The Israeli/Palestinian Conflict and the Nourishing of Intergenerational Hatred
I am a Nigerian living in Lagos. I have never met a Palestinian. I have never seen anyone I know to be a Palestinian.
I know of one Palestinian writer, Mahmoud Darwish, though his poetry collection The Music of Human Flesh. I know little else about Palestinian culture. I know little of the Koran.
On the contrary, I once presented a paper at a conference on Jewish culture in London, where I introduced some of the Jewish attendees to Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, a book I bought in Nigeria and used for my MA thesis in literature at the University of Benin. My University of Benin MA included an essay I wrote on Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool.
The study and practice of Jewish mysticism, particularly the Kabbalah, has been foundational to my philosophical and spiritual life.
The luminaries of the study of the academic study of Jewish mysticism, beginning from Gershom Scholem who initiated its modern renaissance and was strategic to its grounding at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, along with Moshe Idel and Joseph Dan, two of his successors there, along with various scholars of the field in Israel, the US and England, are my heroes and whose books I own or have read.
I have some background in the development of Jewish history and culture from ancient times across their original homeland to Europe to Israel in terms of its social, economic and political developments, and am informed about the roles of great Israeli political and military leaders such as Moshe Dayan, Menachem Begin and Golda Meir.
I have a significant background in the Bible through schooling and my faith as a Christian.
I have had rich discussions with Jews, some of them Israelis, in London and Cambridge.
Yet at times I experience the wish to have Israel experience the inhumanity it is currently subjecting the Palestinians to in one of the most savage actions ever undertaken by members of the human race.
I imagine the merciless decimation of all Israeli troops in Gaza, the obliteration of all Israeli settlers in the West Bank and the transformation of Israel into a near waste land through totalistic bombardment, as the contours of that land are redrawn, the decimation of the Israeli cabinet, the elimination of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli far right Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a central ideologue of the ongoing genocide, and the entire gang of savages who run the Israeli government as all help from their American and other Western allies is destroyed in a restoration of justice.
Then I recall that the evil people running the Israeli war machine do not represent all of Israel.
In Israel, there exist the staff of the news medium Haaretz, which has consistently sought a humane approach to the decades old crisis.
Families of the hostages seized by Hamas and held in Gaza have been calling for a permanent ceasefire.
A significant number of Israelis are declining to take part in the genocide against the Palestinians, an evil of the most inhumane proportions, falsely described as a war by the perpetrators and their allies.
Recalling these realities, I restrain the terrible rage, the hunger for a balance of destructive justice against the monsters in Israel who are enjoying the support of the US government in a genocide carried out with the support of that government even as the Europeans are beginning to withdraw from their initial support.
If I, who live so far from the conflict, have no experiential relationship with the population being so evilly and inhumanly decimated, can experience such flashes of murderous rage, of a yearning for sweeping destruction of the enemies of the Palestinians, enemies with whom I have significant cultural affinity, what about the Palestinians themselves, how do they feel, what aspirations will be etched into their hearts and minds as they are steadily decimated by an opponent through air and land, while they have no air military resources and the Palestine Hamas can barely make a dent in the Israeli military or protect any Palestinian?
The legendary Hamas leaders, such as Yaha Sinwar have paid the ultimate price in this conflict, the latest round triggered by their surprise attack on Israel, killing civilians and soldiers and abducting some, in a casualty rate of a hundred or somewhat more to which Israel has responded with a totalistic bombing and ground campaign currently complemented by an ongoing months long aide blockade amidst desperate conditions among the Palestinians, an Israeli counter attack that has claimed more than 50,000 Palestinian lives,most of them non-combatants, the Palestinian Gaza Strip increasingly being leveled into rubble even as Israel exerts more control, land theft and persecution of Palestinians in the West Bank.
I grew into adulthood on stories of the Arab/Israeli wars in which Mose Dayan made his name as an Israeli soldier, his iconic eye patched face etched in my memory.
Golda Meir's rugged looks, Menachem Begin 's weathered but leonine features are part of my mental database.
The Egyptian Prime Minister Anwer Saddat, mercilessly gunned down by his own honour guard,perhaps for his accords with Israel.
Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister killed by an Israeli for the same reason.The massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by the PLO. Yasser Arafat and his keffiyeh. The movement from the PLO to Fatah to Hamas.
So many have gone and more are going everyday but this time, this "more" is limited to the daily, savage truncation of Palestinian existence in the flames and horror of bombs, of death from the air, against which they are completely defenseless.
Israel has resolved to depopulate the Gaza Strip and totally dominate the West Bank with the support of the near mad man in the White House, Donald Trump, who, declaring he wants to clear the Gaza Strip of Palestinians, has inspired the Israeli govt to proceed to do just that.
If I could occasionally experience the desire for the counter decimation of Israel as it is decimating the Palestinians, what are the Palestinians likely to feel, whether in Palestine or in exile from Israeli savagery and wars with Israel?
How is Hamas still surviving after the awesome bombing campaign and sweeping ground invasion unleashed on Palestine?
Is it true that the destruction of Hamas is an unrealistic ambition on the part of the Israeli government?
Hamas replaced the PLO in the struggle for a Palestinian state.
What could emerge from the fire and blood, the mangled lives, of the current wholesale slaughter?
The Israeli government is working hard to make sure the Palestinians cease to exist in Palestine, determined to prevent a Palestinian state and any further conflict or co-existence with the Palestinians, under any terms.
The Jewish Holocaust, climaxing centuries of Jewish persecution in Europe, is a moral hole in the conscience of the world.
The ongoing Palestinian Holocaust, carried out by the descendants of the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, with the support of the descendants of those Europeans who once persecuted Jews, will go down in history as an event of the most heinous infamy, when humanity plumbed it's lowest moral depth, it's greatest savagery.
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