Countercurrent – February 1, 2024
Israel Is Ignoring UN Court Ruling Ordering It
To Prevent Deaths In Gaza, Says South Africa
Israel has ignored the ruling by the U.N.ﾒs top court last week by killing hundreds more civilians in a matter of days in Gaza, South Africa’s foreign minister said Wednesday, adding that her country has asked why an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not been issued in a case South Africa filed at the separate International Criminal Court.
Israel’s offensive in the Palestinian enclave has caused the world’s most acute humanitarian crisis, with 85% of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants homeless, large numbers starving and others falling sick.
Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor said South Africa would “look at proposing other measures to the global community” in a bid to stop Israel killing civilians during its war in Gaza against Hamas militants, but did not go into details.
“I cannot be dishonest. I believe the rulings of the court have been ignored,” South Africa’s foreign minister said. “Hundreds of people have been killed in the last three or four days. And clearly Israel believes it has license to do as it wishes.”
Pandor said there was a danger of the world doing nothing to stop the civilian casualties in Gaza and said similar inaction contributed to the horrific death toll in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when more than 800,000 people were slaughtered in the East African country.
“We are allowing this to happen again, right before our eyes, on our TV screens,” Pandor said.
Pandor also said South Africa was eager to pursue the case it has lodged with the separate International Criminal Court, an indication the country will continue its legal pressure on Israel. In the ICC case, South Africa accuses Netanyahu of war crimes and asks the court to order his arrest.
“The (ICC) prosecutor assured us the matter is in hand and being looked at by his office,” Pandor said of South Africa’s allegations against Netanyahu. “What I felt he didn’t answer me sufficiently on was, I asked him why he was able to issue an arrest warrant for Mr. Putin while he is unable to do so for the Prime Minister of Israel. He couldn’t answer and didn’t answer that question.”
An AP report said:
The preliminary ruling by the U.N.’s International Court of Justice in South Africa’s case accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza ordered Israel to do all it can to prevent death, destruction and any acts of genocide against Palestinians in the territory. It stopped short of ordering a cease-fire. It also ruled Israel must urgently get basic humanitarian aid to Gaza and submit a report on steps taken to abide by the ruling within a month.
A top official in South Africa’s foreign ministry has said the country hopes that Friday’s ruling, and whether Israel is abiding by it, will be discussed on a wider level at the United Nations, possibly as early as Wednesday.
Since the ruling, Israel has continued its military offensive, which it says is aimed at Hamas, and hundreds more Palestinians have been killed, according to figures from the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. The ministry said Wednesday that 150 people were killed in the territory in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of Palestinian deaths in the war to more than 26,700.
The Health Ministry’s count does not differentiate between combatants and civilians. It says the majority of the dead are women and children.
The courtﾒs ruling is binding on Israel, and the country could face U.N. sanctions if it is found to be breaching its orders, although any sanctions may be vetoed by close ally the United States.
Netanyahu has said that Israel “will continue to do what is necessary to defend our country and defend our people.” Israel says the offensive is aimed at destroying Hamas after its Oct. 7 attacks on Israel that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians.
Israel says it has abided by international law and is doing its best to minimize civilian casualties in Gaza. It says it has killed more than 9,000 militants and accuses Hamas of embedding in civilian areas, making it difficult to avoid civilian casualties.
South Africaﾒs governing party, the African National Congress, has long compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank to its own history under the apartheid regime of white minority rule, which restricted most Black people to “homelands” before ending in 1994.
The ICJ and ICC are both based in The Hague but deal with different cases. The ICJ is a U.N. court that decides disputes between countries. The ICC prosecutes individuals.
A South African delegation met with the ICC court president and prosecutor while in The Hague last week for the ICJ ruling, Pandor said, and stressed “our concern at the slow pace of action on matters that we referred to them as urgent matters.”
South Africa filed its case against Netanyahu at the ICC in November. The ICC is the same court that issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin last year over alleged war crimes relating to the removal of children from Ukraine.
Israel, like Russia, is not a signatory to the treaty that created the ICC and does not recognize the court’s authority.
A Reuters report said:
Any halt to operations by the U.N. Palestinian agency over Israeli accusations that some of its staff took part in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack could hamstring the entire humanitarian effort in devastated Gaza, aid agencies say.
Donors are demanding a swift investigation before resuming funding, though they have praised the work of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in Gaza and its response so far to the allegations.
UNRWA believes it has responded rapidly and transparently to Israel’s allegations, which came as Israel faced a genocide case at the International Court of Justice over the Gaza war, and after years of it calling for the agency to be disbanded.
UNRWA is at the heart of all aid work in Gaza through its 13,000 employees in the enclave, its clinics and schools, many now acting as packed shelters, and its logistics hubs.
“The entire aid system in Gaza will be closer to the point of collapse,” said Shaina Low, a spokesperson for the Norwegian Refugee Council, calling UNRWA “vital in coordinating aid and providing shelter”.
“No other organisation than UNRWA has the infrastructure to do the work that they do,” said the U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.
Some 15 of the agency’s most important donors, including top two the United States and Germany, have suspended funding over Israel’s allegations.
About $440 million is at risk, said UNRWA spokesperson Juliette Touma.
“The decision to suspend funding from these countries is tantamount to a death sentence for Palestinians,” the charity Action Aid said.
The agency and the wider U.N. now face a race to persuade donors they have responded appropriately to Israel’s accusations before money runs out at the end of February.
It is not clear how long the investigation by the U.N.’s oversight office may take. It was important for it to be thorough and “unimpeachable”, but also swift, U.N. spokesperson Dujarric said.
Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy accused UNRWA of acting “as a front for Hamas” and said it was “not bad apples” that were the problem but a systemic failure to address accusations of support for extremism in its ranks.
Responding to those comments, Touma said UNRWA had on Jan. 17 ordered an independent review to establish the truth of longstanding claims about UNRWA and its staff.
Inside the organisation, the accusation that 12 staff members took part in the Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people in Israel had come as a deep shock.
“If these allegations are true, they are a betrayal of U.N. values and a betrayal of the people we serve,” Touma said.
The organisation believes it has acted quickly despite Israel only making direct accusations to it about 12 staff while allegations were leaked to media that a larger number of employees have Hamas links.
