How Israel Won The Battle And Lost The War
By Prakash Kona
04 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Power creates illusions and Shakespeare's History plays are about men who ultimately will know that for all their victories what they will be deprived of is "sleep" and "appetite." Henry the IVth in the second part notes with agonizing self-pity how meaningless power can be:
How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?Will fortune never come with both hands full,
But write her fair words still in foulest letters?
She either gives a stomach and no food;
Such are the poor, in health; or else a feast
And takes away the stomach; such are the rich,
That have abundance and enjoy it not.
This is the sad and stupid plight of the state of Israel that has murdered sleep and lost its appetite for life. No wonder it embarks on the politics of meaningless murder instead of looking for a way to end the occupation whose consequences generations of Israeli children will have to pay for deprived of both "sleep" and "appetite."
The world was an eyewitness to the cruel inhumanity with which Gaza was blockaded and how Israel pounded that little strip of land filled with thousands of people in it with bombs that cannot make the distinction between the guilty and the innocent. What is guilt however in this context? That is for Israel to decide which is fundamentally guilty of the occupation.
Nobody with a little common sense expected Hamas to win the battle not Hamas for that matter. There are too many contradictions in the Palestinian resistance. Even the latter most people accept as a fact of life. Most people that I know are not particularly sympathetic to Hamas either. But I have not met one single person who did not believe that Israeli occupation is the reason for the violence and not Hamas. I am including those who are completely opposed to the politics of Hamas, like myself, for instance.
The war has been won by the Palestinians of Gaza. I have seen reporters of mainstream western media, who you normally expect would toe the official American and the Israeli line, wince in disgust at Israeli brutality. It did not surprise me a bit. At the end of the day they are individual men and women with a conscience that can only take so much of lies and deceit. How can they reject the narration of blood and horror being played out right before their eyes!
The war is lost for Israel and the Palestinian on the street along with the rest of the world is convinced of the illegitimacy of the occupation. The latter are more than ever willing to accept suffering and death as part of their day-to-day lives under the occupation. That definitely is not a good thing for Israel. Bolingbroke in Shakespeare's play is only too aware that politics is about negotiation as opposed to brute imposition of power whose results are temporary and both the Henrys -- the father and the son -- are keen on finding ways to explore the possibilities of truce than jump into pointless battles, whether they are fought in the name of security or honor, one being as empty as the other.
The end of the occupation is inevitable and Israel seems to be heading towards a no-choice zone. The Gazans did a good thing by standing up to Israeli might despite the fact that it means it would take "ten years" for them to reconstruct the damage done to the strip of land they inhabit. In anti-colonial wars of resistance millions perished. But, thanks to those millions of deaths, we live in a freer world than we did earlier without human dignity and under occupation. If the death of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children is the price to pay for freedom I think it is a small price to pay and any price is a small one when it comes to liberating the body and the mind.
If I were in the position of Israel I think that no price is too small for peace to prevail. It means I sleep well and I don't lose my appetite simply because I have not slept well. It means that I am not looked at with contempt and hatred when I travel and people do not speak ill of my country or my people. I simply fail to understand if the extremists in the Israeli government realize what they are doing to ordinary citizens in the name of security! If the US is a role model for their security obsessions, seriously they should wake up and smell the coffee! If they think that the Iron Dome air defense system is the source of their security I can only laugh at them in sheer amusement. It is like one of those not-so-funny jokes that erupt sometimes in the midst of a serious conversation.
This is what the humane Mahfouz had to say in his Nobel Lecture: "Save the famished in Africa! Save the Palestinians from the bullets and the torture! Nay, save the Israelis from profaning their great spiritual heritage! Save the ones in debt from the rigid laws of economy! Draw their attention to the fact that their responsibility to Mankind should precede their commitment to the laws of a science that Time has perhaps overtaken." I think the Israelis should pay heed to the reference made to them. If more than a thousand years of European anti-semitism that lead to the holocaust was wrong, the average Israeli Jew must know that the occupation falls under the same discourse of taking away somebody's human rights by depriving them of what is rightfully theirs: their rights to live a life as they think is good for them. Through resisting their government's brutality and stupidity they are only doing good to themselves and to the future generations to come.
Prakash Kona is a writer, teacher and researcher who lives in Hyderabad, India. He is currently working as an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad.
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