Although Israel beats Hamas in rocket science, she is low on emotional quotient or EQ. How can one treat the family next door like the Jewish state is doing and still hope to continue living in the Arab neighbourhood?
The assault on Gaza will not be forgotten nor forgiven for a long, long time to come. Let's roughly estimate that every of the Palestinian dead has 5 family members and 10 close relatives; the same with each of the injured. We're looking at a blood debt for many generations, and this Israel has brought upon herself.
Israel cannot wish away the 1.5 million Palestinian population in Gaza and 2.5 million in West Bank. If impoverished Palestinians overcrowding at Israel's doorstep are likened to living in a vast 'prison camp', then Israelis will soon have to reside within a walled-in fortress of their own making.
And if Israel is currently armed to the teeth, she has in future to sleep with a loaded gun beside her pillow at all times. Not smart either to be on bad terms with 20-odd Arab neighbours engulfing you.
For a long while, I'd pondered on how it is that the Tibetans under Chinese occupation have not created world headlines with acts of violence akin to those carried out in the name of the Palestinian cause. My understanding is that Tibetans are philosophical in their Buddhist stoicism.
However, I've also reached a conclusion that the Tibetan pacifism implies they don't stand a Hungry Ghost of a chance at taking their country back. On the other hand, the Palestinians at least have a faint shot at self-determination because they elected to take up arms. Unfortunately, their armed resistance has been branded 'terrorism', and I've previously been guilty of sticking this label too.
It is a tragedy that Hamas has not shaken off its ‘terrorist’ tag which impedes their recognition as democratically elected representatives of the people. The blame for this must be shared with Israel and the other countries which have determinedly undermined Hamas so that the organization never had the chance to prove that they can indeed govern.
Israel's continued pummelling of Gaza this week also drove home the point that the Palestinians have no air force, no army and no advanced weapons. Therefore it’s not really surprising that Hamas methods are suited to the circumstances.
If despairing Palestinians as a larger whole can see no light at the end of the tunnel, then their resentment is understandable. It's hard to imagine this bereaved population erasing from their collective memory the painful, harrowing scenes of the last fortnight.
New York's Twin Towers tumbling down have played in the popular imagination of 9/11 but there is much more acreage in Gaza rendered rubble since the airstrikes started on 27/12. Thus Palestinians have more just cause to be aggrieved than Americans on the ‘terror’ calculus.
The emotional tug-of-war for public sympathy between the survivors of Holocaust (Israel’s right to exist) and the Palestinians she displaced is a complex issue requiring a balanced weighing of the competing narratives. Comprehending the nuances is taxing even on informed adults much less the learn-by-rote-exam-oriented Malaysian pupils to be sucked into Education Minister Hishamuddin Hussein’s hate campaign.
Poisoning young minds
Does it help the Palestinians when Hisham launched ‘Hate Israel’ as a Barisan Nasional project flipsided to increase schoolchildren awareness of the conflict? It is yet another of his Ministry’s logic-defying decisions and ill-thought out initiatives. Some politicians wake up one morning and simply decide that the brainwave they had in their sleep is the greatest idea since the invention of sliced bread. After fiddling with the toaster where our Education Minister electrocuted his little finger and vestiges of rationality, Hishamuddin announced that about five million pupils and some 361,000 teachers from more than 10,000 schools would be mobilised to protest against Israel.
Bernama reported: “School students nationwide will be galvanised into a mass movement aimed at instilling hatred against Israeli atrocities on Palestinians???. The national news agency report was essentially accurate – such a brilliant idea is typical of BN’s neverending capacity to shock and awe.
Not unexpectedly, Hisham’s glocal education philosophy to inculcate hatred in kids was met with the derision it deserved. So the Minister backpedalled and his damage control spin has been that the awareness drive (shouldn’t it read ‘exploitation of children’?) was not about instilling hate for Jews but to advocate a peaceful means to end the Middle East conflict.
On this occasion, he was relatively quick to shift-shape compared with the three years slow burn it took his consciousness to register that Umno Youth brandishing the keris was offensive. If Hisham’s apology on the keris trilogy was about as convincing as a pyramid scheme, this sobriety twist currently is only the Education Minister trying to sell us junk bonds. Hishamuddin Hussein is no sterling example to schoolchildren and not fit to sit in office.
How can we even think to entrust our children’s morals to his egregious spinning compass?
There may not be much we can realistically do for the Gazans but at the very least, we can refrain from adding to the quantum of hate among ourselves. By the same token, there is precious little we can individually do to affect events in the Middle East but we can influence domestic politics and policies. And spare a thought for our own dispossessed.
Note:
Lucia Lai in her blog ‘Mental Jog’ has some pictures of children in mock postures we don’t want ours to emulate.