“UNRWA took a very proactive approach,” said Touma the UNRWA spokesperson. Its head Philippe Lazzarini went to the U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres and to the U.S. and other top donors after Israel verbally told him on Jan. 18 it had evidence against 12 UNRWA staff, she said.
Lazzarini fired those allegedly involved, an unusual step he is allowed to take “in the best interests of the agency”, Touma said.
“UNRWA then went public with the information before anyone else,” she added.
Neither Israel nor any other official source has shared with UNRWA a dossier alleging that 190 of the agency’s staff members in Gaza are Hamas or Islamic Jihad militants, but learned about it only when reported in the press, Touma said. Reuters viewed and reported on the Israel intelligence dossier on Monday.
UNRWA regularly shares lists of its employees with Israel and with the governments of countries hosting Palestinian refugees. It last did so in May 2023, Touma said. Israel has never provided a response to those lists “let alone an objection”, she said.
A spokesperson for Israel’s government did not respond to Reuters questions on what information they had shared with UNRWA and the UN and major donors or about how long it had known about Hamas links to UNRWA employees.
Israel has long criticised UNRWA and says its mandate should be given to other U.N. agencies. Its 30,000 staff provide schooling and primary health clinics for Palestinian refugees in several Middle East countries.
The first ever U.N. agency, UNRWA was established by a resolution of the body’s General Assembly in 1949 to look after refugees who fled or were pushed from their homes when Israel was created.
Israel has long criticised the curriculum taught in schools UNRWA runs and disputes the agency’s count of refugees – an important political issue in any eventual peace talks, with Palestinians demanding a right of return.
“Israel would like there to be an existential threat to UNRWA because they mistakenly think if you get rid of UNRWA then you suddenly get rid of the refugees and their right to return,” said former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness.
“Palestinians have been told across U.N. facilities that they are still refugees from a war that took place decades ago, that they possess a right that does not exist,” said the Israeli spokesperson Levy.
However, UNRWA’s mandate was renewed by the U.N. General Assembly in 2023 until mid 2026 and the agency could only be disbanded by a new General Assembly resolution.
Israel’s Limits
The ABC News report said:
Daniel Levy, president of the U.S./Middle East Project, a nonprofit policy institute focusing on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, said Israel’s intensive campaign against Hamas was now showing its limits, with Hamas still intact.
“What we are seeing is the law of diminishing returns kick in,” he told ABC News. “There has been some killing of Hamas fighters. There has been a clear reduction in the Hamas rocket capacity. But Hamas is very much present.”
Many observers from the beginning of the war have questioned the feasibility of destroying Hamas given its nature as a movement within Palestinian society, and Israel’s operation itself would potentially fuel more support for it, according to Levy.
“Hamas is a resistance movement. It is an idea,” Levy said. “So the idea that that can be defeated was never a realistic Israeli reading of the reality it lives it.”
The Hostages
The report said:
Concerns have also grown in Israel itself over whether the goal of destroying Hamas may be in conflict with rescuing the remaining hostages held in Gaza.
About 136 hostages remain captive by Hamas, according to the Israeli prime minister’s office and the IDF. At least 33 of those hostages are believed to be dead in Hamas captivity, with their bodies still held in Gaza, the Israeli prime minister’s office and IDF say. There was a temporary cease-fire at the end of November during which Hamas freed over 100 of the more than 200 people its militants took hostage during the Oct. 7 surprise attack on Israel. In exchange, Israel released more than 200 Palestinians from Israeli prisons.
In the most high-profile dispute within the war cabinet so far, retired Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, whose son was killed fighting in Gaza, openly criticized Netanyahu’s leadership in comments this month to Israel’s Channel 12 News, saying the highest chance of securing the hostages’ release would be to agree to a cease-fire, and that the likelihood of a military rescue was “extremely low.”
Since Hamas took more than 230 hostages into Gaza on Oct. 7, only one — Pvt. Ori Megidish — was rescued by the Israeli military.
“There is today a growing tension between the two, let’s say, goals of the war. On the one hand, to crush Hamas, and on the other hand, to release the hostages,” Eiland said. “Hamas understood this very well.”
Negotiations to release the remaining hostages continue, but Hamas’ insistence they be released in exchange for a permanent cease-fire, and Israel’s full withdrawal from Gaza, would represent a defeat for Israel, Eiland said.
“If Israel agrees to this formula, then maybe we will get the hostages back. But [it means] we have lost the war,” he said.
Isolation And A Wider War
The ABC News report added:
Israel has found itself isolated on the international stage, according to Levy, after launching a major offensive in Gaza he said has “played into Hamas’ hands.”
“Not only in terms of failures to succeed on the ground, but also the narrative,” he said. “The mass mobilization around Palestine, Palestine becoming almost an avatar for injustice in the global order, the global South siding in, as it has done, South Africa taking Israel to the International Court of Justice. Israel has lost this war, and it is a question now of cutting its losses, because I fear that from an Israeli perspective, this only gets worse.”
The United Nations has warned that disease and hunger are spreading across the Gaza Strip, with the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) saying earlier this month that 570,000 Gazans are currently facing “catastrophic hunger.” International organizations have also said hospitals in Gaza are experiencing “catastrophic” situations and operating far beyond capacity.
The IDF has said it is only targeting Hamas and other militants in Gaza and alleges that Hamas deliberately shelters behind civilians, which the group denies.
A dossier from the Israeli military recently revealed new allegations against employees of the UNRWA who are accused of being involved in the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. The report obtained by ABC News alleges that 13 UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 attack, including six employees who allegedly infiltrated Israel.
The specter of a wider, regional war, involving the likes of Hezbollah and Iran, has haunted the conflict.
U.S. diplomatic efforts in the region have focused on preventing escalation, but some in Israel have advocated for deeper strikes into Lebanon.
Since Oct. 7, tensions have simmered in the north with militant group Hezbollah, with both sides trading fire and tens of thousands of people forced to leave their homes on either side of the Lebanese border.
Senior Israeli officials have repeatedly warned the situation is unacceptable and that Israel could be forced to take military action to push Hezbollah forces back unless a diplomatic solution can be found. The Biden administration has dispatched an envoy to try and seek such a solution, but many in Israel remain skeptical it can succeed. For the likes of former Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren, the perilous situation in the north means they feel containment efforts are unlikely to succeed.
