CrossFireArabia
By Fawaz Turki
No doubt you’ve noticed. There are rational men and women engaged in the mainstream media of the Western world who still allow eroded figures of speech to inhabit their common parlance when they write about the deranged horrors in Gaza, as if what is happening there is a “war,” typically an open and often prolonged, garden variety military conflict between the armed forces of two nations or groups.
What we are in reality witnessing in that tormented, 142-square-mile strip of land — once described as an open-air prison camp but now as an open-air death camp — is clearly not a war but the most anguishing humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century, one that challenges the shared sense of morality inherent in our global dialogue of cultures.
We need not describe these horrors inflicted on the 2.3 million souls who “live” – yes, this word needs to be enclosed in quotation marks – in Gaza, a people now hunted beyond all human endurance.
We know these horrors already. We’ve read about them. We’ve watched them on our screens. And they have shocked us to the core of our humanity.
Two worlds
The enclave we call Gaza is today a wasteland whose destruction has been Carthaginian in scale, where starved Palestinians are neither dead nor alive. They and their skeletal children have been ghoulishly described as “walking corpses.”
You see them at dangerous food distribution centres where trigger-happy Israeli soldiers gratuitously kill dozens of them daily, and where their humanity is so reduced to a fragment that they are willing to die for a bag of rice, a quart of milk, a jerrycan of water.
Yet, a few kilometres away, across the border, supermarkets are loaded with food and people go about their quotidian lives. Walking their streets. Drinking their coffee. Watching their films. Reading their Torahs. Visiting their dentists. Hugging their children. Listening to music. And making love.
Surely, these are two orders of reality whose spatial and temporal coexistence the mind baulks at reconciling and the imagination recoils at envisioning.
Questions crowd upon us.
What justification do those who deny children access to food have for preventing them from meeting their basic needs? What propels the need in one people to calculatedly inflict such repeated, unspeakable savagery on another?
And what drives the seemingly normal Israelis to give such a massive echo of approval to the racist bellowing of their political and military leaders, instead of turning away from it in nauseated disbelief, thus reducing whatever there is in them of the human and restoring what there is of the beast? (It is a sad fact that progressive Israelis have always failed to insinuate into, let alone impose on society, the humane rigour inherent in their beliefs.)
Writers, like other laymen, would do well to abstain from taking part in a debate such as this that the therapeutic community considers its own. But reasons there must be, albeit dark and disquieting ones.
Blinkered world
One thing is plain. Gaza is burning. Its analogue is hell. So, why has the global conscience not compelled the powers that be to intervene and put an end to the genocide in Gaza, an end to the immeasurable agonies of its people? And if not now, when?
Very simply this: The US, the self-styled “leader of the free world” and putative “maker and shaker” of international affairs, insists on maintaining its long-held, notoriously right-or-wrong support of Israel.
So much so, it has repeatedly used its veto power to sabotage any efforts by other members of the UN Security Council to end the mayhem in the besieged enclave.
And governments elsewhere in the Western world have opted to become mere onlookers of that mayhem, that is, where they are not closet backers of it.
Yet, that is not the end of that. That global conscience has already become something to reckon with, having progressively morphed into – to paraphrase Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamato’s famous observation about Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbour — a sleeping giant, now awakened and filled with potent resolve.
True, the silence with which the Western world has met the horrors in Gaza may have raised serious doubts about the gravitas attributed to the foundational values of Western liberalism, showing them as a sham.
But the majority in that same world have now bravely taken a stand against their governments, seeing it not just as a moral imperative but also as a means to speak truth to power.
And by adopting that posture, they in effect tell themselves, each other and the world at large that human beings are complicit in that which leaves them indifferent, for by not speaking up, they are indirectly giving their approval to the prevailing order.
Let no one be in doubt that these folks’ voices have been heard.
Their voices have resonated, loudly, clearly, and impactfully, even in the US, traditionally the heartland where support of Israel was once robotic. Indeed, signs of that shift are already evident in public surveys, including the most recent Pew poll.
Yes, more than 18,500 children have so far been killed by Israel in Gaza, a little strip of land now reduced to being a place where the dead reach out to drag the living into the abyss of their mass graves, as a final act of mercy in a place where living has lost all meaning.
As for us Palestinians who, by a trick of fate, are “here,” fed beyond our need, safe in our beds and in our streets and protected against disorder in our daily lives, what is happening “there”, in that parcel of hell, remains indivisible to our identity and will remain tattooed, in indelible ink. It is etched in our collective memory and will remain with us for generations.
And our history books will tell that no child slaughtered in Gaza was ever forgotten, no brutality committed there was ever forgiven.
Fawaz Turki was born in Haifa in 1940. He fled with his family to Lebanon following the 1948 Nakba. He is a Palestinian-American journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington, DC. His publications include the autobiography The Disinherited: Journey of Palestinian Exile (1972), Soul in Exile (New York, 1988) and Exile’s Return: The Making of a Palestinian-American (New York, 1995). TRT World.
