- By Mike Kebonkwu
It is difficult to make sense of the mindless siege first, to the Israeli villages by Hamas militants, and the reprisal and relentless bombardment by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) of the Gaza Strip. The barbaric savagery and unprovoked slaughtering of innocent Israeli civilians, women, children and the elderly in their numbers by Hamas triggered off the current mayhem. Young people partying at concert were rounded up and brutally shot and murdered at point blank like a scene in the recast of the holocaust tragedy. The world watched with outrage, the horrifying death and injuries on both sides. The attack was orchestrated, well planned and executed with ruthless ferocity and precision. It was a holiday weekend on October 7 when Hamas fighters invaded and overran some Israeli villages. The State of Israel was caught napping and disorientated at the audacity of the brazen invasion and especially the apparent intelligence failure. There can never be a justification for that vicious attack directed not at military objectives or targets of the enemy, but on vulnerable defenceless civilians.
The Israelis response was equally measured and expectedly iron-fisted causing death, injuries, displacements and mass exodus of innocent Palestinian residents in the Gaza Strip. There is unimaginable human suffering the like the world has never witnessed since the end of the Second World War with huge casualties on both sides as if the gate of hell has been opened. Our sympathies are with the innocent victims and vulnerable people in the conflict whether they are Israelis or Palestinians.
Hamas is a militant Palestinian group with a pseudo government in the Gaza strip. They may have been designated as a terrorist organization by the West but to the Arab Palestinians, they are freedom fighters engaged in the liberation struggle for the Palestinians’ homeland. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a larger Arab Jewish conflict which is as old as human recorded history. It is not a religious war by any means as understood or perceived by some naive pedantic clerics, especially bigoted Nigerian religious fanatics who jump into the fray in partisan stands for either Christianity or Islam. For crying out loud, as Africans, we are neither Arabs nor Jews; these two racial groups treat Africans with disdain and at best like indentured slaves.
Read Also: Six more UN staff killed in Gaza
In the whole of this, it is instructive to understand that the Jews and Arabs have about the two most dominant religions in the world with each superintending over the holiest religious sites of the two received religion of Christianity and Islam where people from all over the world come on yearly pilgrimage to worship. With all the religious pretensions and grandstanding, these two distant cousins are in a duel of fight to finish in an all-out war fought with the fiercest weapons at their disposal showing neither love nor humanity.
There have been partisan solidarity marches and protests across the globe while the carnage continues and casualties rising by the day. Common sense dictates that taking sides in this conflict would be infantile and puerile as that will not be addressing the larger conflict in the Middle East between the State of Israel and the Arab nations. Israel practices Judaism that does not share much in common with Christianity. The percentage of Christians in Israel as at my last check in 2022 was about 1.9% which is quite insignificant number of their population. Islam is the second largest religion in Israel – about 18.1% of the population who are Israeli Arabs. As you read this piece we may probably be inching towards Arab-Israeli war that would be fought with the same bitter hatred and animosity that will reshape the demography of the entire region.
The Arabs and Jews have common paternal ancestry through the loin of the patriarch Abraham, their forebear. The war in Gaza clearly showed that we have lost our common humanity. There is a collapse of the global system and very weak United Nations that has lost the capacity to deal effectively with current global crises; whether it is Syria, Yemen, Libya, Ukraine and now Gaza. Hamas invasion of Israeli villages and the butchery of civilians, women, children and elderly are beyond human comprehension. It can never be equated with the revolutionary act of freedom fighters engaged in liberation struggle; it is evil of unimaginable proportion. The decisive response from Israel was therefore not unexpected but appears excessive in a context. Indeed, there can never be justification for the sheer human tragedy that the actions of both parties to the conflict have caused.
Opinion appears to weigh against the Israelis who have clear military superiority over Hamas but Israel did not start the war. We have a saying in my local Ika language that, ‘when you blame the hawk for preying on the chick, you must also blame the hen that exposes its chick to the predator’.
It was bad miscalculation for Hamas to have underestimated the probable response from Israel; it was indeed a misadventure. Hamas is still hauling and launching missiles on Israel from civilian infrastructure and built-up areas and would not allow the civilians to leave for safety. Here lies the dilemma in this present all-out war; even under international law, when civilian infrastructure or protected objects are used for military purpose, they lose their legitimacy of the protection of the law from attack. As it is, Israel is not willing to turn the other cheek no matter the world opinion if missiles keep raining from Hamas. The prospect for peace in that enclave is slipping away as the belligerents fight one another like savages.
Palestinians have a right to their homeland just as the State of Israel has the right to live in safety and co-exist with its Arab cousins. The conflict may snowball into a global conflict of epic proportion that may just as well trigger a Third World War.
Hamas is only a proxy in the war sponsored and funded by Tehran and countries with its variant of Shiite credo of Islam with sympathy and solidarity of other Arab nations in the region; Syria, Lebanon etc. This is just the same way that Israel, although a strong military country with small population has the back and unwavering support of the West. The Hamas leaders fuelling the inferno do not live in Gaza but in capital cities of the rich Arab states in safety with their families. They incite their followers with inflammatory rhetoric and ignore the suffering of the victims while supervising the carnage. This is the nature of the crises in the Gaza Strip fuelled, financed and controlled from outside; it is hand of Esau and the voice of Jacob, a proxy war.
The lesson for the poor Africans is not to take side. And for the brainwashed Nigerian religious bigots and fanatics who follow their pedantic clerics sheepishly to their own misfortune; we should be concerned about the mass poverty and ignorance amongst our people. Our professionals and youths are leaving the country in droves; you are not protesting. People cannot get a good and decent meal in a day; it does not matter to you. The rising unemployment does not worry us; we are waiting for palliatives. Our elected representatives in the National Assembly are buying exotic SUVs when the masses cannot feed themselves and live in safety; it does not call for engagement and protest by our religious leaders. Instead we are carrying placards chanting down to Israel, down to America and down to Gaza!
You are neither Arab nor Jew; the battle is not your own; fight your own battle which is poverty, ignorance, unemployment, insecurity, disease and bad governance. Nigerians have no business fighting one another over religion; we have no reason to kill one another because of language and ethnicity. We should project common humanity and show love without discrimination; that is religion that the Bible and Quran preach.
- Kebonkwu Esq is an Abuja-based attorney.