During the occupation of the Palestinian town Tul Karm, a platoon commander for the Israeli Defense Forces decided to evict a family from their home. Unfortunately for them, they had built a big, comfortable house on high ground and the IDF wanted a place with a good lookout over the rest of the village. In his memoirs, the commander, Noam Chayut, recalls banging on the door and yelling for those inside to open it only to find that a frightened woman, her teenage daughter, and the woman’s mother-in-law were the only ones at home. Relaxing after realising her husband was away, he told them they had an hour to pack and ‘get going’.
The woman turned pale and started dashing around, pouring things into bags to the sound of gunshots ringing out from the town while barking instructions at her crying daughter to pack her things. Then, the incident which is unique only in that it isn’t unique at all, takes a turn for the tragicomic:
The mother asked the girl something before leaving, and the girl answered “no” and stamped her feet. The mother made me understand that she didn’t want to take her schoolbooks with her. The girl pointed down at the town, where gunfire resounded, as if stating: it’s a war, who needs schoolbooks now? The mother and girl looked at me, each wanting me to support her point of view. The girl’s face was swollen with tears. I looked helplessly at the mother, then at the girl and again at the mother. The mother looked at me and smiled all of a sudden; she was the first to realize how ridiculous that moment was. I smiled, too, and then the girl cracked up laughing, choking through her tears. I took off my helmet and nodded, sent her to her room to get her schoolbooks.
The commander was to later become a leading campaigner against the Israeli occupation, documenting the war crimes he had committed in his memoirs, and encouraging others to break their silence. But for me, I couldn’t help but see the schoolbooks as a stand-in for international law. Like them, it seems pointless in the face of an occupation that dreams of violence. The mother’s desire to continue in the old way, un-anchored from all she had been taught to hold dear, seems at odds with her eviction by a state living off blood. The girl’s response may linger in my mind now more than ever; it’s a war, who needs international law now?
The Rules-Based Order is Dead
Israel has been killing Palestinians on an industrial scale for a year. Netanyahu is now continuing his Hitlerian march to pursue Israel’s living room ambitions in Lebanon with cloak-and-dagger tactics while perpetually pummelling the Gazans who die without hope. Any appeal to international law reeks of redundancy; after all, the International Court of Justice may take ten years to decide whether what Israel is doing is genocide, does anybody in Gaza have that sort of time? The International Criminal Court is in the process of issuing arrest warrants it knows will likely never lead to any of the accused in the docket. Meanwhile, the ICJ’s landmark opinion holding that Israel must end its occupation and return the land to the Palestinians has been roundly ignored by every state co-authoring Israel’s holocausts.
At the same time, several states which act as Israeli pom poms (Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands) have filed a case at the ICJ against Afghanistan’s gender persecution. The same countries who have no problem with Israel butchering tens of thousands of Palestinian women will now perform their tidy crying about Afghan women’s right to education. As if two decades of military occupation did not also compromise the pursuit of these women’s rights. Afghanistan’s ‘gender apartheid’ will be decried while Israel’s actual apartheid will be ignored. The message here is clear; international law is back to being used as an exercise in colonial disciplining.
The United Nations has been relegated to being a non-playable character in the disgrace that has unfolded over the past year with states (Muslim and non-Muslim alike) performing the spectacle of compassion every few months for the starving children of Gaza. I now understand the joke that if the UN had been around in 1939, we’d all be speaking German.
Endless Wars
Meanwhile, the new Nazis are pushing into Poland. Israel has invaded Lebanon and is goading Iran into an all-out war, something it has wanted since at least the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Even shortly after Hamas’ attack, on November 1, 2023, Israeli historian, Benny Morris, wrote an article in Haaretz titled “There Will Never Be a Better Time for Israel to Attack Iran”, arguing for an attack before the ‘moment of superiority’ over Iran’s weaponry is missed.
So for Israel it seems everything is going according to plan.
Yesterday, former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennet rubbed his hands with glee at the prospect of Persian regime change, saying that “[t]his is the greatest opportunity in 50 years to change the face of the Middle East”. Iran’s recent attack in revenge for Ismail Haniye and Hassan Nasrallah’s assassinations is a response Israel has been praying for and gives it the excuse it needs to lure the Americans into another fateful war. President Joe Biden has said emphatically after Iran’s strike that the US is “fully, fully, fully supportive” of Israel, which means what? No more weak appeals for an investigation when refugee camps are wantonly bombed? A famine on five fronts?
Iran after all offers the only Islamic resistance to Israeli slaughter giving it the (in my view well-earned though perhaps sexist) moniker of being the only brother of fifty-six sisters. The Israeli lobby has successfully made Iran the outcast of the international community and Iran has been invigorated by an outcast’s strength in furthering its resistance. Even an American commentator’s prescriptions for foreign policy was to tell Israel to ‘back off’ Iran and stop denying it “the position in the Middle East to which its culture and educated population entitle it”.
While the newly wealthy bedouin cultures have chosen to spend their riches on gilded palaces and shopping malls, Iran has spent what money it has (after sanctions) on funding an armed opposition to occupation. But this opposition does not see itself as ‘at war with the west’ nor does it condone attacks on it. Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas were among the first to condemn the attacks of 9/11. While Saudi’s proxies have made life hell for Muslims, Iran’s make life hell for Israel. It is time, I think, to bring Iran in from the cold.
A Resistance to Support
Muslim scholars have often argued that our fundamental differences with the west are so great that we even ‘think about thinking’ differently. While the west pits their ‘enlightened liberal atheism’ against our ‘backward authoritarian theism’ (ignoring entirely that the two world wars were waged by them), we have largely accepted this and ignored our own values, our own ways of thinking about thinking.
For so long, we have been hamstrung by the notion that Americanisation is the only road to prosperity, and the elevation of individualism (rather than its restraining) is the only way to live a life well lived. Now that the west is unravelling, we get to dust off the cobwebs of our ways of thinking and are free to reason anew. The decades we spent in a crisis of self-esteem and confidence can be replaced by a new resistance in which we are not shackled by the contempt and demonisation by the west. If they have brainwashed us for this long, now our brains need washing of these notions.
The contempt for us is evident in how the west views our resistance; as an unworthy characterisation of what they see as violence for violence’s sake, inflicted upon them by a people taught to not value life, education, or tolerance. Former Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman said when the Palestinians have “studied Rousseau and Voltaire, then they’ll deserve a state.” My education also didn’t include Rousseau or Voltaire yet I wasn’t carpet bombed for it. But it’s a pervasive notion that we are an unenlightened people, incapable of statehood because we have not embraced the values the west holds dear; an incredibly ‘individualistic, sexually obsessed, materialistic mindset’ which fetishises celebrity status, wealth and power.
Instead, our faith emphasises the notion that we can only get closer to God through our community, that only in experiencing things together can we experience the love of God. That reliance on and obedience to one’s family and tribe is the goal, not the thing to run away from. That connecting with others diminishes the self, and that losing yourself in others is a virtue.
Our difference can best be summed up by author Ethan Watter’s metaphor of being on an aeroplane when the oxygen masks come down. While the western notion is that if you are sitting with a child, you put on your mask first, then take care of them, the eastern notion would be that putting the oxygen mask over the mouth of the child would be the only thing that would allow you to breathe.
Iran has decided to die a little to let Palestine breathe, what will the rest of the Muslim world do?
