GAZA in a world of louts

by Gamini Seneviratne

The vermin are active wherever they can reach. The question of method does not interest them. Nor does the identity of their victims – except that they become legitimate targets by the simple measure of being or becoming a threat to the barbarians’ voracious appetite. And, as continues to be made clear, such is their reliance on a ‘god-given’ grace they well know, who better? does not exist and never did, the practitioners of the massacres that continue are not shy to announce is their project/program of their brilliant design.

The aforementioned efforts of bestiality have gone on for at least 75 years in Palestine. “Ethnic cleansing”, a construct that conceals several, disparate, features is not new; nor is it limited to Zionist practice. Nor is the creation of “famine”: the Irish have today taken the floor with accounts of how their overlords, the English, starved them, transferring grain, meat, fruit and necessary edibles to England under armed guard. Just to focus on the English, we had the ‘famine’ in Bengal in which millions died/ were killed (the subject of a doctoral study by a Harvard Professor, also Master of a College in Oxford, Amartya Sen).

The usual ploy / fiction was to declare a land they coveted as being ‘vacant’ – no people as in human beings. They done that in ‘Australia’ and elsewhere and here, in Sri Lanka, through a ‘Waste Lands Ordinance’ which supposedly provided “legal” cover for the theft of a Uva Vellassa that glowed with prosperity and the mouth-watering farmland of Sabaragamuva.

In Palestine there was no infrastructure for such ‘enactments’ – it was enough to fabricate, what a silly travesty, the word, which a much honored intellectual, Noam Chomsky, has shown to be fictitious, of some god (not the one whose son was born in Jerusalem). In the face of such fabrications, let us see what Taha Muhammed Ali said. Taha was among the 650,000 (non-existent/invisible) people who were driven out of Palestine in 1948. In his poem ‘Exodus’ this is what he says – listen:

The street is empty

as a monk’s memory,
and faces explode in the flames
like acorns—
and the dead crowd the horizon
and doorways.
No vein can bleed
more than it already has,
no scream will rise
higher than it’s already risen.
We will not leave!

…..

Ivory white brides

behind their veils
slowly walk in captivity’s glare, waiting,
and everyone outside wants us to leave,
but we will not leave!

The big guns pound the jujube groves,

destroying the dreams of the violets,
extinguishing bread, killing the salt,
unleashing thirst
and parching lips and souls.
And everyone outside is saying:
“What are we waiting for?
Warmth we’re denied,
the air itself has been seized!
Why aren’t we leaving?”

……………………….

Outside they’re blocking the exits

and offering their blessings to the impostor,
praying, petitioning
Almighty God for our deaths.

That scenery has been repeated many times over many years: Taha died in 2011.

Others provided testimony for “Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine”. Published in 2015, it includes work by Jane Hirshfield (a poet whose later work was infused with Zen perceptions), Colum McCann (Thirteen Ways of Looking), Alice Walker and others of a distinctive note giving voice to the demands of conscience. (Walker is perhaps best known for ‘The Color Purple’ – I met her briefly at an event in Philadelphia shortly before she joined a boatload of people and goods for Palestine: it was attacked off the shores of Gaza by Israeli forces in ‘international waters’).

For a flavor of what the book offers, I quote Cheryl Strayed: “Extraordinary Rendition reminds us of the power of art and the necessity of literature. Ru Freeman (also the editor) has made a book unlike anything I’ve ever read. It’s a great contribution not only to the conversation about Palestine, but to the larger one about peace and justice”.

The Zionists and the US-led war mongers have continued to act as if they have no idea what ‘peace’ and ‘justice’ are. They seem to believe that by shutting out the truth their falsehoods would prevail. Perhaps it was inevitable that the current behavior of the coalition of criminals would present the proof of Marx’s prediction of the savagery that would mark the collapse of capitalism.

But we tend to identify actions with names, the names of the perpetrators. Thus, we have Biden, Netanyahu, Blinken, Sunak, Cameron – blood brothers all even if they are puppets of anterior forces. And lest we forget, key actors within the European Union and agents of other under cover dealerships such as Gautam Adani now exposed as a conman and racketeer and his go-fer, Narendra Modi who shares with the Zionists such concepts as ethnic cleansing and the practice of apartheid.

What is to be done? The UN Security Council, now chaired by China, has given what may be called stern warnings to Israel and the United States. But such would be initiatives of a temporary kind. Longer term measures are necessary and over a 100 years ago, W E Du Bois spelt them as follows: Either America will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States. What we have seen are attempts by the shady prompters who have decision-makers in their grasp to enforce the spread of ignorance everywhere, including the centers of higher learning.

In such circumstances thoughts of what punishments the facilitators of such bestial acts deserve occur. There one has the medieval practices in Europe within easy reach. They are spelt out as follows: The convicted traitor was fastened to a hurdle, or wooden panel, and drawn by horse to the place of execution, where he was then hanged (almost to the point of death), emasculated, dis-embowelled, beheaded, and quartered“.That would be for the men. Women would go the Marie Antoinette way: by the guillotine.