Oren said he advocates for a preemptive strike on Hezbollah, which possesses a far stronger and more advanced force than Hamas. He argued Israel must be given the time to continue the war and complete Hamas’ destruction — even if Israel has to go it alone, without the United States’ support.
“To paraphrase John Lennon in a way that John Lennon would not like, you have to give war a chance here, because if you do not give war a chance, you will not have any peace,” Oren said. “There will be no peace as long as Hamas is a force in this region, and there will be no peace between Israel and Arab states if we are not shown to be strong.”
Asked whether that meant the war would go on for many months, with thousands more civilian casualties, he said: “We have no choice.”
Rage In Gaza Is Not Directed Only At Israel. Some Are Angry With Hamas Too
A Los Angeles Times report said on Wednesday, January 31, 2024:
By the 100-day mark of Israel’s offensive in Gaza, Abu Ahmad Al-Gharabli and his 13 family members had been displaced four times before settling in Rafah, at the besieged enclave’s southern end.
Forced to sell cigarettes on the street to get by, the 56-year-old blacksmith is angry. At his inability to provide food and shelter for his family. At the scant humanitarian aid he’s received.
And, most of all, at Hamas.
“Before they launched Oct. 7, they should have secured food, drink and money so that we would not suffer like this,” Al-Gharabli said of the militant groupﾒs assault on Israel that triggered the war.
“It seems Hamas did not consider the consequences,” added Al-Gharabli’s wife, Umm Ahmad, who, like most people interviewed for this story, gave only her nickname for safety reasons. “They believe they planned for everything, but when it came to us, they did not. The poverty, the displacement — all this Hamas didn’t think about.”
More than three months into the most devastating assault Gaza has ever experienced, many residents — 85% of whom are displaced and almost all of whom are at risk of starvation — are growing exasperated with Hamas amid a war that has left no one in the enclave unaffected.
Although the majority of the 2.3-million population hold Israel principally responsible for their suffering, and Hamas retains the support of a significant portion of society, many Gazans feel caught between fealty to the resistance against Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and a war strategy by their militant rulers that seemed to overlook them.
“Any organization or state that plans for a military attack should have a feasibility study, if you will,” said Abu Tawfiq, 35, speaking with the clear diction of the voiceover artist he was before the war. “We have started to ask, ‘You go on a military adventure — did you fortify the home front? Did you prepare the simplest means of life for citizens in Gaza?'”
On Oct. 7 — when Hamas commandos killed at least 1,200 people and kidnapped about 240 others, Israeli authorities say — most Gazans celebrated, Abu Tawfiq said, seeing it as a moment of fighting back against Israel and its long siege of the coastal strip.
But since then, “it has been a nightmare from which we cannot wake up,” Abu Tawfiq said. “We are angry. And Hamas neglecting citizens is compounding that anger.”
Examples of that neglect abound, he said. With Israel restricting the number of aid trucks going into the Gaza Strip, price gouging was to be expected, which is why, in past confrontations with Israel, Hamas officials or police would be out in marketplaces penalizing offending merchants. This time, with Israeli drones and armor a constant threat, Hamas authorities barely have a presence in the streets — and an ineffectual one at that.
Sugar, at almost $3 a pound, costs seven times more than it did before the war; onions, 13 times; canned goods, six times. Diapers for Al-Gharabli’s two grandsons surged to a staggering $38 a pack — and he has to walk two miles to find them.
“There is no supervision. You just do not get a sense there is a government,” said Abu Amir Tafesh, 42, who was searching for bottled water for his family.
Problems also riddle the distribution of what few supplies make it into Gaza, some say. During other wars, aid organizations linked to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, another militant group, would give out packages or cash not just to members but also supporters. That’s not happening this time.
“Even if you are sitting inside the mosque, you get nothing,” Abu Tawfiq said.
The sense of abandonment by Hamas is exacerbated, many say, by the fact that the only gain from the Oct. 7 operation has accrued to the occupied West Bank, where hundreds of imprisoned Palestinians were freed from Israeli prisons in November during a weeklong truce in Gaza.
“All the martyrs, the houses destroyed, the fear … we are paying the price,” Tafesh said.
He is happy that the Palestinian detainees were released. But with more than 26,000 people reported killed by the Israeli bombardment, entire families wiped out and much of the enclave destroyed, Gaza as he knew it is gone.
“People want a way to live in dignity. That’s it,” Tafesh said. “They are silent now because they are too aggrieved. Even if they want to shout at the government, what use would it be?”
Hamas’ Decision To Attack: “Incorrect”
The Los Angeles Times report said:
With little sense of Hamasﾒ endgame, many Palestinians are torn over what has happened since Oct. 7. A December poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research — which involved 1,231 respondents, including 480 in Gaza — showed 37% of Gazans labeling Hamas’ decision to attack as “incorrect,” given the consequences so far.
A majority of Palestinians also say the killing of civilians is not permissible, but they do not believe the Israeli government’s allegations or evidence of atrocities by Hamas.
“If the 7th of October did not happen, we would have stayed humiliated, under the mercy of the occupation all our lives,” said 57-year-old Umm Mahmoud Zreik. “For us, the exchange of hostages is not much of an achievement. We need them to do more, like break the siege.”
Perhaps in response to such sentiments, Hamas on Sunday issued its first public report about its multipronged cross-border assault, a 16-page document titled “Our Narrative,” in which it cited a list of reasons for its attack, including the Israeli government’s right-wing policies, the expansion of illegal settlements, the increase in Palestinian detainees and the failure of negotiations over a Palestinian state.
Some Faults
The report said:
The report by Hamas also insists that, although “maybe some faults happened” during the “rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system” during the assault and the “chaos caused along the border areas with Gaza,” Hamas fighters did not intentionally target civilians.
About 60% of the Israelis killed Oct. 7 were civilians. Israel accuses Hamas of wanton slaughter and says it has compiled abundant visual evidence and witness testimony that the militants engaged in torture and sexual violence against civilian victims. Hamas blames Israel, pointing to reports in Israeli media that the army was responsible for killing a number of civilians during the engagement with the group’s fighters.
Although there are growing signs in Gaza of disillusionment with Hamas, which has ruled the strip since 2007, it can still count on a loyal base. The December poll found that support for the group rose slightly, to 42% from 38% in Gaza; in the West Bank, it almost quadrupled to 44%.
