Madness in the Middle-East

CNN and BBC called it a “terrorist attack”. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya News called it a “military operation”. Therein lies the contradiction and tragedy of what this hundred year old tribal war has come to define. Two different narratives, two opposing viewpoints and the mangling of history.

What happened here this past weekend was unadulterated barbarism. A kind of brutality this part of the world is much too familiar with from the time of the Crusades.

President Biden defined the act as “pure evil”. Someone else called it “Israel’s 9/11” and compared it to the Holocaust. Senator Lindsey Graham asked Israel to level Gaza if they needed to, to get rid of Hamas. Republican Niki Haley said Israel needs to do whatever it takes to eliminate Hamas from the earth. Obama said we must squarely stand alongside our ally, Israel, as it dismantles Hamas. Secretary Blinken said Israel would have all the weapons it needs to deal with the situation including warships in the Mediterranean on stand by. And Benjamin Netanyahu said the middle east would never be the same after Israel did whatever it needed, to eradicate Hamas.

No sooner did these statements make the news cycle, bombs were being unloaded from an American airplane at an Israeli airport as Hamas fired rockets from rooftops.

So yet again the war cries were loud and clear. Bombs were being seen as the solution.

Two million Palestinians who live in poverty and deplorable conditions, as refugees under UN protection and have been dealing with a siege for sixteen years, were again made to run as bombs rained down. Gaza, the bleak prison camp that it has been for so long, has now been pushed into further despair as all supplies have been cut off. Doctors Without Borders declared the situation a “collective punishment” inflicted on innocent civilians, which amounts to a war crime. Hospitals without power are on the brink of turning into morgues.

The Israeli families and others who have lost loved ones, are distraught in their grief. Many want revenge. The politics of the land needs to respond, and the only way to do that is with overwhelming force. Which has been the norm here. And so madness has taken root. The end of Hamas, if that is even possible, is the only answer before many. This, as everyone knows, can only come with more blood shed and more death of women and children. Many of whose faces will not be seen on CNN, in feature stories by Clarissa Ward.

To the right wing populist leaders in Israel, who have been emboldened the last few months, this moment may be the one they have been waiting for.

Many have been openly wishing and hoping Palestinians would miraculously disappear from their land. Now it seems like they have found a reason to push them into the sea by effectively cutting them off from civilization.

For many Israelis what is happening is something the Palestinians have brought upon themselves by supporting an infernal enterprise. But for many Palestinians, it is a choice they never had. When you are occupied, oppressed and denied freedom, your options are limited.

Hamas to many in the Arab world, is a resistance group. Much like the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization) from the early days of the struggle. The PLO was designated a terrorist organization by the west then, but in the Arab world, they were freedom fighters and their leaders are still worshipped.

In the first nine months of 2023 alone, Israel has killed at least 230 Palestinians, a level of violence that has already exceeded the total death toll during 2022. It is also the highest recorded number of casualties in the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians since 2005, according to the United Nations. This rise in Israeli military and settler brutality signifies an unprecedented level of violence across all the Palestinian territories, fueled and encouraged by a troubling sense of impunity and a lack of accountability for those responsible.

Recently Benjamin Netanyahu showed a picture of Israel at the UN which sent shockwaves through the Arab world.

He showed a map of Israel which did not demarcate Gaza and The West Bank, effectively sending a message, that this was the ultimate aim.

The normalization of the siege of Gaza by the international community, had become something many Arabs and Palestinians could not tolerate. The indefinite detention of Palestinian political prisoners without due process was another violation that had gone ignored for much too long. And the many incursions by the IDF at Al-Aqsa mosque has always riled up tensions and Hamas gave that as one of the reasons for their latest carnage.

This tribal war that started more than a century ago seems to have no end in sight. It certainly escalated to an appalling level this time, fueled by the drip-drip nature of the conflict and generation after generation, accumulated deep-seated traumas.

When the people in power cannot broker peace it is the innocent who pay with their lives, and often they are the young. Like the ones who were celebrating life at the music festival and were butchered by those who came from beyond the wall. From a place where there is no future but only hate, despair and violence. Where the young have no festivals to attend and are ripe fodder for those who want to kill and cause pain.

In 1993, Yossi Beilin, the Israeli deputy minister of foreign affairs, recruited two college professors, Yair Hirschfeld and Ron Pundak, for back-channel negotiations with the Palestinians to find a viable path to peace. He specifically told them, “if you get caught you will be charged with treason and espionage and I cannot protect you.” They took the cue and decided to dream the unthinkable.

The 2018 HBO documentary “The Oslo Diaries” takes you on an intimate journey revealing how close the negotiators came in achieving the impossible.

Told through the diaries of the chief negotiators and interviews of others involved, the documentary charts the journey to the Oslo Peace Accords and shows how Yitzak Rabin and Yaseer Arafat agreed to set aside their deep mistrust and hatred to bring an end to decades of bloodshed.

Through secretly filmed footage and news archives from the time, the film tells a gripping story of how peace was within grasp before it was wrecked by an assassin’s bullet. The hardliners won by killing Yitzak Rabin and quashing the dreams of millions of Israelis and Palestinians who wanted to live side by side in peace.

As ground realities shifted Benjamin Netanyahu came to power defeating Shimon Peres by a slender margin. The Oslo Accords were abandoned. Hamas became a formidable force and more than 16,000 people have lost their lives since. This number spiked this week all over again.

The people who dreamed of peace are still around. But the audacity of hope seems to have vanished.

At the end of the documentary, Shimon Peres, who was one of the chief negotiators of the Oslo Accords and later became Prime Minister after Yitzak Rabin’s assassination and went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, is asked if he is optimistic about peace. He says,

“I don’t think there is an alternative, neither for the Palestinians nor us. The only alternative is an ongoing war. In war there are no victors, only victims. No war is ever finished. Unless it is being replaced by peace.”

