Akhtar Raja
During the ICJ proceedings, South Africa’s lawyer submitted that Israel is committing the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time. Recently, when asked what stood out over the last year during the depraved onslaught by Israel, the experienced senior Al Jazeera political analyst, Marwan Bishara, referred to the deafening silence of both Western and Arab powers and the Western media.
The satanic cult like conduct of the Israeli colonial project in Gaza and the West Bank has extended to Lebanon and Syria. How else would you categorise such conduct having heard Fadi Bakr, a former prisoner at the Sde Teiman detention camp in southern Israel? And what about the attack on 14 October on displaced Palestinians in tents on Al-Aqsa Hospital grounds, described in graphic detail by a British doctor, Dr Mohammed Tahir?
At the time of writing, Israel and Iran seem poised to escalate the conflict. All crystal balls have been shattered. You cannot rule out either a costly political settlement and/or a regional war.
On the one hand we will doubtless continue to speculate, analyse, and calculate on the basis of observable facts, politics and history, whilst on the other hand, there is the option of viewing all of this through the prism of Islam. For Muslims, the latter rests on an objective, tangible and verifiable belief in the very existence of Allah and His guarantee of justice. Even those opposed to the idea of a divine entity cannot in absolute terms rule out the possibility of one.
Israel dances to United States’s drumbeats and not the other way round. Israel is a notoriously mistrusted but necessary client state needed to achieve US and larger Western aims. It was created and groomed by the US and the UK.
They continue to give unflinching support. Israel exerts seeming control by applying funds (received from the US) to corrupt and manage its cronies, to engage in a psychological game, and to portray and exert physical and economic power. But where does actual power really lie? The answer depends on which prism you look through.
Israel is US’s and UK’s strongest geostrategic asset in the region albeit one that is prone to grotesque mis-behaviour, at times biting the hand that feeds it. Remember the bombing in 1946 of the British HQ at Jerusalem’s King David Hotel by Irgun, a terrorist group led by Menachem Begin, which killed 96 people.
What about the mediation efforts to negotiate a UN peace plan in May 1948 sabotaged by another terrorist group, the Stern Gang, who murdered a Swedish diplomat, Count Folke Bernadotte. And then in 1967 there was the Israeli attack on a US spy ship, killing 34 men and injuring many more while - as James Bamford in his book Body of Secrets says - Israelis were busy “systematically butchering” 60 Egyptian prisoners in El Arish during the six day war.
The Zionist ideology does not fit squarely within the Anglo-US foreign policy formula. It nevertheless needs to be tolerated for the Zionist (not Judaic) asset to function.
The promotion of an ideological symbiosis helps paper over the crack. There is a shared belief in racial, cultural, and religious inferiority and dehumanisation. ‘The other’. This attitude is stereotyped for general Western consumption. It also happens to be the subject of some prejudice by Ashkenazis against Sephardic Jews.
Western goals include suppressing the repetition of historical dominance by Muslims and gaining access to resources to stay in the game globally.
The West hopes the Middle East (and Iran given the Russian and Chinese nexus) can be preyed upon by a well reared guard dog by relying on its training, support, and characteristic instincts. Given its construct, size, and location Israel can never achieve domination over the region. History bears testimony. Historic Palestine is the natural state of the land whilst a Greater Israel is an unnatural attempt to extend and maintain a colonial project. The colonised never accept their colonisers.
Even if a ceasefire is somehow achieved that will not break the cyclical pattern of violence witnessed since the 1948 Nakba. Why would it while the West fuels the ‘Greater Israel’ plan to redraw territorial lines to help confront emerging global contenders and impose ideological superiority.
On 27 September 2024 while addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, referred to the world being divided into “those sitting around the table of democracy and those that are on the menu…”.
This resonates with Muslims. The Prophet (PBUH) described people who would summon one another to attack Muslims being akin to people when eating inviting others to share their dish. Such occurrence would be irrespective of the size of the Muslim population and instead down to the depleted condition of their faith and their preference for materialism.
But Allah’s Messenger (PBUH) also described believers as being merciful and showing love among themselves, being kind and resembling one body, so that, if any part was unwell then the whole body shared its pain.
This carefully and accurately reflects the sentiment and condition of Muslims as a collective non-sectarian mainstream body of humanity. But many criticise the misalignment between most Middle Eastern state actors and Muslims generally, and the corresponding failure to achieve relief and regional security.
Akhtar Raja, is a British lawyer based in London and Principal of Quist Solicitors.
