[COLUMNIST] Humanitarian insanity at work in Gaza

ALL but one Congressman in the United States (US) is deemed to have signed on to the pledge of the American Israel Public Affairs Commission (AIPAC).

Whether this is apocryphal or otherwise, actions speak louder than the words. The macabre display of Israel's war killing machine has been allowed to proceed without so much as the bat of an eyelid.

Never in the history of the United Nations (UN) has one heard of "humanitarian pause"; what more with a daily window of 4 hours. Yet this mechanism of 'peacemaking' has kicked in.

To those countries that can see through the hypocrisy, not least the likes of China, Russia, France and the United Kingdom (UK), for the longest time ever the charade of AIPAC and the US has been called out bluntly.

Indeed, the US State Department has had junior diplomats and senior ones alike, telling the Biden Administration that the current policy towards the Palestinian issue is completely wrong headed. It is not enough to ask for any "humanitarian pauses" as the moment Israel is allowed to restart its war machine at the expense of the children, women, elderly and disabled in Gaza, the death toll has been exacting.

After 6 weeks of unrelenting bombings and blood thirsty rampage on the ground, more than half of the murdered victims, not to mention the ones who had been maimed, are babies, women, elderlies and disabled. North or South, none of the Gazans have a place to avoid the genocide.

The above does not include the copious amount of propaganda on Shifa Hospital as the "Command Center of Hamas," which even TIME magazine and New York Times, indeed, all the US media, have all questioned; except a bare few under the pay of AIPAC.

The definition of madness is when the likes of Israel bombs Gaza again and again with the expectation that the whole world will yield to its ultra zealot altar.

Thus what Israel and its lobby in the US and the developed world called "humanitarian pauses" is nothing but the idea of a mad man or a person already made mad long ago.

Tellingly, what is legally not permissible has also been turned on its head. The Geneva convention of 1959, clearly forbids the occupation of any lands by illegal acts of war to be rendered into another entity's material possessions. Annexation by any name is just as foul.

Indeed, if this macabre logic makes sense —- which it doesn't —- then the whole of the world's economy should be given to the former colonies of the erstwhile imperial empires. Thus, Israel and AIPAC's pact must be broken. It is a good thing that the centre and left leaning Americans still have some decency to exercise their freedom of assembly and free speech to challenge the policy of the Biden Administration.

But it is not enough to challenge them by shouting slogans on and off campus, online or offline, since the likes of President Joe Biden has replies to this chorus of extreme discontent with sheer platitudes.

In responding to the internal revolt in the US State Department, for example, President Biden has affirmed that he "appreciates the diversity of opinion," that is part of America. What kind of political correctness is this?

It is precisely this form of motherhood statement(s) all across the White House and Congress that the US is enabling an active act of genocide.

This inadvertently is helping Israel and the extension of it, namely, AIPAC, to will a world of sheer evil into existence. How?

First and foremost, even when President Biden has mouthed off on "two state solutions," this very embrace of the formulaic phrase, is where the Palestinians of all backgrounds and creeds are killed and put under siege with collective punishment by Israel and AIPAC.

Those who disagree with the line and doctrine of the latter are immediately deemed to be anti Semitic. Yet, it is often —- intentionally neglected —- that Arabs and Palestinians are part of the Semitic groups too.

Secondly, outrageous and wild historical claims cannot be the basis of international law in 1948, let alone now or in future. The argument that Palestine is the ancestral land of Israel verging on a Zionist history of more than 3000 years ago is a serious historical aberration.

Thirdly, Israel's histrionics that their only home in Israel has been violated on October 7, 2023 holds no basis whatsoever. Jews had existed in various parts of Eastern Europe and Russia. The Hasidic Jews, for example, had only had a sectarian history of 200 years, originating in Kviv, Ukraine. They speak Yiddish, which is not part of the original language of the land of Palestine let alone Southern Palestine, of which the latter forms a large part of the current Syria. Israel is a fake concoction that deserves utmost critical scrutiny by all scholars and historians alike.

