{"id":236225,"date":"2024-03-24T11:47:43","date_gmt":"2024-03-24T06:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=236225"},"modified":"2024-04-02T07:05:54","modified_gmt":"2024-04-02T01:35:54","slug":"gaza-in-end-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/gaza-in-end-times\/","title":{"rendered":"Gaza In End Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Tisaranee Gunasekara<\/a> –<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhether the victims of October 7<\/i>th<\/sup><\/i><\/span> in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza, all the victims of dehumanisation, how do we resist?\u201d ~ <\/i>Jonathan Glazer, director of The Zone of Interest (Oscar acceptance speech)<\/p>\n

\"\"The Pali Canon has the original tale, but it\u2019s the version in the commentaries we know. In both stories, she is Kisa Gotami, a thin girl who marries young. Then comes the divergence. In the story we know she loses her baby to illness, refuses to accept his death, and rushes from healer to healer, cradling the dead body, seeking life. The Buddha is her final refuge. He tells her to bring a mustard seed from a house into which death hasn\u2019t entered. She walks the length and breadth of the city. In every house someone has died, sometime.<\/p>\n

In Gaza<\/a><\/span>, most families have suffered a violent death in the last five months. According to a March survey by the Palestinian Centre for Survey Research, 60% of Gazans have lost at least one family member since Israeli offensive began. More than 32,142 reported deaths as I write. 70% of the victims are women and children.<\/p>\n

This spectacle of blood, this daily dose of death and destruction visited on a captive population, is creating a sea-change in global opinion – against Israel. Mr. Netanyahu has become an embarrassment, even to those politicians who bear-hugged him in the immediate aftermath of Hamas\u2019 murderous attack and continued to embrace him as the Israeli military machine killed 1000, 5000, even 10,000 Gazan children. The number of murdered children is now 13,430 \u2013 that is in under six months. How many more children would be killed if this war continues for another month, six months, a year? The calculations are easy to make but harder to swallow, even for many American politicians.<\/p>\n

So Chuck Schumer, the staunchly pro-Israel majority leader of the US senate, warned, \u201cIsrael cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.\u201d And Nancy Pelosi, former American speaker and another died-in-the-wool Israeli-supporter, agreed. The nakedness of the war has become unaffordable for many of Israel\u2019s international enablers. They prefer it to be veiled. (Not Donald Trump though. His son-in-law Jared Kushner enthused about the \u2018very valuable\u2019 waterfront properties in Gaza during a February discussion in Harvard about the Middle East).<\/p>\n

Some Israelis are finally becoming aware of the cost of war, to themselves. Bibi – stop killing Israel<\/i>, read a giant banner carried by Israeli protestors demonstrating outside prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s private home. The protestors want Mr. Netanyahu to step down and hold early elections (elections are due only in 2026). He may not survive an immediate election but Israel\u2019s hard right will, those extremists who want to starve Gazans to death or dream of a second Nakba or the Third Temple on the land Al Aqsa mosque stands today. Mr. Netanyahu might not be popular, but the war is. Still. Most of those who protest against Mr. Netanyahu don\u2019t see the genocide next door, the dying babies, the wailing parents. Only the growing international opprobrium resulting from that carnage.<\/p>\n

That opprobrium will increase, especially with mass starvation looming in Gaza, the intended outcome of Israeli policies. Last week, British foreign secretary David Cameron publicly criticised Israel for obstructing international aid to starving and sick Gazans. Aid cannot get in due to \u201carbitrary denials by the government of Israel and lengthy clearance procedures, including multiple screenings and narrow opening windows in daylight hours.\u201d<\/p>\n

His surprise is surprising because this is what Israel said it will do before launching its offensive. The country\u2019s political and military leaders called Gazans human animals and talked about starving them to death in the crudest terms. They are walking that<\/b> talk now.<\/p>\n

In Sri Lanka, the Rajapaksas named the Fourth Eelam War a Humanitarian Operation with zero-civilian casualties. President Mahinda Rajapaksa even said that Lankan soldiers fought this \u2018humanitarian operation\u2019 with the UN Declaration of Human Rights in one hand and a rice packet for refugees over one shoulder, their hearts full of love for civilian Tamils. The Rajapaksas had to sugar-coat the bloody truth because they feared international reaction. Without that concern, the final offensive would have claimed many more civilian lives.<\/p>\n

