The New Nation - Internet Edition

Maswood Alam Khan

Aristotle opined that a tragedy should evoke pity and fear. We also used to believe that only a barbarian remains untouched by the sufferings of the innocent. But it now seems digital hearts of modern people are too smart to be melted on hearing the groans of children being burnt to death. Dead body diplomacy and killing humans in digital fashions is nowadays a great vogue to win in global political warfare.

The whole world has decided not to be stroked and moved by what is happening in the Gaza Strip. Deaths of hundreds of Palestinians in Israel's deadly air assaults, mutilated bodies of the wounded, the sights the dead children, and flames spewing from buildings are indeed very prized scenes the photo journalists eagerly await to digitally shoot and feed back to their print and electronic media headquarters. Hamas militants too are perhaps relishing deaths of their children because one death is a powerful enticer to invite at least one hundred lives to the kiss of death.

Human shield is nowadays as great a safeguard for clandestine snipers as ruthless attack by the smart and digitalized bombers is as great a fun for global superpowers. Human cries will never stop this war because such cries are irrelevant in the human ears of snipers and the digitalized ears of superpowers.

Those holding some gun-power, Israelis or Hamas, have no interest in peace, and no enthusiasm in victory. The constant inconclusive bleeding in Gaza is actually benefiting the owners of mills and ordnance factories producing arms and ammunitions and is resultantly bereaving families both in refugee camps in Gaza strip and homes in border towns in Israel. The more blood spills on the streets of Israel and Gaza, the more the hardliners of both sides are getting vindicated and strengthened.

In the last seven days one soldier and three civilians have been killed in southern Israel in rocket attacks from Hamas. And in Gaza more than four hundred Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli bombardments. Along with nine of his family members Mr. Nizar Rayyan, the most senior Hamas political figure, a civilian, has also been killed inside his home in the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the Gaza Strip, not in any battlefield. The UN says at least 25% of the 402 Palestinians killed were civilians; Palestinian medical officials say more than 2,000 people have been fatally injured.

"The blood of Sheikh Nizar Rayyan and the blood of other martyrs will never be wasted and the enemy will pay a heavy price for the crimes it has committed," one Hamas official has recently declared.

The ratio of Israeli and Palestinian deaths that now stands at 4:400 in the weeklong war since last Saturday between gargantuan Israel and diminutive Hamas seems not glaring enough for Israel to stop dispatching their sorties or for Hamas to stop catapulting their rockets!

Any failure to muffle the Palestinians up in a blanket of air bombardments would in fact bring a personal tragedy to Mr. Ehud Barak, the Israeli defense minister, who is now orchestrating the barrage of bombs on the Gaza Strip. As chairman of the Labor Party, Mr. Barak is running for prime minister in the February election and polls show him to be a distant third to the Likud leader, Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Kadami leader, Ms. Tzipi Livini, the Israeli foreign minister.

Israelis badly need a leader like Barak to be their prime minister and Barak needs a place on the top position among the three election contestants, a job which is possible only if droning sounds of propelling rockets on the Israeli border habitats and groaning sounds of dying children in the Gaza Strip can be silenced once for all---a job of detonating bombs not really tough for the Israeli defense minister! Winning political victory for Barak in Israel, to the world view, is apparently more sought after than ensuring emancipation for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Provocation by Hamas has purportedly worn thin Israel's patience. So, Israelis have decided to stop, by means of a lethal aerial retaliation, rains of rockets being propelled on their border towns and villages. Accordingly, Israel has drawn up a strategy of bombarding the camps, tents, government offices, courts of justice, and mosques in the Gaza Strip till the last rocket propeller drops dead, no matter even if all the Palestinian refugees packed like sardines have to die as collateral deaths!

With such torrential bombings, war-vindicating pundits of the Occident probably believe, all will have to be quiet on both sides of the border like the eerie silence that prevailed after detonation of a little bomb in Hiroshima on August 8, 1945! Like killing mosquitoes by aerosol, killing refugees in the Gaza Strip by aerial attacks, Israelis probably surmise, should not raise an alarm in the global community if only the pogrom in return brings a lasting peace in the region.

Israeli officials have said they will work with Israel's allies to build a long-term truce, and would also seek to expedite and increase humanitarian aid to Gaza alongside the military offensive, which one senior military official described as "making Hamas lose their will or lose their weapons."

"Wounding one by beating with shoes and then immediately offering him balm to heal the wound" is a maxim we Bangladeshis popularly quote when someone immediately after insulting or assaulting one begs his or her pardon---a maxim which is now appropriate to describe the latest Israeli fashion of pursuing diplomacy, pressing attacks, and supplying medical and food aid to the victims, all being carried out simultaneously.

Commentators and analysts all over the world are saying that Israel had till the latest attack on Gaza Strip shown enough patience by not killing Arabs who time to time launched rockets across the border.

But no analyst ever pointed out that it is Israelis who in the first place displaced the Arabs and stole their lands where they had lived for centuries! The Palestinians were expelled from their own lands and then they were confined to live according to Israeli rule in the territories Israel as a master earmarked for them as slaves.

If the world views Israelis as inhabitants of Brobdingnag and Palestinians as inhabitants of Lilliput (like the imaginary people we read about in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travel) it is sheer wastage of time to keep propping up both sides in intractable conflict, to keep clashing again and again and to keep vexing TV viewers like us with the same and monotonous scenes of the wounded and the dead Palestinian children.

Israel wants to see Palestinians just sitting with their arms crossed and waiting for things to be changed as Israel deems fit. Now that they are pelting stones and rockets at the Israelis the best thing, I believe, is for the United States to help the whole lot of Brobdingnagians crush the whole bunch of Lilliputians in one stroke so that the losing side is completely cleared out and the conflict ends for good.

After such a quick and stunning annihilation of the Palestinians there may be some uproar in the immediate aftermath for a few days or weeks. But there will certainly be tranquility in the vicinity of Brobdingnag with no Lilliputians, like mosquitoes, nagging around. There is no point in keeping both sides frozen and locked into perpetual conflict when a decisive victory by one side will end the stalemate and force the losers to be evaporated into smoke.

If, otherwise, the world views both Israelis and Palestinians as truly humans, not earthlings of the lands of the Lilliput or the Brobdingnag, it is time for the United States to urge Israelis to get off their high horses. It is time when all the superpowers should condemn Israeli state terrorism. It is time when Hamas should also realize that their rockets procured through underground smuggling tunnels are less powerful than the digitally operated Israeli smart bombers bought from the Occident.