In fact, the institutional influence of Israel and AIPAC on the administrative elites and leaders in the US political scene is a well noted one. Leading authorities of international relations such as Professor John Mearsheimer at University of Chicago and Professor Stephen Walt at the Kennedy School of Government have both called them out. They are not part of any left wing groups. To the degree their names are tarred, the culprits who try to smear their names are Israel and AIPAC.

Thus, the very process of seeing Israel now pounding on Gaza with bombs verging on 60,000 KG worth of dynamites, ever so often now, is but an invitation to be complicit in all forms of war crimes and chicanery that Israel and AIPAC are complicit.

Granted that foreign ministers of the Muslim majority countries are now doing their rounds to visit various major capitals of the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), it is time for OIC and G77 to demand what President Erdogan did and still does "the world is more than five." That is more than five of the Permanent Members of the UNSC. Why ?

Israel and AIPAC's attempt to pull wool, literally iron curtains over the eyes of the whole world, cannot be compelled to stand unchallenged in the United Nations' General Assembly (UNGA) let alone the UN Permanent Security Council of five.

If this macabre logic of Israel and AIPAC are accepted, then the whole of the world's economy should also be given to the former colonies of the erstwhile imperial empires of which Israel conveniently came out with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 during the First World War I.

The current modern economy is based on the slavery and servitude of the past. Therefore, if the foul and fallacious past can be used as a pretext to create "facts on the ground," then what the world has had since 1948 —- the year that marked Israel's ostensible independence —- is all up for claims too.

Clearly wild historical claims cannot be the basis of international law in 1945, now, indeed, in future. Therefore, Israel's histrionics that their only home in Israel has been violated on October 7, 2023 holds no basis whatsoever. It is like watching a serial mid-season !

Thus, not unless the UNSC is subject to a serious structural reforms, the bloodletting in Gaza and West Bank will not end.

What is laughably a "humanitarian pause," as a Gaza resident pointed out, is but a lull of 4 hours each day. That is before the gut wrenching decimation of the Palestinian people —- first in Gaza, in turn, then in West Bank —- would be allowed to proceed apace completing the river to sea ideas of illicit Zionists expansionary vision.

Such an atavistic world order holds no currency with any Abrahamic principle of 'thou shalt not kill" and " steal."

As the Jewish philosopher of the 12th century Moses Maimonides exclaimed in trying to prevent the numerous tribes of Israel from attacking one another let alone others once said: "The root to any religion is the belief in 'not doing to others, what others shall not do to unto others."

In urging all to focus at the horrendous massacre of Gaza by Israel, as a systemic problem that the composition of the UNSC, which has been flawed from the very beginning in 1945, is to urge both an immediate and long term solution on the Palestinian Question. Now ! Such insanity must be arrested and eliminated as it has become an epidemic of misinformation.

To the credit of many Hasidic Jews who refused to acknowledge the secular and salacious existence of Israel as a "Jewish State," most of them have refused to serve in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).

That being said, the world cannot wait for the Hasidic Jews to reach 30 percent of the Israeli population by 2050. That is to bring Zionist expansionism to a slow halt as the systematic mass killings and forcible displacement of the Palestinians from their own land and strong attachment to the Mosque of Al Quds.

The latter is based on the custody of the Islamic Waqf that has ensured fair access to people of all faiths to Baitul Muqaddis or Jerusalem.

No Palestinians of any faith can be simply wiped away. Whether this is done by way of the ink of the British Mandate of 1947 let alone the blood of the innocent Palestinians now being boxed in and killed in Gaza once again; not to mention those trapped in West Bank too.

In this moment of dark history, our very decisive but astute PM Anwar Ibrahim brought the issue of ethic cleansing of the Palestinians by the Israeli at the tail end of the APEC summit in the formal and physical presence of all APEC leaders including the US President Joe Biden, US Vice President Kamala Harris and US State Secretary Anthony Blinken, who are all known staunch pro-Israeli, by asking “this genocide must stop NOW”, is indeed heartwarming. More leaders must rise to the occasion, to be pro-humanity NOW !

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Dr Rais Hussin is the Founder of EMIR Research, a think tank focused on strategic policy recommendations based on rigorous research.

** The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of Astro AWANI.