Inside Gaza, researcher Abdalhadi Alijla sees two trends at work: skepticism of Hamas amid minimal improvements to life after 17 years of its rule and no moves to ease the enclave’s isolation, yet also the increasingly dominant belief among Palestinians that armed struggle is the only way to end Israeli occupation.
“The consensus in Gaza is that the resistance is a red line — that it will remain, with or without Hamas,” Alijla said, adding that Hamas has never resolved whether it is a governing authority able to provide order, stability and jobs or a liberation movement.
“The popularity of Hamas is greater in the West Bank than in Gaza because those in Gaza tried their rule. They know it,” Alijla said.
Hamas maintains that the chief aim of its Oct. 7 incursion was to kidnap Israeli soldiers in order to force a prisoner exchange. But its report makes clear that another goal was to refocus world attention on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The report repeatedly castigates Israel’s allies and the United Nations for ignoring Palestinians’ plight.
As the war grinds on and the question of who will govern Gaza becomes more urgent, anger among some Gazans at Hamas has not translated into greater support for the rival Palestinian Authority, the much-reviled administration that exercises limited control over the West Bank and was violently ousted from the Gaza Strip by Hamas in 2007.
“The authority does not have the trust of the people. Even its own officials do not trust it,” Alijla said.
Whatever arises as an alternative, said Umm Ahmad, the wife of blacksmith Al-Gharabli, the priority should be providing stability for civilians.
“This living on the streets, this famine, our kids getting sick or injured with nowhere to be treated — for me, I would not accept it,” she said. “I need a government that takes care of its people.”
Countercurrent – February 1, 2024
Killing of Four Soldiers is a Psychological Blow to the Israeli Army in Gaza
By Dr. Marwan Asmar
The killing of four Israeli soldiers in battles in north Gaza according to the Jewish army in the last 24 hours is devastating for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government.
This means fighting has returned to the north of Gaza between the Israeli army and the Palestinian resistance as dominated by Izz Al Din Al Qassam and Saraya Al Quds fighters who are redeploying their forces in the north with great speed.
Just recently the Israeli army announced it has finally dominated the north of the Gaza Strip and that it is fully in control of this part of the enclave all the way down to Gaza city just above the center of the enclave.
Since the beginning of its military campaign after 7 October it said it wanted to divided Gaza into three ‘fighting sections’ – north, center and south – and this is how it will end the presence of the Palestinian resistance there.
But this is turning to be water off a duck’s back for Palestinian resistance fighters are fully prepared. Off course, Israelis keep saying they have dismantled Hamas infrastructure across the strip but such talk tends to be for public consumption in Tel Aviv who are clamoring for the stopping of the war and the return of their hostages – at 136 or so – probably hidden in deep underground tunnels by Hamas.
The resistance is mushrooming back with greater force. There is no evidence that there fighting power has been drastically reduced despite the Israeli videos of their soldiers which also tend to be as a morale-boosting exercise.
The killing of two ranking officers and two others soldiers and talk of 10 injured among Israelis soldiers in skirmishes with the Palestinian resistance shows the battles are not abating – are going on in tandem with each other across the 360-kilometer enclave – and the Israeli army is not in control of the north at all and maybe down to square one!
The killing of an Israeli sniper in Tal Al Hawa which is to the west of Gaza city shows the Israelis are being fought all at once and upsetting their plans of moving to the third stage of the war as being planned by the Israeli army in conjunction with the Netanyahu war cabinet and its government.
They have been scaling down their brigades in the southern Khan Younis as well as north of Gaza and planning to create a kilometer-wide buffer security zone inside the edges of the territory manned with Israeli soldiers and hardware of tanks, bulldozers and troop carriers.
But this latest spate of deaths mean it will not be safe for these Israelis stationed in the buffer zone because they will be subject to devastating attacks from ghost ‘Palestinian soldiers’ with their “carry on” but effective Yasin 105 missiles.
There is an alarming daily drainage among the Israeli soldiers. If they are not being killed, they are being injured in their thousands while many need psychological rehabilitation and laying in Israeli hospitals.
The bringing down of the Israeli sniper is likely to be a further psychological blow to the Israeli army and soldiers who initially thought they will end the Gaza military campaign in a matter of weeks. Frequently, and this is documented on social media, the soldiers who boasted about their “kill presence” in Gaza were all “neutralized” subsequently.
Israel is in trouble after 117 days of fighting in Gaza but the army egged on by extremist right-wing politicians see no way out but keep fighting.
Through their own admissions they say they face formidable fighters in Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They already admit 80 percent of the underground tunnels under the Gaza Strip are still intact which means frustration and worry since they already dropped thousands of tons of explosives on Gaza equaling three or four atomic bombs.
One of those killed in north Gaza is a high-ranking officer in the elite Shaldag Unit of the Israeli Air Force who took part in the ruinous attacks of the Shifa Hospital and its destructive surrounding in central Gaza last November.
He is the 9th Israeli soldier to be killed in the unit which means morale among the Israeli tanks is rapidly sinking despite the stiff upper lips.
There is no point in outlining the number of deaths and material among the Israeli soldiers for they are in their thousands with millions, if not billions of dollars to the Israeli treasury and on the face of it, the Gaza war seems to be an open season, for Israeli politicians, sitting in their chairs in Tel Aviv, predicting the war will go into 2026.
But this war has been devastating for Palestinians as well, proving the most apocalyptic of all Arab-Israeli wars since 1948.
Dr Marwan Asmar is a writer based in Amman with contributions on Middle East Affairs.
Chris Hedges – February 1, 2024
The Silence of the Damned
Chris Hedges
Our leading humanitarian and civic institutions, including major medical institutions, refuse to denounce Israel’s genocide in Gaza. This exposes their hypocrisy and complicity.
There is no effective health care system left in Gaza. Infants are dying. Children are having their limbs amputated without anesthesia. Thousands of cancer patients and those in need of dialysis lack treatment. The last cancer hospital in Gaza has ceased functioning. An estimated 50,000 pregnant women have no safe place to give birth. They undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia. Miscarriage rates are up 300 percent since the Israeli assault began. The wounded bleed to death. There is no sanitation or clean water. Hospitals have been bombed and shelled. Nasser Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in Gaza, is “near collapse.” Clinics, along with ambulances – 79 in Gaza and over 212 in the West Bank – have been destroyed. Some 400 doctors, nurses, medics and healthcare workers have been killed — more than the total of all healthcare workers killed in conflicts around the world combined since 2016. Over 100 more have been detained, interrogated, beaten and tortured, or disappeared by Israeli soldiers.