After the October 7th<\/sup><\/span> murderous attack by Hamas, Israel got a blank cheque from the West, and therefore saw no need either for restraint or for concealment. \u201cGoing after Hamas is legitimate; obliterating vast swathes of Gaza is not. Using proportionate force is legal; but collective punishment and forced movement of civilians is not,\u201d former UK foreign secretary Ben Wallace recently pointed out. But that distinction was not made clear to Israel. The West\u2019s unconditional support enabled genocide. It is a warning of how unliveable this world would become if every country is free to wage its wars in whatever way it wants.<\/p>\n

Universal extremism<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

In January 2024, Britain\u2019s chief rabbi Ephraim Mirvis made a speech endorsing Israel\u2019s war against Gaza. \u201cWe can be proud of the state of Israel, what it represents\u2026what Israel is doing is the most outstanding thing a decent responsible country can do for its citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

In January 2024, Palestinian death toll surpassed 25000. In January 2024, the number of dead Palestinian children was almost 10,000. In January 2024, there was an \u2018acute food shortage\u2019 in Gaza, according to UN; \u201c\u2026the highest share of people facing high levels of acute food insecurity (ever recorded) for any given area or country.\u201d The UN secretary general called the situation \u2018heart breaking\u2019.<\/p>\n

Calling such horrors \u2018outstanding\u2019 and their perpetrators \u2018decent\u2019 and \u2018responsible\u2019 is reminiscent of the corrupting and poisonous language of Nazism. Viktor Klemperer, professor of French Literature and Holocaust-survivor, in his eponymous book named that language LTI \u2013 Lingua Tertii Imperii \u2013 the Language of the Third Reich. \u201cIf someone replaces the words \u2018heroic\u2019 and \u2018virtuous\u2019 with \u2018fanatical\u2019 for long enough, he will come to believe that a fanatic really is a virtuous hero; and that no one can be a hero without fanaticism. The Third Right did not invent the words \u2018fanatic\u2019 and \u2018fanaticism\u2019; it just changed their value\u2026\u201d (The Language of the Third Reich<\/i>).<\/p>\n

The Rajapaksas, unknowingly, emulated this model when they replaced war with \u2018humanitarian offensive\u2019, soldier with \u2018war-hero\u2019, and open prison camps with \u2018welfare villages\u2019. This linguistic inversion continues to this day, and is practiced even by those vehemently opposed to the Rajapaksas. In the parlance of Lankan Opposition, soldiers are still war-heroes, the war is still a humanitarian operation, and Tamil civilian deaths are the perennial unmentionable, as if zero-civilian casualties were the reality rather than Rajapaksa myth. As Professor Klemperer said, we have imbibed so many tiny drops of verbal arsenic that our body is saturated with poison and we have become immune to it. We don\u2019t even notice what we are saying when we say humanitarian operation<\/i> or war hero<\/i>; or when we valorise retired military personnel without mentioning Tamil civilian casualties. Like the chief rabbi of UK, who takes as irrefutable fact, the rightness of Israel state in its treatment of Palestinians, be it in Gaza, West Bank or elsewhere. His approach to enemy deaths is reminiscent of the monks of Mahawamsa<\/i>, who assured a conscience-stricken King Dutugemunu that he did no wrong in war since the enemy dead were non-Buddhists and thus \u2018beasts\u2019.<\/p>\n

Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies were Untermenschen not just to the Nazis but also to many a German. The Palestinians are Untermenschen not just to Zionists but also to many an Israeli or non-Israeli Jew. Dehumanisation is the road to carnage, anywhere, anytime. Jonathan Glazer\u2019s Zone of Interest<\/i> which won the award for Best International Film at the Oscars is about the normal, ordinary life of Rudolf H\u00f6ss, the commandant of Auschwitz, lived within olfactory-distance of the death camp\u2019s massive crematoria. According to Mr. Glazer the movie \u201clooks into the dark corners of human capacity\u2026 I think what is inside this film is what we do to each other as human beings. We see others as lesser than ourselves, different from ourselves. Somehow, step by step, that leads to atrocity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Glazer, a Jew, was excoriated for anti-Semitism. Extremism owns Israel now; Palestine too; that stark divide which permits neither nuance nor dissent. Yet, as historian Geoffrey Levin points out in his new book, Our Palestinian Question<\/i>, opposing Zionism and Israel on the issue of Palestinian rights was not uncommon either in Israel or the US for decades. He writes how the state of Israel worked systematically to silence and cancel dissenting Jews, like journalist William Zukerman, once a prominent voice among progressive American Jews. That erasure was so successful there\u2019s not even a Wikipedia<\/i> page about him<\/p>\n