This was his last interview. Shimon Peres passed away in 2016.

America has Israel’s back, as it should. But it needs to know that the world is watching and a double standard does not bode well. In Ukraine an occupation is being responded to, by providing military support to the underdog. In the middle east, Israel is seen as the occupier and aggressor, virulent under the current regime.

Hamas’ butchery is inexcusable and abhorrent to anyone with a conscience or an iota of humanity. But dropping bombs and destroying civilian infrastructure, plunging millions into darkness and not opening humanitarian aid corridors, also goes against the Geneva conventions and the laws of humanity.

The ones with the bigger guns always have the greater responsibility in the eyes of the world.

It is what it is.

A Dystopian Nightmare

A text popped up on my WhatsApp group. My wife’s cousin asked, “Is it a safe area”. He was referring to a neighborhood around Columbia University where his daughter was coming soon to start an internship from UC Berkeley, California.

New York is still the big bad city from a distance, even though it was rated the wealthiest and safest city of its size in the world in some recent poll.

The question about New York being safe is both warranted but also irksome. Having lived here since the mid-nineties, I somehow end up taking it personally. Partly because I have escaped any incident so far, and feel the question a racially motivated as people in the suburbs disproportionally see more black people arrested on their TV screen than any.

There was a time when crime in New York high and neighborhoods of Harlem, Bed-Stuy, Bushwick and East New York were considered dangerous. But they have long been gentrified beyond recognition.

This does not mean, that the city of nine million is rid of crime, but then again, there is no place in America that is safe anymore, anyway. Probably the manicured suburbs are far more dangerous than they seem.

As I was having this discussion with my wife in the car, the news of an active shooter in a suburban mall in Allen, Texas, sounded an alarm on the radio.

By the time this all too familiar American horror was over, there were eight dead and several wounded and others fighting for their lives in a hospital near by.

Over the years I have written extensively about this uniquely American terror. I had decided never to write again on this topic as the despair it causes has become unbearable.

I felt I had said everything there is to say in this matter, and had seen it from every angle to find reality infuriating to fathom. The needle does not move as people keep dying like clockwork and statistics keep revealing the American cancer that it is.

This recent carnage in Allen, Texas, hit a bit close to home. One of the victims was a twenty seven year old girl from my city back home in India.

Aishwarya like I, had come to the United States to attend graduate school. She had completed her studies in India from my alma mater, Osmania University, and had gotten her masters degree from East Michigan University. She had started her first job in Texas and all that is good this country has to offer was in her destiny.

Her parents probably would have spent a fortune sending their daughter to this land, with hopes that she would make her place in this world. They were hoping she would get married next year and start a family. She was at the mall shopping for her birthday, which was later that month.

A few days before the Texas bloodshed, there were two mass shootings in Serbia. A thirteen year old had opened fire in a school, killing eight and two days later a lunatic went on a rampage in two villages, killing eight and wounding twenty. A nation which is no stranger to violence, having experienced a dreadful civil war in the nineties, was nonetheless shaken to its core.

Serbia like the United States is deeply divided, awash in weaponry, where war criminals are glorified and memories run deep of years of horrors of war. But this kind of carnage was unfamiliar and deeply disturbing to the entire nation. Two mass killings in two days. Seventeen people dead and 21 injured, was just too much to handle.

The whole nation felt scarred. A week later tens and thousands poured into the streets of Belgrade demanding that top government officials resign, and newspapers and TV stations that promote violence to be shut down. Crowds marched through the center of the city behind a banner that read “Serbia against violence”.

Serbia has the highest rates of gun ownership in Europe. A 2018 survey suggests there are 39 guns for every hundred people in Serbia — the vast majority unlicensed.

In the wake of the shootings, President Aleksandar Vucic swiftly announced what he called a “general disarmament” of the country. He declared a month-long amnesty for illegally-held weapons, with a warning of harsh consequences for anyone who held on to guns without a permit. He also announced a moratorium on new weapons permits and a review of current gun licenses.

The amnesty has been mostly positive and by the second day, more guns and ammunition had been handed over than in the previous three amnesties put together.

In America, we changed the channel and the Allen shooting was history. There were no protests. The usual Republican talking points were on garish display. The Texas governor labeled gun violence a product a mental health problems plaguing America and not gun infestation. The president expressed sympathy for the victims and said more should be done to reduce gun violence and blamed the Republicans for stalling any meaningful measures.

And so on and so forth and the news cycle moved on in anticipation of the next mass shooting which is imminent.

This is the dystopia Americans live in. A state of apathy and numbness has set in. The statistics around gun violence is jaw dropping. And yet politicians go around saying its a mental health problem, which means America also has the most amount of mentally ill people in the world. The politicians, judges and gun owners are probably at the top of the heap.

In a dystopian society, common sense does not operate like it should. As reality begins to take shape that is so far from the norm, that one cannot frame it in any civilized terms.

The Vietnam and 9/11 memorials are powerful and speak to you when you are in their presence, because the names of the dead are etched in stone and metal for you to touch and feel. The sheer magnitude of the tragedy is expressed by the multitude of names that stand framed before you. You cannot touch and not be moved by the glaring fact that there was a person behind each embossed name whose life was cut shot by violence.

A similar national memorial for the people who have died from senseless gun violence is long overdue in this country.

Maybe, this will help the people of this nation realize the dystopian world they have created, by hiding behind an archaic sentence in the constitution and allowing carnage to continue unabated. And just maybe, this will start a conversation towards change. At least that is the hope.

With thousands dying from gun violence every year, the memorial wall would have to be endless, until there is an end.

People, who want to send their children to this country seeking a future, need to think long and hard, about the dystopian nightmare America has become.