By Babatunde Jose

“You shall do no injustice in judgment: you shall not be partial to the poor, nor honor the person of the mighty. In righteousness you shall judge your neighbor. . . . nor shall you take a stand against the life of your neighbor: I am the Lord. . . . (Leviticus, 19:15-17)”

As Muslims, our heartfelt wish is for the anger and hatred on both sides to die down, for the bloodshed to stop, and for peace to come to both lands. We oppose both the radical Palestinians bombing of innocent Israelis and Israeli killing of innocent Palestinians.

But would the interlopers, do-gooders and Munafiqun allow genuine peace to reign? Chief among them is the ‘Great Satan’, United States of America. No doubt America is not an honest broker. With a flotilla of aircraft carriers, destroyers and other weapons of mass destruction dispatched to Israel, including the preparation of 2000 troops to be sent to Israel for operation; and a proposed $40 Billion in aid to Israel: Talking about peace or settlement is a transparent sham.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is therefore doomed, intractable, complicated, and deadlocked. Today, we seem to be turning tragedy into a calamity. Only on Tuesday, 500 people were killed in a bomb raid on a Baptist hospital in Gaza. The gory scenes from the genocidal reprisals in Gaza have been variously described as a massacre, slaughter, and bloodshed. It’s like the holocaust revisited.  Latest death toll stands at 3,860 Palestinians and at least 1,403 people killed in Israel since October 7.

Since the tragic turn of events, there has been much equivocation and doublespeak on the part of many interested parties that the whole issue has become mired in semantic confusion.

President Biden advocates that Israel should wipe out Hamas but at the same time should not make the mistake of leveling Gaza. How is that possible? He also said that Israel should keep space open for settlement with Palestinian. A recipe for Peace indeed!

The status quo is killing Israeli and Arab children, their mothers, fathers, and grandparents. It is a return to the primitive on both sides. It should be noted that even some Israeli media, including the editorial board of Haaretz, have the good sense to state the obvious: Benjamin Netanyahu’s government bears responsibility for this war. On the other hand, Hamas is unwittingly playing into the hands of Netanyahu at the expense of the Palestinian population. This is very gross.

Identifying the causes of conflict and stating them openly are, on the contrary, the first steps in resolving the problem. Unfortunately, the peace makers are shy of doing just that.

We hold these truths to be self-evident that all militarily occupied people have a right to resist their occupation, even militarily.

In view of the devastation of the land and people of Gaza, Hamas stands condemned for targeting Israeli civilians of any age or gender. Such targeting belies Hamas’ Islamic identity. Islam forbids the killing of innocent children and women, including elders.

Hamas succeeded unwittingly in giving a higher moral ground to Israel which has always stood condemned for its apartheid policy and in the process the excuse to ethnically cleanse Gaza of its citizens and bombing them to oblivion.

But we must condemn Israel’s indiscriminate killing of Palestinian children and women and men in Palestine.

There is talk in the western media of an unprovoked attack. What more provocation is needed than what Israel has done to the Palestinian people for 75 years.

Apart from the obnoxious policy of stealing of Palestinian lands, Israel stands condemned for its incursions into houses of worship in Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Despite a 93-year-old ruling on the ownership of the place. Except that today, Israel claims it does not recognize the International Court of Justice.

Western ‘do gooders’ also stand condemned for shedding crocodile tears when Israelis are killed but feel unconcerned when Israel kills, incarcerates Palestinian men, children, and women, evicting them from their homes and denying them all fundamental rights. Where were the British Prime Minister and EU leaders when Israel was killing, incarcerating and stealing the lands of the Palestinians?

There needs to be an end to this hypocrisy.  The US Secretary of State, the Secretary for Defense and the President, including the British Prime Minister all visited Israel to show solidarity. These were all empty shows that did not succeed in changing anything.

As the Israel-Hamas war intensifies amid growing anger across the Middle East, the region looks like it’s spiraling downwards in a familiar pattern.

Biden’s trip was thrown into disarray after a meeting in Jordan with Arab leaders was called off following an explosion at Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in Gaza City that killed hundreds.

That catastrophe sparked a firestorm of protest, with most of the Arab world — already seething over the death toll in Gaza — blaming Israel.