Israeli soldiers routinely enter hospitals to carry out forced evacuations – on Wednesday troops entered al-Amal Hospital in Khan Younis and demanded doctors and displaced Palestinians leave – as well as round up detainees, including the wounded, sick and medical staff. On Tuesday, disguised as hospital workers and civilians, Israeli soldiers entered Jenin’s Ibn Sina Hospital in the West Bank and assassinated three Palestinians as they slept.
The cuts to funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) — collective punishment for the alleged involvement in the Oct. 7 attack of 12 of its 13,000 UNRWA workers — will accelerate the horror, turning the attacks, starvation, lack of health care and spread of infectious diseases in Gaza into a tidal wave of death.
The evidence-free charges, which include the accusation that 10 percent of all of UNRWA’s Gaza staff have ties to Islamist militant groups, appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The reporter, Carrie-Keller Lynn, served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Given the numerous lies Israel has employed to justify its genocide, including “beheaded babies” and “mass rape,” it is reasonable to assume this may be another fabrication.
The allegations, of which details remain scant, are apparently based on confessions by Palestinian detainees — most certainly after being beaten or tortured. These allegations were enough to see 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, U.K., Germany, France, Australia and Japan cut or delay funding to the vital U.N. agency. UNRWA is all that stands between the Palestinians in Gaza and famine. A handful of countries, including Ireland, Norway and Turkey, maintain their funding.
Eight of the UNRWA employees accused of participating in the Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, where 1,139 people were killed and 240 abducted, were fired. Two have been suspended. UNRWA has promised an investigation. They account for 0.04 percent of UNRWA’s staff.
Israel is seeking to destroy not only Gaza’s health care system and infrastructure, but UNRWA which provides food and aid to 2 million Palestinians. The object is to make Gaza uninhabitable and ethnically cleanse the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands are already starving. Over 70 percent of the housing has been destroyed. More than 26,700 people have been killed and over 65,600 have been injured. Thousands are missing. Some 90 percent of Gaza’s pre-war population has been displaced, with many living in the open. Palestinians have been reduced to eating grass and drinking contaminated water.
Noga Arbell, a former Israeli foreign ministry official, during a discussion in the Israeli parliament on Jan. 4, stated: “It will be impossible to win the war if we do not destroy UNRWA, and this destruction must begin immediately.”
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, saying UNWRA was “totally infiltrated by Hamas,” reiterated the call to shut UNRWA down.
If UNWRA is abolished it puts into question the Palestinian’s status as refugees, imperiling the “Right of Return,” the demand, long rejected by Israel, that Palestinians be allowed to go back to their homes in what is now Israel.
“It’s time for the international community and the UN itself to understand that UNRWA’s mission must be terminated,” Netanyahu told visiting UN delegates, according to a statement from his office. “It seeks to preserve the issue of Palestinian refugees. We must replace UNRWA with other UN agencies and other aid agencies, if we want to solve the Gaza problem as we plan to do.”
More than 152 of UNRWA’s employees in Gaza — including school principals, teachers, health workers, a gynecologist, engineers, support staff and a psychologist — have been killed since the Israeli attacks began. Over 141 UNRWA facilities have been bombed into rubble. The death toll is theﾠlargest loss of staff during a conflict in the U.N.’s history.
The destruction of healthcare facilities and targeting of doctors, nurses, medics and staff is especially repugnant. It means the most vulnerable, the sick, infants, the wounded and elderly, and those who care for them, are often condemned to death.
Palestinian doctors are pleading with doctors and medical organizations from around the world to decry the assault on the healthcare system and mobilize their institutions to protest.
“The world must condemn the acts against medical professionals happening in Gaza,” writes the director of Al-Shifa hospital, Muhammad Abu Salmiya, who wasﾠarrested along with other medical personnel by the Israelis in November 2023 while evacuating with a World Health Organization (WHO) convoy, and who remains in custody. “This Correspondence is a call for every human being, all medical communities, and all health-care professionals around the world to call for these anti-hospital activities inside and around the hospitals to stop, which is a civilian obligation according to international law, the UN, and WHO.”
But these institutions — with a few notable exceptions such as The American Public Health Association that has called for a ceasefire — have either remained silent or, as with Dr. Matthew K. Wynia, the director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado, attempted to justify Israeli war crimes. These doctors — who somehow find it acceptable that in Gaza a child is killed every 10 minutes on average — are accomplices to genocide and stand in violation of the Geneva Convention. They embrace death as a solution, not life.
Robert Jay Lifton in his book “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide” writes that “genocidal projects require the active participation of educated professionals — physicians, scientists, engineers, military leaders, lawyers, clergy, university professors and other teachers — who combine to create not only the technology of genocide but much of its ideological rationale, moral climate, and organizational process.”
A group of 100 Israeli doctors in November 2023 defended the bombing of hospitals in Gaza, claiming they were used as Hamas command centers, a charge Israel has been unable to verify.
The deans of U.S. medical schools and leading medical organizations, especially the American Medical Association (AMA), have joined the ranks of universities, law schools, churches and the media to turn their backs on the Palestinians. The AMA shut down a debate on a ceasefire resolution among its members and has called for “medical neutrality,” although it abandoned “medical neutrality” to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
There is a cost to denouncing this genocide, a cost they do not intend to pay. They fear being attacked. They fear destroying their careers. They fear losing funding. They fear a loss of status. They fear persecution. They fear social isolation. This fear makes them complicit.
And what of those who do speak out? They are branded as antisemites and supporters of terrorism. George Washington University clinical psychology professor Lara Sheehi was pushed out of her job. The former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, was denied a fellowship at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy because of his alleged “anti-Israel bias.” San Francisco professor Rabab Abdulhadi was sued for supporting Palestinian rights. Shahd Abusalama was suspended from Sheffield Hallam University in the U.K after a vicious smear campaign, although the institution later settled her discrimination claim against it. Professor Jasbir Puar at Rutgers University is an ongoing target for the Israel lobby and endures constant harassment. Medical students and faculty in Canada face suspension or expulsion if they publicly criticize Israel.
