Duplicity of the Western mind on Israel's Gaza Holocaust
While the Western world is indifferent to Israel’s carnage of the Palestinian people in Gaza, one is amazed at how sensitive the Americans and the Europeans are even to animal rights! How do we explain these double standards, this hypocrisy? The United States of America, the “World’s most powerful democracy”, and “Leader of the Free World”, was founded on the concept of “Escape from Old World Tyranny” - The American colonies declared their independence from a British monarchy that the Founding Fathers deemed “tyrannical,”. The message inscribed on the Statue of Liberty reads:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
The “Pilgrims" were the ordinary English men and women who made the famous 1620 voyage aboard the ship Mayflower and founded Plymouth Colony. Ironically, the emancipation of these runaways from the monarch’s tyranny in 17th Century England, and also the emancipation of hordes of settlers from the European continent who followed them and established the United States, couldn’t have materialized without the slave labour that subsequently went into creating wealth in their new homeland.
The United States, besides cherishing human rights and democracy, was also founded on the contradictory concept of slavery. Nowhere is this contradiction more aptly highlighted than in Alex Haley’s “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, and transported to North America; The book follows his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley. Kunta Kinte was sold into slavery roughly 20 years before the framing of the US Constitution in 1787. The family history of Kunta Kinte shows he was sold into slavery in a town called “Naplis.” Haley's research identified a slave ship, the Lord Ligonier, which sailed from the Gambia River, on 5 July 1767 with 140 captured Gambians. It arrived in Annapolis, Maryland on 29 September 1767, with only 98 survivors.
What about Israel, founded on the slogan of the emancipation of Jews running away from Hitler’s Holocaust? Defending the killing of more than 34000 Palestinians in Gaza, 70% of them women and children, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu labelled them as “an enemy of incomparable cruelty- an evil whom Israelis are committed to eliminating from the world.” Hinting at the Palestinians, he added: “You must remember what(modern) Amalek has done to you. What says our Holy Bible (about such people). And we do remember.” Netanyahu was referring to the passage where God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul:
I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
Again, how do we explain these contradictions? Herbert Spencer was an English biologist, sociologist, and anthropologist. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology after reading Charles Darwin's 1859 book On the Origin of Species. In another of his books, The Principles of Ethics, Spenser dwells on democracy and tribal Mentality. His views are summarized as follows:
- The relations between tribes are based on isolation, suspicion, and hostility; but within the tribe, the common interest against every other tribe compels its members to unite for self-preservation. Hence the distinction between one’s tribe- the ‘in-group’ and another tribe’s- ‘the out-group’.
- Peace and cooperation are essential between the members of the ‘in-group’. Conversely, suspicion toward the ‘outgroup’ breeds hatred and hostility.
- As the ethics of external hostility and the ethics of internal harmony evolving in each tribal society had to be simultaneously entertained, there emerged a highly contradictory set of values. Man is therefore acted upon by a double set of impulses: those generated by man’s instincts, and those necessitated by the pressure of his social environment.
- For the tribe to survive, the tribesman had to willingly sacrifice himself in battle. Similarly, the tribal cohesion demanded submission to its taboos.
- A life of constant external hostility generates a code in which aggression, conquest, and revenge are inculcated, while friendship and compassion get the back seat. Conversely, a life of settled internal amity generates a code that includes cooperation, justice, honesty, and regard for the rule of law.
Finally, now that the mask is off, should we exonerate the Arabs for their ineptitude? When it comes to the resolution of their conflict with Israel, the Arabs have been accused of always remaining a step behind appreciating the ground realities. The Zionists, representing the political and military face of the world Jewry, spearheaded the movement which resulted in the creation of Israel. It has been mentioned in an earlier article that the UN, in 1947, voted for the partition of Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state. Jerusalem was to have the status of an international city. Whereas the Arab states rejected the UN plan, Jews accepted it (A stop-gap measure, as they eyed the whole of Palestine). The state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948 and was immediately attacked by armies of its Arab neighbors. Zionists and Arab states were equally responsible for creating an alarm that Jews would carry out a large-scale massacre of Palestinians if they remained in their ancestral land, prompting a massive exodus of Palestinians to the neighboring Arab countries. Among the Arab armies, only Trans- Jordan had a British-trained army which, under Glubb Pasha, its British commander, could take on the far better-trained Haganah and Stern Gang, and occupy the West Bank of the river Jordan and East Jerusalem. The other Arab armies were defeated by the Zionist settlers.
As a consequence, Palestinians, to this day, rot in refugee camps. After the 1948 war, King Hussain, despite Jordan’s limited resources, rehabilitated the Palestinians in the West Bank. However, the Egyptian-controlled Gaza Strip, under Nasser’s rule, remained in turmoil. Nasser exploited the Palestinians to gain political mileage and led the Arabs into the catastrophic 1967 war with Israel. As a result of this war, Israel captured the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. Today, Israel has its teeth in the entire formerly British-mandated Palestine. Palestinians, under the influence of the semi-illiterate and inept Arab leadership, had missed their first chance in 1948 to have a state of their own. Palestinians missed their second chance immediately after the 1967 War when the Arabs refused the Israeli offer for a negotiated settlement. They got their third chance in 1978 when the Camp David Accords were negotiated between Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Palestine Liberation Organization, along with the rest of the Arab leadership, boycotted the talks. The failure of Arab states and the PLO to force a military solution on Israel, and simultaneously reject peace with it, resulted in the emergence of Hamas and Hezbollah. It is a long and tortuous road ahead.
Saleem Akhtar Malik
26 April 202
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