The United Nations broke the news of the murder of its 9 staff members in the following words: "Nine UN staffers working with UNRWA have been killed in airstrikes in the Gaza Strip." The Secretary General of the UN issued an indecisive statement after the Israeli air strike on a hospital in Gaza that killed over 500 people: "I am horrified by the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians." American president Joe Biden, who was quick to condemn 'Hamas' brutal and abhorrent attacks', issued a vague statement after Al Ahli Arab hospital massacre, reiterating his regime's 'commitment to peace and the protection of civilian life'. Not surprisingly, the name of the perpetrator of these heinous attacks was missing from all these statements. We have smoothly transitioned from 'the problem that has no name' to 'a killer that has no name'.
Palestinians have suffered at the hands of the Israelis for over seven decades; generations have grown up in the shades of bombs, missiles, illegal detentions, and raids. Palestinians are fighting the war of survival and are on the verge of destruction at the hands of Israelis, who receive 4 billion US dollars annually from the USA as military aid. Besides giving generous funding to Israel to maim Palestinian children, who are caged in an open-air prison, America is doing wonders in portraying their barbarism as self-defense.
Harvard professor Ruth Wisse admonished American Jews in a 2019 conference to soften Israel's image in the media: "Your job is to make us look good... you have got to serve two or three years in the army of words...to fight the political battle which is even more important, at this point, than the military battle."
The attempts to portray Palestinians as the instigators of violence and the Israelis as 'cautious defenders' of their sovereignty is an intellectual dishonesty that the West is habitually committing.
From January to August 2023, over 200 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces, not to forget that it has been doing the same for the last 75 years. Illegal settlements of Israelis in Palestinian territory, illegal under international law, are increasing unabashedly, causing discontent amongst Palestinians. The flames were burning, and an explosion was imminent.
The UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process issued a report in August 2023, stating: "Although the parties have taken measures towards stabilizing the situation, "unilateral steps" continue, including Israeli settlement growth, demolitions, Palestinian militant activity, and settler violence."
Human Rights Watch has called Gaza an 'open-air prison', where every second person is unemployed, half of the population is food insecure and 80% of the population relies on humanitarian assistance for its survival.
The Israeli regime has made sure that "No electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything closed" for the Palestinian civilians after skirmishes with Hamas. These are outright war crimes under international law, but the world has yet to take notice.
Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to turn Gaza into rubble, while another Israeli parliamentarian has aimed to remind Palestinians of the Nakba (the catastrophe in Arabic). Any violent act in circumstances like these should be seen as a defensive mechanism, rather than an offensive one.
It is absurd and ignorant to say that the Palestinians should adopt peaceful ways of solving the conflict and not revert to violence when they have been detained, massacred, and expelled from their homes for doing the same for the last seven decades. The Hamas style of guerrilla attacks is a relatively new phenomenon in the Israel-Palestine conflict after the humiliating defeat of the Arab states and the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to deliver the Palestinians their independence and end illegal settlements.
Was the liberal West successful in pressurizing Israel to end its occupation and illegal settlements when the secular PLO was diplomatically engaging with Israel? The Israeli regime led by Netanyahu has effectively facilitated the rise of Hamas by not giving any leverage to the PLO, and tightening his regime's grip over power in the occupied territories.
While the West is standing resoundingly behind Israel, in both conventional and information warfare, Palestine is yet to receive any concrete support. The Muslim world, especially the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), has maintained criminal silence, as the Muslim world is treading the path of 'normalizing relations with Israel'. The silence is perhaps because 'zero plus zero is equal to zero’, as the Egyptian nationalist Saad Zaghloul had reportedly said decades ago on the Arab unity against Israel.
Some 'experts' of Middle Eastern politics try to blame the Russian-American rivalry that ensued after the Ukraine War to be the main reason of the ongoing Palestine-Israel war. This viewpoint argues that the Iranian support to the Hamas fighters is meant to bring the US directly into the conflict so that the Russian bloc makes the Middle East 'America's Ukraine.'
History suggests that the Palestinian resistance movement has continued unabated regardless of the foreign powers' involvement. The Arab powers, including Egypt and Jordan, supported the Palestinian cause till the 1980s, but even when they relinquished their support, the movement continued relentlessly. The increasing support for Hamas in Palestine, estimated to be around 53-60 % as of 2022, is a testament to the growing support for military action amongst Palestinians to dismantle the apartheid state of Israel.
The Israeli regime has relied on fake news and fabricated stories to pitch itself as a victim of Palestinian aggression. The highly circulated news of the killing of hostages followed the rape allegations and the killing of 40 babies by Hamas, which all proved to be bogus and fabricated. However, these fabricated pieces of information were peddled by Israeli-sponsored media outlets to every nook and corner of the world. The Israeli media is now trying to blame Hamas for the hospital debacle.
Not a single country, news channel, or organization that created uproar over these fake allegations, raised a question when Netanyahu posted a video on his official account on X (former Twitter), showing the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza, turning several high-rise buildings to ashes, killing hundreds of people. The portrayal of the causalities in the imperialist media is biased to the core, as Palestinian lives lost are reported as 'deaths in the conflict', while the Israeli losses as 'Hamas terrorists mercilessly killed Israel's forces.'
The Palestinian resistance is not the main cause of the conflict in the ongoing battle, but the Israeli occupation. The Palestinian resistance is a symptom of a disease that is the Israeli occupation and subjugation of the inhabitants of the holy land. You do not cure a disease without solving the root cause, attempts to mitigate or hide the symptoms won't do any good in the long run.
Any durable and sustainable peace in Palestine and the Middle East, therefore, is only possible if the Palestinian problem is solved according to the wishes of the local populace and according to the UN resolutions. This goal can only be achieved if the West and the United States call spade a spade and admonish Israel for its violent acts of terrorism and occupation of the Palestinian lands. Although, it seems very unlikely that any such development will occur in the near future.
The only feasible option that the world has left the Palestinians with is violence, which will breed more violence, and the unfortunate cycle of vehemence will continue not sure for how long.