The danger is not only that the Israeli crimes are denounced. The danger, more importantly, is that the moral bankruptcy and cowardice of the institutions and their leaders are exposed.
This brings me to Dr. Rupa Marya, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), whose call to halt bombing hospitals and to examine the impact of Zionism as a racist ideology unleashed a torrent of vitriolic attacks against her, attacks tacitly endorsed by the medical school where she works.
She has been slandered as an antisemite and targeted by the Canary Mission, a Zionist organization that seeks to defame and destroy the careers of students and faculty that criticize Israel and defend Palestinian rights. She has had speaking engagements rescinded and received death threats and messages such as: “kill yourself you retarded grifting n*gger,” “Jew baiting c*nt,” and “White people are the greatest people on Earth. You know this.”
You can see her statement on the campaign against her here.
There is a striking contrast between the treatment of Dr. Marya and the physicians who cheer on the genocide. UCSF physician Matt Cooperberg, who is the Helen Diller Family Chair in Urology, ‘liked’ social media posts such as “REMOVE Palestinians FORM [sic] MAP” and a quote by former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir: “We are able to forgive the the [sic] arabs for killing our children. We are unable to forgive the arabs for forcing us to kill their children.”
“Cooperberg’s endowed chair comes from the Helen Diller Family Foundation, UCSFﾒs largest donor, which to date has gifted some $1.15 billion dollars to the health campus,” Dr. Marya writes. “In 2018, due to a mistake on a tax form, the Helen Diller Family Foundation was exposed as a funder of the Canary Mission. The Foundation attempted to erase its connection after this exposure.”
She continues:
As a faculty member at UCSF, disgraced dermatologist Howard Maibachﾠexposed and injected over 2,600 imprisoned Black and brown people with chemicals in experiments that echoed the experiments put on trialﾠat the Doctorsﾒ Trial just a few years before he went to medical school in Pennsylvania. There he studied under Albert Kligman, who taught him how to exploit Black people for medical experimentation, documented extensively in the horror nonfiction book, Acres of Skin. Maibach also advanced notions of racial differences in skin, furthering racist ideas from the pseudoscience of eugenics. Race is a social construct that enshrines supremacism. It is not a biological reality.
Most of Maibach’s experiments were conducted without informed consent, and while UCSF issued an apology, Maibach is still employed by the University of California. His family supports the Friends of the IDF,ﾠand he is represented by Alan Dershowitz, who also argued for the bombing of hospitals in Gaza. Dershowitz attempted to prevent me from speaking at the AMAﾒs first National Health Equity Grand Rounds, where scholar Harriet Washington, who studies medical experimentation on Black people, highlighted Maibach’s racist practices. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, UCSF faculty, trainees and students of color brought Maibachﾒs story to light,ﾠand many have expressed their horror that they have to continue to sit in the same room as this man during Dermatology Grand Rounds. But the problem is not just one man. It is a system that allows someone with these values and actions to continue to be present in our learning and practicing community.
The dehumanization of Palestinians is lifted from the playbook of all settler colonial projects, including our own. This racism, where people of color are branded as “human animals,” is coded within the DNA of our institutions. It infects those chosen to lead these institutions. It lies at the core of our national identity. It is why the two ruling parties and the institutions that sustain them side with Israel. It feeds the perverted logic of funneling weapons and billions of dollars in support to sustain Israel’s occupation and genocide.
History will not judge us kindly. But it will revere those who, under siege, found the courage to say no.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show On Contact. His most recent book is “America: The Farewell Tour” (2019).
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-silence-of-the-damned
Israel confirms flooding of Hamas tunnels
Previous methods of destroying the passages have reportedly proven ineffective
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed on Tuesday that it has been flooding Hamas’ underground tunnel network with seawater, a controversial tactic that it first trialed late last year.
In a statement shared with Israeli media, the IDF said that it had developed and was using “several tools for injecting high-flow water into Hamas tunnels in the Gaza Strip.” Not all of the roughly 350-400 miles of tunnels are being targeted, the military said, adding that the operation would cause unacceptable damage in some areas.
Israeli forces installed several high-flow pumps in Gaza late last year and experimented with pumping seawater from the Mediterranean into the underground labyrinth, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time. In a follow-up report on Monday, the American newspaper said that the flooding operation had expanded, with the installation of an additional pump in the city of Khan Younis, located in the south of the enclave.
Until now, Israeli officials have refused to comment on the use of seawater to flood the tunnels. US officials told the Wall Street Journal that “walls and other unexpected barriers and defenses slowed or stopped the water flow” in some places, and that “the overall effort wasn’t as effective as Israeli officials had hoped.”
Despite flooding, bombing, and raids by special forces and robots, between 60% and 80% of the subterranean network remains intact, the newspaper reported.
Back in December, US officials warned their Israeli counterparts that the use of seawater could contaminate Gaza’s limited freshwater resources. Prior to the conflict with Israel, around 90% of the enclave’s drinking water came from groundwater wells, according to the Palestinian Water Authority.
Relatives of the roughly 132 hostages still held by Hamas also fear that flooding the tunnels will endanger their loved ones. In meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in December, freed hostages complained that the flooding would be a death sentence for those left behind, according to audio recordings published by Hebrew news site Ynet.
The IDF said that its troops are carrying out “professional and comprehensive” checks to ensure that the operation is not contaminating groundwater sources. However, the military did not mention whether the likelihood of harming hostages was being considered when deciding which tunnels to flood.
Israeli tanks and troops have been on the ground in Gaza since late October. However, while the Palestinian death toll now stands at nearly 27,000, US officials believe that the IDF has killed just a fifth of Hamas’ fighters after almost four months of fighting. The IDF announced the deaths of three Israeli soldiers on Wednesday, bringing to 224 the number killed in Gaza since October.
Countercurrent – February 1, 2024
Rushing into a Hindu Rashtra
by Dr Ranjan Solomon
Modi has proven to the country that he means business. He promised the country the Ram Temple in the very location where the Babri Masjid once proudly stood. He fulfilled that promise. A mob of right wingers, RSS cadres, and lumpen elements brought it down unabashedly. Bringing down the mosque in 1992 was an act that split the country and created bloodshed. It followed a Movement led by BJP stalwarts such as L K Advani, and Murli Manohar Joshi, both of whom Modi dropped from the list of invitees to the opening of the new Temple.
