The forgotten people

Just as the ‘Injuns’ (Indians) of America and the Amazon tribes of South America are endangered species, and preserved in ‘reservations’ aimed at keeping them alive for record and research, the twenty-first century has two more groups of humans threatened with a similar fate: Palestinians and the Kashmiris. Both have been constrained to the dustbins of history with no voice now heard in their support and against the excessive repression of their controlling masters.

Palestinians far more so; while the signs of what may happen in Kashmir are equally ominous. Such is the predominance of the geopolitical dynamics and interdependencies that this evolving global order generates in the name of shared interests; a carte blanche to use naked military force against unarmed people.

The US and its allies in the west can close their eyes to Israeli atrocities, while Kashmir sits unattended in the halls of international institutions as tens of thousands have lost their lives under state repression in search of freedom. Life is being snuffed out of them by the tens on a daily basis. It is not that these are Muslims that are subjected to such inhuman treatment, it is humanity under obliteration. Yet, there is little outrage!

Signs in Kashmir are equally disconcerting. The Kashmiris have been under ruthless state repression; such that what used to be a widespread cry for azaadi is now reduced to an infrequent and a politically more acceptable intifada. Under the BJP government, and its reprehensible communal bias, it is feared that even an intifada of a kind that legitimises political struggle through street agitation may be faced down with the dominant force spilling even more Kashmiri blood refuting their right to self-determination and their future. The BJP government has made a special allocation in its latest budget to relocate Hindu pundits back into Kashmir. A rail link to Hindu pilgrimage sites too has been revived; this will travel through most of Kashmir for seasonal religious duties by Hindus from all over India.

These are infant steps to a pervasive presence of the Hindus in a region where a Muslim majority is the basis of contention in the decades old issue between India and Pakistan. In Palestine it is organised extinction through mass murder of the Palestinian people under the rubric of ensuring state stability in Israel; in Kashmir it is subsumption of the people into a much larger Hindu majority of India in the garb of engineering a demographic erosion of the majority through insertion of the Hindus in Kashmir in large numbers. Already Article 370, which lays out the special status of Kashmir as per the aspirations of the people of Kashmir and in consonance with Kashmir’s disputed status, is under assault by BJP think-tanks and the media.

If ghettoisation is the first step towards social exclusion, it is already in play in Palestine. In Kashmir, erosion of its special status may just be as bad; eliminating the very basis of the right of the people of these two regions to an independent state. Both are provided institutional securities under UN resolutions that chart a way out to enable these people of the world a universally recognised fundamental right. The fate of both stands in precarious balance as the world forgets about yet another set of people who were born with supposedly equal rights.

Palestine is soaked in blood again. While ostensibly Israel pursues the militant Hamas in Gaza, it actually threatens the extinction of the Palestinian race by killing young boys, girls and women. Relentless bombing through aerial strikes in the congested areas of Gaza’s various towns bring down residential blocks with people inside.

‘Bibi’ Netanyahu practically rebuffed efforts of Obama’s first administration to enquire of him of the ruthless killing of the Palestinians at the hand of his military – when over 1300 Palestinians were killed by Israel for the loss of 13 of its own – by suggesting at a press conference that Israel did not need to explain anything to the US or the world; and that, indeed killing children, women and the dependent, and targeting hospitals, schools and mosques was the strategy that Israel pursued. Take that for toxic arrogance.

Hillary Clinton was speechless and mechanically offered her hand to ‘Netanyahu’ in a daze at the presser. This time around the arrangements between Israel and ‘their masters’, the US, are pretty smooth and both the State and the White House spokespersons find reasonable congruence in Israel’s renewed offensive against the Palestinian threat.

Who can stop this genocide? For theory’s sake, either Israel, or the Hamas/Fatah combine, or both. There are clear qualifications to each: Israel will expand beyond its known borders into Gaza or the West Bank in particular while Palestinians in either of these two locations will be insulated, ghettoised, imprisoned – take your pick. The two-state solution implicit in the Balfour Declaration and subsequent formulations from occasional bouts of moral pangs in American conscience will have to be shelved.

Neutralisation of Hamas by repeated operational engagement of it is meant to suppress any notion among the Palestinians of the resort to armed means to dream of an independent state. With current Palestinian aspirations, this seems a non-starter, especially when Hamas is a declared terrorist organisation. The regional developments in Syria and Iraq denote even more complicated undercurrents of why the current travail of the Palestinians first occurred. This, though, should be another debate.

The US could be another. But not when securing Israel is a cornerstone of your foreign policy and you will stand by it through the most horrendous and obnoxious, there is little by way of offering any hope to humanity. The Arab world? Not when countries within are estranged to the point of extremely limited interaction. Not when they are fighting proxy wars in different locations of the world. The GCC is fragmented; the Arab League is impotent and fractured and seriously destabilised; while the OIC could actually be dead by now for its proverbial ineffectiveness. The UN? Or, the Ajam (Non-Arab Muslims)? Turkey, Iran and Pakistan once had the potential; but, now each is debilitated by its own weight of internal and external strife losing their inherent potency.

We are told there is still humaneness in this race. Perhaps there is. But it is increasingly becoming a captive of realpolitik and shared national interests. Humaneness from the west is overtaken by its need to support Israel. Corollary: The current spate of insanity in Gaza will stop when Israel thinks it has done enough. And Hamas’ potential is reduced to become yet another factor of added unrest and turmoil in the region that surrounds Israel. Between politics and the great game in play, the extinction of the Palestinians continues. Adios, Palestine.

The writer is a retired air-vice marshal of the Pakistan Air Force and served as its deputy chief of staff. Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com