Israel’s mass murder plan divides the world

Israel has divided the world: Those who are with the Gazans and those who are against them.

Syed Talat Hussain

As Israel’s policymakers tighten their murderous chokehold around hapless Gazans, planning a ground invasion, causing and justifying a human catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, they are not telling us anything about themselves that we did not know before.

As a first-hand witness to Israel’s brutal attack on the Freedom Flotilla in 2011 carrying humanitarian aid for the besieged Gaza, I know through personal experience deep darkness in the soul of their decision makers, who, using their unfortunate past, think they have the license to kill.

Their killers in uniform are trained to walk nonchalantly through blood pools of those they shoot from close range and toss bodies around as if they were trash. Hatred for the “Other” — not just Arabs but anyone who is not “Them” — is part of their war manual. So cutting off fuel, food, and water to 2.3 million people, while baffling in scale is not a savagery that is on display for the first time.

I am also not surprised at the unqualified support Israel has received from Washington, most EU countries, and London. Neither does the brazen bias against the Palestinians the Western media has exhibited sound like breaking news. When it comes to Israel, toadyism is part of the script every newsroom editor prepares for anchors and reporters. The printed word is less compromised but there, too, genuine neutrality that speaks against unspeakable horrors done by Israel has committed for years is hard to find.

So the issue in the genocidal policy Israel is pursuing is not about human rights or war crimes or of Western media’s blarneying of the maniacs who think the imposition of slow and certain death upon hundreds of thousands of helpless civilians is the right response to Hamas’ attacks. I mean all of this — the bias, the killing, the toadyism—does make you puke but should surprise no one.

What is new in this situation is what Israel’s cannibalizing of the Palestinian land and its inhabitants has done to US attempts to turn global sentiments, especially in the Muslim countries, against its strategic enemies, Moscow and China. One plank of Washington’s containment of Chinese and Russian narratives on say, the Ukraine war, Taiwan, and even CPEC, was to paint both the countries as the antithesis of free speech, fair play, and sincerity of the purposes they preached. After Ukraine, Moscow was defined as a Leviathan, thriving on chaos, and China because of Taiwan and on account of its Belt and Road Project investment methods, as a Behemoth, that would stop at nothing in eating up smaller nations’ economies.

Now by siding decisively with Israel’s so-called “right to hit back”, the Biden Administration has conceded enormous strategic space to both China and Russia to build on widening public outrage in the Muslim world over the atrocities in Gaza. Washington is standing on an exceedingly low moral ground when it insists on justifying the bestial and barbaric actions of Israel by constantly using the spurious argument of “self-defense.”

Israel and the US's support of its actions, has also made rich Middle Eastern countries’ powerful elite worry about their precarious domestic situations. As more news comes out — thank you Aljazeera and other non-western media, social media websites included — and heartbreaking horrors from hospitals, razed buildings, graveyards, from fleeing families’ deaths are reported in more detail, rulers in the Middle East can hear the ticking of the time bomb of public emotions that can explode anytime. They will have to speak for the Gazans or will not have time to hold their national sentiments in check. The mainstreaming of Israel in the world through Muslim countries’ recognition is a project that should best be put in cold storage for decades. Israel, always regarded as a rogue or unjust state by the vast majority of the Muslim population, is now a totally unacceptable proposition.

Other groups like Hizbollah also have their patience tested. They are put on the horns of a dilemma: to jump in or stay out?

For how long can those whose entire politics is built around the narrative of the rights of Palestinians remain silent or inactive as Israel sets the stage for the mass murder of the Gazans? These are fraught choices but these cannot be postponed for long.

As anti-west sentiment spreads, this gives these groups a new reason to express themselves through force. It will be hard to control this onslaught of outrage, anger, sense of betrayal, and letdown that has started to sweep the Islamic world (look at the growing rallies).

A wave of new and popular militancy seems inevitable. And it is not like post 9/11 where the Muslims had to restrain themselves on account of the credentials of the other side — Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Taliban. Here there are babies, women, and unarmed civilians who are put to the sword by Israel as Washington, London and most of the West look for ways to create parity between Hamas’s attack and Netanyahu’s systematic murder of those caught between the Devil of the siege and the Mediterranean. There is no 9/11 here. There is ethnic cleansing. There is a programmed pogrom.

Israel has divided the world: Those who are with the Gazans and those who are against them. International relations are entering a new phase, one that can be far more consequential for Western designs and Muslim sentiments than any other event in recent years. The US may have pleased Israelis, but it has lost the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. Western media stands totally exposed without a shred of credibility. The West has displaced itself from the strategic propaganda toehold it has been holding, and using effectively so far, against China and Russia. These are monumental developments that are lost on Israel’s hounds of war, screaming havoc and thirsting for Gazan blood.