Gaza: When will the meat grinder stop?

Every day I say I want to write something smart and incisive about Israel's war on civilians in Palestine, and every time I open LinkedIn I see a video or images or a heart rending story from the people who have lost everything and tiny bodies going into the ground all for want of medicine or a hospital bed in an Arab country and I pull away from ever touching on this subject. Who am I to pontificate and analyze and proclaim political wisdom, what am I?! I am a mere target, a human animal to our neighbors to the south. What can I say that would be listened to that greater men in lofty positions have not already said. Nothing seems to convince the meat grinder to stop... nothing seems to drill some ember of human feeling for their fellow humans that they kill each day into the Israeli people, their army and their leaders. 

 

What can I say that would make any difference at all? They pushed us into this fight, is all I can say. The Israeli Zionist entity and its ideology of the superiority of their kind to the exclusion of all other human beings on this planet, has led us here! Make no mistake, Israel is far from a rational western democracy, that fiction foisted on us by our "Bwana", our western betters! A fiction that helped sustain and maintain an Israeli state willing to do anything to maintain its exclusionary apartheid structure, drilling anti-Palestinian hate into the minds of its young so they may grow up to serve the state in uniform, to police the occupied or to bomb and kill the disobedient yearning to be free.

 

What can I say now? All I can say is if its war they want they will get it, they will get it and more. Those who through their aggressive unyielding and unbending policies start war Mr. Netanyahu, have no means of controlling all the unknowns, all the variables that affect the outcome. There is no certainty either side will come out an outright winner, there is no certainty that the Zionist state itself will come out intact, or at least its democracy. Suspending democratic rule is often the unintended result of war and its aftermath. War will not turn out all that well for us in Lebanon or for the Palestinians in the West Bank and probably not all that well for Syria. Our countries will be changed by this crucible of fire, but then why should that necessarily be a bad thing. What structures of state if any in our countries today are worth preserving? If war sweeps them away all the better!

 

Backward and corrupt countries are often eager for war because in the minds of the foolish and ignorant, anything new is better than the status quo, than injustice and poverty and blatant corruption. So, I doubt we will find it difficult to fill our armies ranks with eager young fighters. Israel, on the other hand, is having great difficulty holding on to the fighters it already has, many of which use their leave from the front to board flights to more peaceful parts. I'm guessing they won’t be too eager to return.

 

Advanced countries with sophisticated technology reliant economies will suffer most from any conflict. Those countries used to barely surviving in medieval conditions will find it easier to ratchet up their tolerance level and tighten their belts by one more notch. True, many will die needlessly, but in hopeless countries where many feel as if they live needlessly, the option to carry a gun and fight seems glorious, at least it is some momentum that moves the story of their lives forward.

 

In Lebanon, we have a problem. We have half the country focused on maintaining a pleasurable and conflict free life at any cost, even if that cost is making peace with a devil that aims to destroy you. The stick-your-head-in-the-sand party wags their disapproving finger at Hezbollah and its war machine, spouting words such as “freedom” and “sovereignty” to defend their position, while they see for themselves how countries that failed to fight the devil have neither freedom nor sovereignty in the true sense of the word. They have regimes who have made peace with the devil, but their people lost all freedom and are far from sovereign over their own land.

 

To Israel: Know this, there can be no peace for any country in the Levant, not for you and not for us unless and until you acknowledge the rights of Palestinians to their own state as promised to them by Oslo and Madrid. There can be no peace for anyone unless you stop, just stop the meat grinder, acknowledge the humanity of those you bomb, that they are just like you, human, with families and children and loved ones, that they too deserve dignity and freedom and respect. Until you recognize these simple facts, you will never have peace and you will never have a future here.

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