One is compelled to give credit to Israel for their endless capacity for absolute fabrication, political obfuscation and unflinching brutality at the expense of human rights and lives. As the current bloodshed in Gaza enters eighth day, as death toll tops 170, women and children included, as thousands of rockets pummel brick-and-mortar hutments in the Hamas-ruled territory in lieu of a handful of rocket attacks from the Palestinian side and murder (no doubt heinous) of three Jewish-Israeli teenagers, we are either numbed into complacence or violence fatigue on the part of Tel Aviv. Even as United Nations Security Council, a five-member body that is too conflicted to call the Israeli offensive an act of state-sponsored terrorism, urges ceasefire, the international community supinely watches Israel play both the victor and the victim to the hilt. The question of Palestine has really transmogrified into a question of how to stop Israeli military from openly carrying out miniature Holocausts on a daily basis in Gaza, under the pretext of countering Hamas-led provocations, an entity it fanned to offset the secular, left-liberal Fatah. In fact, Hamas, and their Lebanese counterpart Hezbollah, are co-creations that are basically the comeuppance of decades of Israeli and US miscalculations in the Palestinian and other regions of the Greater Middle East, just as Al-Qaeda became the latter-day avatar of rabidly fanatic Islamist anti-Communist forces in Afghanistan that were fanned by the US in the wake of 1979 Soviet invasion of the country. In every case, the virulently fundamentalist Islamic militias were ogres built piece-by-piece by those who claim to wage the global war on terror, even as they attempt to airbrush years of misguided policies which have started backfiring now en masse.
While it goes without saying that Hamas are wrong to not recognise Israel as a legitimate state and are still acting on their stated agenda of restoring Palestine to the pre-1948 schema, the legitimate representatives of Palestinian people, in other words Palestinian Authority (led by Mahmoud Abbas), and Fatah, the staunchly secular and educated wing of the more militant Palestinian Liberation Organisation, have accepted that the two-state principle is only feasible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet, six and a half decades of confrontations and unfathomable bloodshed later, the Arabs of West Bank and Gaza are as helpless as ever. While Gaza, ruled by Hamas, is increasingly falling prey to the lure of an escalated counteroffensive to everyday humiliation in the hands of Israeli state, the Arabs of West Bank are witnessing apartheid intensifying everyday. With the West Bank wall having outsized the fallen Berlin Wall by several hundreds of miles and acts of brutalities, there’s really a regime of institutionalised hostility that the Palestinians have to fight back everyday. Life in the times of constant fusillade of missiles is something that the stateless people have to live with, and between the Hamas and Israeli militaries, they are hardly left with any choice.