For the president, the promising diplomatic drive for a rapprochement between Israel and Saudi Arabia is on ice. One of Biden’s main objectives in visiting Israel was to deter Iran, Hezbollah, and other regional actors from entering the conflict. That might be a tall order as there have been tough talks from these quarters of grave consequence if Israel carries out its plan to level Gaza.

“Relations between Israelis and Palestinians backed by the wider Arab world are in a brutally ugly phase — a reminder that such deeply rooted conflicts never really go away.” — Karl Maier

The President was rebuffed by the Arab leaders he wanted to summit with. I wonder what he wanted to tell them. What a nerve.

That primary responsibility for the antecedent conditions that most of the world recognize as having led to this latest escalation – namely, the apartheid regime imposed on Palestinians – lies principally with the West, and the US, their duplicity, complicity, and connivance. They see Israel as a strategic geo-political bulwark, buffer, and insurance for the cheap oil they get from the region. This is rather unfortunate. If the push comes to shove, and the Arab countries are forced in sympathy to retaliate by engaging in another oil embargo as they did in 1973, the West will experience a Winter of hardship.

The injustice against the Palestinian nation has become so obvious that public opinion in the West is moving against Israel, even if leaders remain blind to this fact.

We are watching an occupied, oppressed people face annihilation by a nuclear state with the full backing of the western world. This is not – and has never been – an ‘equal fight’. Right now, it is a massacre on a scale we’ve never seen before.

6,000 bombs dropped in 6 days on a strip of land just 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide at its widest point. Whole neighborhoods flattened. Families wiped out. Hospitals collapsing under the weight of the casualties. On a population of 2 million – half of them children. 70% of them are refugees. One Palestinian child has been killed every 15 minutes since Saturday 7^th October.

And now, the forced displacement of 2 million people is tantamount to ethnic cleansing. The fact that it is impossible for that many to leave means that a genocide is in the making.

All the tragedy that has happened – and continues to happen – in Palestine is traceable to the application of the Zionist ideology by its leaders.

A political turn was given to Zionism by Theodor Herzl, who in 1897 convened the first Zionist Congress at Basel, Switzerland, which drew up the Basel program of the movement, stating that “Zionism strives to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” Hence, the famous Jewish phrase “Next year in Jerusalem”.

When the Ottoman government refused Herzl’s request for Palestinian autonomy, he found support in Great Britain. In 1903 the British government offered 6,000 square miles (15,500 square km) of uninhabited Uganda for settlement, but the Zionists held out for Palestine. And the rest they say is history.

Thus, 50 years after the first Zionist congress and 30 years after the Balfour Declaration, Zionism achieved its aim of establishing a Jewish state in Palestine, but at the same time, it became an armed camp surrounded by hostile Arab nations, and Palestinian organizations engaged in armed resistance. The status quo has not changed today.

Israel’s military occupation of Palestine remains at the core of this decades-long conflict which continues to impact the life of both peoples.

Throughout the world today, many intellectuals, politicians, and historians oppose Zionism. Various Christian and Jewish thinkers and authors condemn it, as do various academics in Israeli universities such as the late Israel Shahak or Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi, who criticize Israeli violence directed against Palestinians and who maintain that peace can be achieved only when Israel forsakes its Zionist ideology.

Spiritually, it is a duty in the eyes of God to put an end to the fighting, which is dragging both sides deeper into unending violence.

Say: “O People of the Book! Let us rally to a common formula to be binding upon both us and you: . . . ..” (Quran, 3:64)

By using the principles of tolerance and moderation, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has caused so much bloodshed over the last 75 years, can be solved. In our view, establishing peace depends upon two conditions:

1.    Israel must immediately withdraw from all the territories it occupied during the 1967 war and end the resulting occupation. That is an obligation under international law, various U.N. Security Council resolutions, and mere justice itself. All of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip must be recognized as belonging to an independent State of Palestine.

2.    East Jerusalem, the site of significant places of worship belonging to three divinely revealed religions, must be administered by the Palestine authority. However, it must have a special status and be turned into a city of peace that all Jews, Christians, and Muslims can visit comfortably, in peace and well-being, and where they can worship in their own sanctuaries.