Mr. Glazer argues that the ending of this relative openness can be largely attributed to a pop-culture phenomenon, Leon Uris\u2019s Exodus<\/i>. The bestselling book was turned into a blockbuster Hollywood movie starring Paul Newman. In his opinion the movie was the reason America really fell in love with Israel.<\/p>\n

Now a real-life movie is making America fall a little bit out of love with Israel. A war in which the main victims are not armed combatants but unarmed women and children is not the best advertisement for any country. The Gaza war, as Brazilian President Lula said, is not \u201c\u2026a war of soldiers against soldiers. It\u2019s a war between a highly prepared army and women and children.\u201d And the lacerating images of those pitiful deaths cannot be hidden from the public gaze in this age of social media. The growing public disenchantment with Israel, and the mounting protests, is forcing many American, British, and European politicians to rethink their unconditional support for Israel\u2019s genocidal war.<\/p>\n

Sacrificial (red) cows?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing from Selma, Alabama, in March 1965, Elizabeth Hardwick, writer and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, observed that the singular nature of Martin Luther King\u2019s protest and \u201cthe quality and the extent of his success sprang from a soil of religion\u2026\u201d Dr King and his white racist opponents drew their inspiration and justification from the same Bible. The paradox of religion is its capacity to seed both movingly good and repulsively evil. In his book, The End of Enlightenment<\/i>, historian Richard Whatmore writes that \u2018enthusiasm\u2019 understood as fanaticism was anathema to many Enlightenment thinkers. What mattered was not what you believed but how you believed it, an understandable consideration when memories of devastating internecine wars between Christians were still fresh.<\/p>\n

Whether a religion seeds a Martin Luther King or a Joseph Kony (and the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army) depends not so much on what religion you believe in but how you believe in it. And for a fanatic of any religion, even the annihilation of a large swathe of humankind is an acceptable sacrifice.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In one of its propaganda videos, Hamas claimed that it launched the October 7th<\/sup><\/span> attack to save the Al Aqsa mosque (a claim that doesn\u2019t dovetail with the gruesome targeting of civilians) from destruction. Some Orthodox Jews are planning to sacrifice a red cow as a prelude to repossessing the Temple of the Mount, Hamas warned.<\/p>\n

If Hamas actually wanted to save the Al Aqsa mosque, it should have targeted the West Bank settlement housing three red heifers and not Kibbutzim in Israel peopled mostly by non-Orthodox progressive Jews. For the red cows do exist in reality, born in Texas and airlifted at enormous cost to Israel and being held in West Bank until the time comes.<\/p>\n

The First Temple of Judaism was destroyed by Babylonian armies and the Second Temple by Roman legions. Building the Third Temple has been the dream of many Jews for millennia. In the meantime, an Umayyad Caliph built the Al Aqsa mosque on the empty land. According to media reports, some right-wing ultra-Orthodox Jews are actually planning to demolish Al Aqsa mosque and build the \u2018Third Temple\u2019 there. They believe that sacrificing an unblemished red heifer who is exactly three years old on the Mount of Olives will be necessary to win divine approval for this project.<\/p>\n

An Israeli organisation, The Temple Institute, with the support of some evangelical Christian groups in the US, is now keeping the three red cows in an undisclosed location in West Bank. An altar is reportedly being constructed. The Temple Institute is said to be readying to carry out the sacrifice sometime this year, possibly before Passover which falls on April 22nd<\/sup><\/span>, perhaps as early as the Easter weekend, on March 29th<\/sup><\/span>, which is the Sabbath of the Red Heifer. The sacrifice and the resultant ash-and-water mixture are believed to be capable of purifying all of Israel of ritual impurities and allow Jews to enter the Temple of the Mount.<\/p>\n

Will there be an Ayodhya in Jerusalem?<\/p>\n

The Al Aqsa mosque is the third holiest site in Islam. Any mob attack on it could open floodgates of violence in Middle East and beyond. No Islamic leader will be able to withstand the resulting fury in their streets.<\/p>\n

Project Red Cow is no secret. Israeli leaders cannot be unaware of the danger of the situation getting out of hand, of Israel-Palestine conflict spiralling over into a Jewish-Islamic war, as Hamas would dearly desire. Yet the circus of insanity is being allowed to proceed. Even if sanity dawns at the eleventh hour and serious steps are taken to stop the sacrifice, this will not be the end. For fanaticism is a sickness of the mind. And extremism which begins with destruction often ends up with self-destruction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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