“Pigs are horses. Girls are boys. War is Peace.” - Arundhati Roy    

The twenty-first century raises its curtain on Palestine in a tortured, twisted light. Events in the land sacred to the three Abrahamic faiths belie history like a carnival of warped mirrors. People, roles, and events from days of yore are reflected with blinding flashes of irony in our times.  

Welcome to Palestine - the Promised Land, which has become a veritable Hell on Earth.

The Old Testament recounts the victory of David over the giant Goliath - his weapon a stone. Today, it is the youth of Palestine that hurl stones at Israel’s gigantic fire breathing military arsenal.  

There is even an exodus - not of Moses leading his people into Israel, but of 3.1 million Palestinians dispossessed of their land and liberties by the relentlessly oppressive armies and settlers of Israel.  

But it is not Moses who demands of the pharaoh: “Let my people go.” It is the world clamoring to deplore the restrictions imposed on Yasser Arafat, confined to his battered headquarters in Ramallah by tanks, soldiers and barbed wire since early December.  

The tanks and armored cars rumble into Bethlehem on the very path Christ tread, wreaking havoc on the holy city. As they besiege the Church of Nativity, the 300,000 strong Christian community in the city does not place palm leaves under the trampling boots of the Israeli infantry.  

The Israeli Defense Force besieges the holiest church in Christendom, where over 200 Palestinian men, women and children have fled for cover for fear of their lives. In a Jewish celebration of Passover, this scene from the Bible is re-enacted in real life: “…the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled for fear of the Jews (John 20:19).”

The Bible teaches us that Jesus died on the cross for the sins of humanity. For whose sins did the mentally impaired Christian bell ringer of Christ’s church die? Samir Salman was shot crossing Manger Square to the besieged church to perform a task he has done for countless years. “Apparently he did not understand the Israeli soldiers’ orders to halt, a priest inside recounted, so they shot him dead,” reports the Washington Post.  

No bells toll for Samir the bell-ringer. Or for the two hundred Palestinians killed in the first week of the Israeli assault - fifty unarmed civilians alone in a single day in a refugee camp on the West Bank.  

In a land where once the Pharaoh - then Arab steed and warrior - rode to victory in Middle Eastern land, the present rulers of Egypt and Jordan tremble and bury their heads in the desert sand. Their police attack and arrest their own people as the multitudes protest the Israeli massacre.  

In scenes reminiscent of the Nazi attack on Jewish neighborhoods in Poland during the Second World War, Israeli flame throwing tanks and “ack ack” guns breathe fire on houses of unarmed civilians, crushing cars, killing pregnant mothers and their unborn children.  

The Nobel Laureate Jose Saramaho visited Ramallah and compared the Israeli occupation to Auschwitz Nazi concentration camps. “We have to ring the alarm bell everywhere in the world to say that what is happening today is a crime that we can end,” said Saramago, criticizing the extension of Jewish settlements and deploring checkpoints and restrictions placed on the movement of Palestinians.  

In World War II, the Nazis arrested Jews and interned them in dreaded concentration camps. In Intifida II, Israel has internment camps of its own in the southern Negev desert where over 1000 arrested Palestinians are detained.  

The Holocaust revisited - a Palestinian holocaust with an Israeli flavor.

When the world faced the onslaught of the Nazis, the American statesman-President Franklin Roosevelt enunciated his doctrine of “a world founded upon four essential human freedoms,” and wrenched his country out of its isolationism to battle on the side of the free world. Today, as those human freedoms are blatantly violated in Palestine, his successor retreats to his ranch, to emerge only when the European Union threatens to wrest the peace initiative from American hands. A week into the war, George Bush delivers what Robert Fisk describes in Britain’s The Independent as “a speech laced with obsessions and little else” - promising too little, too late.

The Israeli army wreaks havoc into the Palestinian Authority, arresting, disarming and maiming its police force. Yet, despite the innumerable images of Israeli tanks and guns that flash across television screens, Bush chastises the beleaguered Arafat for not “doing Enough” to bring about peace in the occupied land. The mugger, writes Fisk, becomes the victim. Are there no television sets in Crawford, Texas?

Arafat is not the only hostage of Israel. The American negotiator

Palestinians expelled from their homes (1948)

General Zinni has attempted to visit Arafat, but is prevented by Prime Minister Sharon. The Marine General, twice AWOL from the land in which he is supposed to negotiate peace, obliges like an obedient schoolboy. A European Union team too is turned away by Israeli forces.  

Journalists are forcibly removed from the war zone and attacked with stun grenades. Gobbels would tell you that a war on civilians makes for bad publicity. Prime Minister Sharon learns his lessons from history well.

The inventors of terrorism in the Middle East take the moral high ground. Israel would have you believe that the suicide bombing by an 18-year-old girl is a greater crime than the bombings of the King David Hotel, where Israeli terrorists killed and maimed British women and children little over half a century ago.  

Sharon, the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, lectures the world about Palestinian terror. He regrets not having murdered Arafat earlier when he had the chance. Netanyahu, his hopeful successor, re-emerges from what CNN reported as “criminal corruption charges… in a bribery and theft investigation” to take to the air in favor of the Israeli onslaught. In a land that once produced biblical prophets, the lot of the people of Israel is to be led by murderers and thieves. But they are both “honorable” men.  

And Shimon Perez makes three. Following the historic Oslo accord, the Nobel committee awarded both Arafat and Perez the Nobel peace prize. The BBC reports that “committee members said they regretted that Mr. Peres’ prize could not be recalled.”  

History reverses itself in the Promised Land. This time around, Arafat is David. Sharon is Hitler. And George Bush is no FDR.  

Yusuf Agha encourages your comments: yagha@YellowTimes.org  

Source: www.YellowTimes.org

 

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