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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Orosdi-Back: A lost Beyrouth department store from an elegant age

Image
My mother told me it was located on ‘ Banks Street ’ in Down Town Beirut , the road that leads up to Riad el Solh Square . On most maps the street is also named after Riad el Solh. The store was located opposite Bank Intra, or so I was told. Presumably the location of the store was indicative of the high end goodies on sale inside. The closest comparison to Orosdi Back is the old Allied’s department store in Dubai , for those who remember Dubai in the 1980s. But Orosdi Back was a store from a different age, an age of elegance as opposed to the vulgar modern excesses of the nouveau-riche, something Beirut ’s Down Town is synonymous with! A wonderful blog dubbed ‘language hat’ published some information about the founders of this chain of department stores. According to the blog the chain of stores came about as a result of a partnership between Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer and his sons who opened a clothing store in Galata in 1855, and the Back family, who were Austro-H
Read more

Palestine's 100 Years War: How Our Militant Past Predicts Our Future

Image
Palestine’s 100 Years War The Past Rarely Predicts the Future, Except in the Middle East   “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” — Ernest Hemingway, 1946   For as long as I can remember my region has been at war. Everyone alive today can attest to the veracity of such a statement. We cheer the men at arms as they go off to fight, we condemn the failure to find a peaceful solution, we admire the fighter, we condemn the terrorist. We are the same people, the great mass of seated spectators, they whom we cheer and condemn, are also the same, the same breed of angry and desperate men and who can blame them, their lives have been hell.   Searching the vast archives of the internet for one of my own, a distant cousin who was one of those angry desperate men, I found an article dated March 22, 1973, in the El Paso Herald-Post titled “Middle East prediction: the worst is yet to come”. It was earie and uncomfortable
Read more

A Reluctant Resistance: Will They, Won't They Strike, Who Knows

Image
It’s hard for anyone to admit that they have wasted their life believing in an idea that was unrealistic and naïve even at its inception. The idea that Palestine could be liberated is one such idea that just won’t die, it keeps recirculating and reinfecting us with hope. Every 20 or 30 years some regional power decides to use this idea of liberation to achieve some kind of political success over the populations of countries in its region that it wishes to dominate.   Palestine is the perfect idea and cause, pure and good and just, just like the tale of the crucified Jesus. A story of gross injustice and cruelty heaped on a man preaching a new age religion. Same with the plight of the Palestinian people, gross injustice and cruelty. Jesus actually preached and healed and drove out demons in the very environs over which fanatical Western Jews are fighting and burning out farmers and villagers of the West Bank who have more Semitic and Canaanite DNA than many European Jews that rule I
Read more