Advani’s Rath Yatra concluded on December 6, 1992, when a mob scaled the mosque and smashed its domes with axes and hammers, leveling the entire structure. The episode triggered sectarian riots in several parts of India, killing about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims. It had already irate anti-minority sentiments. Today, the foundations of Hindutva stand firmly rooted in the country’s political landscape while the roots of secularism are somewhat insecure.
The B.J.P. and the R.S.S. unequivocally envisage India as a Hindu nation. This disregards the glaring reality that the country has a population of more than 200 million Muslims, and some 5% of other faiths. In the political calculus within which the BJP/RSS currently operate, the other minorities count for nothing. A prominent right-wing BJP politician referring to the minorities after the inauguration of the Ram Temple spoke as follows: ‘They are all jealous. They never thought this (Ram Temple construction) will happen. It (Ram Temple) is being built; there is euphoria all over the country. They are in a difficult spot. I don’t care because 82 per cent of India is Hindu and the remaining minorities – Christians have not protested at all, Parsis, Jews – they are all supportive.’
The Ayodhya chronicle dyed by Modi’s interpretations will be the focus of the Prime Minister’s campaign in the ensuing general elections in April. He is convinced that he will gain a massive majority riding on the back of the Ram Temple Pran Pratishtha ceremony.
Ram ke Naam (In the Name of God) is a 1992 documentary by Indian filmmaker Anand Patwardhan which explored the campaign waged by the right-wing Hindu nationalist organisation Vishva Hindu Parishad to build a temple to the Hindu deity Ram at the site of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. The film earned Patwardhan wide recognition, and several national and international awards. It told the harsh truth of Advani’s Rath Yatra and anyone who dared to screen it risked being ransacked and intimidated.
Richard M. Eaton, professor of history at the University of Arizona observed: “Future generations might view the destruction of the Babri Masjid as the beginning of a fateful chapter in India’s history because it opened the door to challenging the identity of Muslim structures throughout India – even the Taj Mahal. As we know, the 1991 Places of Worship Act affirmed that the religious identity of any place of worship (apart from the Babri Masjid itself) could not be altered from what it had been on Independence Day, 1947. Although that act was intended to settle once and for all the status of India’s religious monuments, it actually had the opposite effect, partly because it raised people’s awareness of the religious character of physical monuments more generally, in the same way that nearly a century of British census operations – by requiring people to place themselves in government-defined ethnic categories in an atmosphere of gathering political competition – had raised people’s awareness of their own religious identities.” Prominent places of worship and religious heritage are being disputed as having been built over temples during the Portuguese rule.
Has India now joined ranks of existing theocracies? Is secularism mutely being evacuated from the political milieu? Will majoritarianism now be the new cornerstone of India’s political constructs? The BJP has embarked on a script of a new national history via Ayodhya with its steep descent from secularism to Hindu nationalism. The Ram Temple was consecrated as a re-invented fact in 1992 when Babur’s Mosque was reduced to rubble. The riots that followed took 2000 lives and left in its wake a virtually censored Muslim minority.
The first recorded instance of conflict over the site between the Hindus and Muslims was in 1853, during an era of sociopolitical transition throughout India. During the British raj, separate areas of the site were set up for Muslims and for Hindus. In 1949, after India was partitioned and became independent, images of Rama were brought into the mosque. In the resultant storm, the site was closed off to both communities, although the images were not removed.
A campaign was instigated in 1984 to vandalize the mosque and build a Hindu temple in its place. The movement gained momentum in the following years, leading to riots in 1990 and the collapse of India’s ruling coalition. This momentum swept the Bharatiya Janata Party to power in several states, and on December 6, 1992, security forces that stood by as activists destroyed the mosque. A sequence of court battles played out in the subsequent decades. The land was divided between Hindus and Muslims in 2010 by the decision of a high court. That decision was challenged by both Hindu and Muslim litigants, and in 2019 the Supreme Court entrusted the site exclusively to Hindus. As it turned out, the Supreme Court bench ruled that the entire 2.77 acres of disputed land in Ayodhya be handed over to a trust to be constituted for the construction of the Ram temple at the site, and five acres allotted at a ‘prominent site’ in Ayodhya to build a mosque. Rather bizarrely, the culmination came when an idol was placed in the sanctum sanctorum of the imposing pink sandstone construction, 75 years after a similar idol appeared in Babur’s Mosque. For those who subscribed to the actuality that the temple was built over the destroyed mosque, there is undying conviction that the birthplace of Ram lies underneath the Mosque.
It may be pointless now to enter into a discourse on the ruling by the SC on the validity of the claims that the Temple was built on the precise spot where Lord Ram was born. Yet, to ignore historical facts, and believe in myths is to ignore history and possibly allow history to repeat itself. From the perspective of archaeology and faith itself, the claim is based on apocryphal grounds. There is nil evidence that Lord Ram was born on the precise site of Babri Masjid. The judgment deliberated extensively on whether Hindus believed that the Babri Masjid site was the birthplace of Ram and worshipped him at this site. A 116-page addendum, authored by one of the judges, is titled, ‘Whether disputed structure is the holy birth place of Lord Ram as per the faith, belief and trust of the Hindus. Within the scope of normal judicial practice, the claimants ought to have produced tangible evidence and not what is assumed’.
The inauguration of the Temple has heightened the pitch of a new battle cry to invoke patriotic/ religious sentiment. “Ayodhya to sirf jhanki hai, Kashi, Mathura baqi hai!” (Ayodhya was just a preview; Kashi and Mathura will follow). This new mantra, if taken seriously, can provide political capital with massive assets. Another prominent leaders avowed: “These three temples must be taken back. There is another 40,000 other temples but we can afford to ignore the remaining 39000+.
Other claims are moving at a frenzied pace. As for the Shahi Idgah, Hindutva groups are now asserting that there was a Krishna Janmabhoomi temple which was destroyed by Aurangzeb at this site and that Lord Krishna was born there. They want the mosque to be demolished and the land ‘returned’ to the temple authorities. Legal processes are already on in a Mathura Court with a plea to appoint a senior advocate commissioner to authenticate the presence of signs of a Hindu temple at the mosque site.
