H@rd Truths by GHK Lall – A CONFLICT WRITTEN IN BLOOD, PERPETUATED WITH VENGEANCE

Oct 17, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

Kaieteur News – Israel has a right to exist. Israel has every right to self-defense. Those are written in stone, and it has the tools and assets to represent itself. Plus, there is Big Brother, Uncle Sam, ever-hovering, always on the alert, and constantly ready to lend a powerful helping hand.

GHK Lall

Also written in stone is the right of the Palestinians to live like human beings, to be free to tend their land and raise their families and have a better vision than they have now for their future. For those held hostages, both as taken from Israel and those trapped by circumstances in the Gaza, what they know is their anxieties and their priorities all fade into the crucible of conflict, and with big powers being the determiners of their destiny. All they have, what they live with, are their fears. The gun is king, and any victim from either side will satiate the rages that are always seething beneath, now spilling into the open. For either side bent on bloodletting, there can only be the continuing of a running conflict that will reverberate for the next several decades. This episode gives every indication that it will burn furiously for some time to come.

The debate can rage endlessly and querulously about which side is more of sadistic and demonic and terroristic versus who is civilized and engaged in the genocidal. This is the hard reality: who has the better arms and the more loyal allies, and the greater will could prevail for a time, may gather some concessions in what is really a classic phony peace that is contained for a time, while arm stockpiles are replenished, and strategies plotted. Said differently, it is always a heartbeat away until the next bloody all-outbrawl. Irreconcilable issues involving the scriptural and the ancestral will not be resolved by the legal. Violence is violence, and violence begets more violence; and this is all that has been known for decades now.

I must call things as they are, without getting into Arthur Balfour, Adolf Hitler, 1948, Abdel Nasser, Arafat, Ariel, (all relevant) and the kicks and twists of geopolitics. At the end of the day, oppression is a major contributor to resentments and the violence they breed. By the same token, massive retaliation only spawns more hatreds, is a guarantee that more blood will be spilled by the rivers.The high holy day holiday attack into Israel is an expression of that outrage, an indication of the boiling furies that heave on the surface. When people are caged like chattel, condemned to a life that resembles creatures of a lesser humanity, then the guns sound and the bombs explode. As much as I recognize Israel’s right to safety and security, I must also recognize the plight of the Palestinians, and for more than the underdogs to which they have been reduced, but the dogs they have been made into, become in the eyes of their neighbors. The dogs that they are now before rest of a so-called appalled world, now watching with increasing hypocrisy. I identify with dogs and underdogs, so there is deep, surging sympathy. I urge recalling that the Gaza of today was once known as the Gaza Strip, which says all that there is to say, can ever be said. Despite developments for the marginal better, it is still a Strip that strips men and women of their fundamental dignities. Who can and would live like that forever? Docilely? Without a flicker or a spark?

The talk of a meaningful two-state solution and who rejected have their time and place. That is, if anyone would ever care to listen after what recently took place. There are no innocents in this crippling, internecine pool of rage, revenge, and what is justified versus what is not commensurate. The Irish lived with the gore of that before, still do uneasily. The Semitic and Hamitic people are the only ones that can create more holocausts; the only ones who can carveout some continuity of what the Arabs and Palestinians call what happen to them from 1948 onwards the ‘Nakba’ (catastrophe’). I think that a harder and more hurtful one is now underway, as the rights of the Palestinians get swallowed up by the visions and ambitions of others jockeying for the upper hand in the region, and using their crisis for their own purposes.

For killing well over a thousand Israelis, the entire Israeli war machine will be unleashed, with multiples of dead or maimed Palestinians being the price for each Jewish settler and citizen killed. Recall the attack on America and the World Trade Center among other prized targets. Three thousand died in that inferno, and check how many scores of Afghans and Iraqis died for each American death. I foresee bloody history being repeated in the Gaza. So what is the solution? Nobody is vacating any land, nobody going anywhere from claimed homelands. Certainly, not the Palestinians whose options are very skimpy. The concern from this corner is that this current calamity in Gaza could spiral into uncontrollable, the global. When it has all quieted down, the seeds for another conflict would have been sown deeply with many heroes and martyrs claimed by both sides in what is a lose-lose relationship and situation.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)