By Vishwamithra –

“In order to produce something new, you have to return to the original source, to the childhood of mankind.” ~ Paul Gauguin

They are not just meandering on deserted streets; nor are they lying down listlessly in a corner or on a broken culvert waiting to be picked up by their parents who would be on their way back home. The parents are not in the land of the living. They are not well-fed, they are not fed at all, maybe for days and weeks. When the truck appears on the horizon, they ready themselves with their empty pots, pans and buckets to collect whatever is thrown at them from the truck. No, I am not describing a lamentable story of fiction. This is the real life that is being suffered by many in Gaza, the homeland of Palestinians.

Palestinian Ambassador Dr. Zuhair M.H and President Anura Dissanayake

A pathetic human drama is being enacted before an unseeing world and it has not yet captured the audience it is supposed to impact when these cruelties, man’s indecencies to man, man’s inhumanity man and man’s slaughter to man are perpetrated. Such a cruel world is being bequeathed by the present generation of humans upon our children and their children .

Emaciated figures which once roamed the corridors of crowded Gaza are now crowding near food trucks carrying food parcels for the consumption of hungry children of a once-affluent, once-educated and once-middle-class Palestinians. Israel, their tormentors are now planning to annex the Gaza strip to the ostensible ‘land of milk and honey’ whose armories are being equipped and augmented by the unkind West led by America. America was once being portrayed as the guardian of the oppressed and needy; she herself has been branded as the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’. Now they have chosen to buttress the greed and thirst of Israel, the alleged home of the Jews. The ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ is losing her freedom and looking bluntly unbrave and cowardly.

No person earth could deny the unspeakable torture, suffering and death brought unto Jews by Hitler and his cruel cohorts during the Second World War. But that suffering, that torture and that death do not justify what is being handed to Palestine and her citizens by the very people who endured unspeakable suffering in Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz death camps. It did happen and it was an unerasable stain on mankind. But switching the ignoble conduct of one nation with another cannot be allowed to repeat when the tormented has now become the tormentor.

Israel making herself the undisputed villain who would satisfy the sadistic characteristics of one man who calls himself Netanyahu, simply cannot be pardoned. There is no Mandela any more; there is no Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. any more. The world is bereft of such giants whose only armor and armory were an unclouded conscience and a genuine affection and allegiance for peace.            

There does not seem to be any end to the wailing of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. It is written that ‘God’ of Abraham, if there were ever one, would be turning in his grave to see one of his children’s chosen people have chosen to be so callous and insensitive to man’s basic needs to coexist with his fellow men. Kingdoms on earth do not follow such Biblical fantasies. Kingdoms on earth are increasingly dependent upon oil and arms that protect it.

USA, the strongest military and economy in the world is thoroughly oblivious to the crying eyes of the children of Palestine. Her priorities are at present centered on satisfying one single mad man. That is Donald Trump, her Commander-in-Chief. A dangerously disconsolate politician, Trump is driven by his own megalomania, and the more power that is seemingly invested in the office of Presidency, the more insensitive and callous an outlook he assumes in order to buttress his own position with a glowing aura and luxurious comforts the office bring forth.

Human history, in its vast and complex journey, has reached an uncommon installation; its further development and continuation, if it were ever to materialize, depends mainly on the fluttering of the moral compass that it has been carrying all her time in her reach towards perfection. It has never been an effortless endeavor. Its demands and challenges have, more often than not, subjected man to near extinction. Yet man has survived and picked himself up after each fall to attain nobler goals. Science has been the only rational religion, except perhaps unadulterated Buddhism, that man has embraced after questioning each turn of events.

Civilization has its zeniths and its collapses; man has landed on the Moon, but is yet to find a medical answer to deadly malignancies that visit man at each phase of this marvelous journey. Countries win wars and they lose some of them too; those who survive the wars march on despite sustaining several dilapidated systems. Leaders at each defining juncture, rise up and yet again fall to rise again. Individual sustenance has an unequal capability to withstand criticism and vitriol hurled at it time and time again.

Those leaders who had the that ‘grace under pressure’ to lead in spite of radical and unprecedented circumstances have always been those who had within themselves what is call a ‘moral compass’ to guide them at the right time and right place. It is the individual who defines and shapes the circumstances rather than the other way about. But such leaders are few and far between. Rarity of such individuals adds a premium to the sense of sacrifice and devotion to truth and honesty. It is extremely hard to even name ten such greats in human history. While religious leaders may take the primary positions in such a scale of measure, those who followed science and more secular lifestyles still dominate that ‘few’.

The current world situation is rammed in a stagnant premise from which extrication seems increasingly difficult as days go by. Being polarized along ‘haves’ and have-nots’ lines, extreme religious fundamentalism tends to overwhelm the average mind. That average mind has no time for nuanced aspects of human existence. Poorer nations suffer from a drastic dearth of wealth and capital to emerge from this doggedness. For them, entrenched in yearly or half-yearly basis of accountability to their lender countries, a priori assumption of their own geopolitical realities. Small countries and small economies, such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar and most of the African nations fall into this pit of penniless many.

Standing against these vulgar realities, where else can Sri Lanka look to? Once considered an ardent leftist coalition of a movement, National People’s Power (NPP), was catapulted to power by force of circumstance. Although Aragalaya-22 played a very decisive part in creating the right objective conditions, the subjective leadership of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the leader of the NPP, allowed himself to embrace the right set of ideas and a more pertinent school of political thought to transform a center-left polity to vote for a far-left party. That in itself is a marvelous recovery from oblivion.

Furthermore, AKD’s success and that of his government’s is not winning an election; his real success is averting further decline in our economy and following several of the marketplace-oriented economic policies which NPP’s predecessor JVP would have rejected without a second thought. Now the usual cabal of pundits and academics is trying to keep a scorecard of NPP’s performance in the six months they have been in power. While it is not all that unusual to engage in such an unwarranted exercise, it adds to and subtracts from what is under way behind the actual eye can see and ear could hear.

That is why we must pay our attention to what Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC Television anchor termed as ‘watch what they do, not what they say’.   Taken in an American context, she was referring to the crazy enactments of the Trump Administration after sugarcoating the draconian aspects of its policies and governing principles and what really entails at the end of the winding route Trump is taking America.

When applied to Sri Lankan context, the positive profile of the saying ‘watch what they do, not what they say’ stands out most  stridently. If one observes President Dissanayake, he seems to say and do the same. But what is lacking or what is most conspicuously absent is the evident commitment from his immediate cohorts- his Cabinet and other parliamentarians.

Any reference to the Palestinian crisis by our government is of no value in the context of the gravity and vastness of the international pressure brought upon Israel and her main protector USA. Other than issuing perfunctory statements at the (ir)relevant UN Agency meetings, Sri Lanka’s participation in the broad discussion of the Palestinian issue would be redundant. However, intervention by various human rights organizations, both official and informal, no major country including China, India, Russia and European Union has proposed any drastic measures such as broad sanctions against Israel are  being stipulated.

In short, today Palestine is in search of a foster parental country or countries. To find herself in the catalog of orphans is indeed a telling commentary of the times we live in. There is no Non-Aligned Nations organization today. NATO seems to be the only working ‘pact’ that is in operation. WARSAW is dead and the Soviet Union belongs in the dustbin of history. Military conflicts are being conducted between countries that are belligerent to each other for one reason or the other. India and Pakistan, both being nuclear powers are merely clashing without serious military of political consequences.

Israel’s inhumanity to Palestine occupies the main seat in the boring chambers of international conventions. It’s worthy of repetition: ‘watch what they do, not what they say’.

*The writer can be reached at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com