Why the desperate hurry to inaugurate the Ram temple that is a sheer work-in-progress. Some onlookers found solace in seeing Modi don mascara on the idol’s eyes. Political analysts linked the tedious hurry to the upcoming elections. If, in 2019, it was Pulwama and Balakot, in 2024, the BJP will seek to rake in the political turnover of the Ram Temple.
Regardless of the controversies that surround it, the divisive new Ram temple saw half a million visitors on its first day open to the public. Half a million people entered the new Ram Mandir the following day. Many more millions more watched it on social media and swarms of Sangh Parivar members roamed the streets of towns and cities raising the slogan ‘Jai Shree Ram, hanging up red flags bearing the images of Lord Ram and the Ayodhya Temple atop buildings symbolizing the Hindu symbol of victory since the time of Ramayana and Mahabharata. Mobs provocatively even placed flags and buntings over churches. It was a show of militant celebration and religiosity. Some reports have it that babies were prematurely induced so that they would be born on the day of the inauguration.
Ayodhya is not an important religious or tourist destination on its own. A new airport and railway station were star attractions designed for the occasion. The solitary lure will be its newness. Spiritual destinations in India are a dime a dozen and have the weight of historical spirituality and spirituality is punctuated by the lengths of its longevity. Take Valankani, Tirupathi, Sabarimala, Bodh Gaya, visited every single year by tens of thousands of devotees. Does Modi assume that all these devotees will abandon history and shift to Ayodhya?
The most fundamental question progressives ask is: Have the shutters on secularism been eliminated? If the new virulent Hindutva is going to ride roughshod over minorities, liberals, and secularists, we could as well write the epitaph of the multi-cultural, multi-religious, multi-ethnic country that made India the unique country it has been through the centuries. Are we on the brink of writing the epitaph of an epoch?
This is certainly a time when we must examine our nation with razor-sharp questions and scrutinize our history in depth. It would be historically inappropriate to lay all the blame for the post 2014 happenings in terms of religious fundamentalism on the current regime. We must also interrogate the Nehruvian era and its multiple riots in which the largest number of victims were Muslims. Few recognize how, for instance, calls to introduce a ban on cow alienated Muslims and low-caste Dalits, who see no reason to uphold the upper-caste Hindu injunction against consuming beef. Today’s secularists are loath to admit that the Congress was just as nasty to minorities when it was in power as the BJP is today. The BJP did not come out of nowhere. Both parties share a commitment to caste and class hierarchy, coupled with an allergy to redistribution, and sustained electoral appeals to the Hindu tradition.
The modern history of Ayodhya illustrates this point rather well. When the idol of Ram magically appeared overnight at Babur’s Mosque in 1949, the Congress took a rather indulgent view of the whole affair. The mosque was boarded up and the idol left inside, giving oxygen to Hindu zealots. In 1985, their demands that the locks be opened were answered by the Congress which was pursued amid raucous calls for Hindu renewal. But it was the BJP that proved more adept at that game, demolishing the mosque completely in 1992. Riots ensued across the country, and the BJP rode to power four years later off the back of religious polarization.
By 2010, the Allahabad High Court pronounced Muslims “junior partners” in national life, dividing Babur’s Mosque into three tracts and pledging two to Hindus. Then, 10 years later, with the BJP in power, the Supreme Court handed the entire plot to Hindus, to construct a temple on the ruins of the 16th-century mosque. Now, with the consecration of the Ram Temple, and by extension the effective inauguration of a new theocratic regime, we may have heard the last about that self-congratulatory declaration that India is a secular, socialist democracy.
As the BJP attempts a rewrite of history to establish its majoritarian, monolithic agenda, secularism stands threatened. Frank Huzur states: “Upholding the democratic spirit of diversity and justice on which this nation was founded is imperative to counter such regressive, divisive and unconstitutional moves”.
Modi described Ayodhya as a symbol of peace, patience, mutual harmony and coordination of Indian society, or the notion of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” (The world is one family)? These values of inclusion, equality and justice are essential to any human civilization. Yet facts and stated aspirations are two different things in contemporary India. The state of the nation is marked by violence against the minorities – religious, economic, caste and ethnic.
But just before and after the 22nd January, churches were torn down, and Muslims experienced fear and anxiety. “Jai Shri Ram” once a benign greeting is now a war cry; its invocation of “Jai Shri Ram,” culturally an bland salutation, has undergone a transformation into a belligerent rallying cry with menacing connotations. Such instrumental use of Lord Ram by those in the Ram Navmi processions, and now the launch of the Ram Temple organised by Hindu nationalists has not come from nowhere. The Hindu nationalist ideology, as propagated by the Sangh Parivar misrepresents and distorts history wherein the Muslim rulers are presented as oppressors of Hindus who were out to destroy the Hindu culture, demolish their temples, forcibly convert the Hindus and sexually assault Hindu women. That is why the Prime Minister once asserted that Hindus were enslaved and colonized for over a thousand years.
With communal politics in the ascendancy, it now remains to be seen if secularism can be revived on the grounds of the Indian constitution – a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic Republic. These are peeling off by the wayside. Hinduism in its most authentic impulse affirms that Hindu belief is totally non-exclusive and accepts all other faiths and religious paths. An ancient Vedic text says that God or Truth is one and the wise call it by many names. This is by contrast to certain other faiths which are prone to proselytizing.
But until a dialogical process among religious leaders – clergy and laity- begins in right earnest, the risks of physical, symbolic or attitudinal violence and structural violence will eat into Indian polity and endanger among religious followers. It would then swell into caste and ethnic wrangles.
A wise, unknown source speaks with profundity:
“The leader installed the deity, the nation cheered, the people burst crackers, the children rejoiced in a school holiday, flags were forced onto other places of worship, chants filled the air, and the followers believed a New Age had dawned.
The next day: The poor remained poor, the rich became richer, the leader fooled the millions, the starving continued to starve, the minorities felt more alienated, the nation lost its secular character, religion died a bit more,,, and the god represented by the deity smiled at the foolishness of human beings”
Ranjan Solomon is a human rights activist who subscribes to the ideal of a secular, socialist, democratic society.
https://countercurrents.org/2024/02/rushing-into-a-hindu-rashtra/
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