Palestine: the answer my friend is blowing in the wind

“By my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death... .” Human as Shakespeare states, in literal sense dies for once—though one dies many times before he eclipses from the sight for good—each person owes his death to God and there is no escape. The quote as such presents a commonplace, superficial religious one-dimensional concept of death and its dialectical opposite: life.

In this one-dimensional concept of death, the two great freedom fighters, Hassan Nasrallah and Yahya Sinwar, chose their death or martyrdom not to liberate their lands, but to pay their debt to God. On the contrary, both were martyred not only to liberate their countries from a Western imperialist Zionist stooge but to free their people from the clutches of metropolitan/international capital striving to maintain its dominance to appropriate the wealth of the region by maintaining unrest in the Middle East.

In his remarkable Substack article Scott Ritter describes the grace with which Sinwar kissed the gallows “His (Sinwar’s) death was the top priority of Israel…in the end he did die at the hands of Israelis. But he did not die in a tunnel. He did not die surrounded by human shields. He did die fighting, at the command of Hamas fighters in the streets of Gaza. The Israeli infantry, using antitank missiles, fired severely, wounding the surviving Hamas fighters”.

But the most remarkable sentence that makes one‘s heart flutter with pain and hope is the one that follows: “A drone was thrown into the structure, revealing a defiant figure, seated in a chair, glaring at the camera. One arm had been blown off the fighter, and his legs were badly mangled. With his one remaining arm, the fighter picked up a piece of wood and threw it at the drone…His name was Yahya Sinwar”.

This reminds me of Riffat Alareer, a great Palestinian poet and academic. He was told about his fate categorically in no uncertain terms by the Israeli occupation army during the early phase of the genocide. Riffat wrote, “I am an academic, if they come for me I will throw a marker at them”. Who can defeat the people who are prepared to fight with markers and pieces of wood in their hands?

Those people embraced martyrdom—a death for a noble cause and sublime conviction— on their own terms. For Muslims it’s glorified as the highest achievement, later rewarded in the afterlife albeit in this regard the Marxists have invariably outnumbered people of any other faith, but that is a story for another day. Was it fair to enjoy the luxuries of paradise leaving behind their people burning alive in the inferno lit by the occupying power is a question one dares not ask for not only it’s indecent but impertinent as well.

It portrays a false image as if they sacrificed their lives not only fighting for the liberation of their homeland and striving to arrest the process of capitalistic accumulation and its realization but for the ultimate reward in the hereafter. The great Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish cleared this confusion stating, “It’s not because they’re looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinian people are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they’ll stop killing themselves”.

Mahmud does not hesitate to condemn the indifference of divinity to the century old suffering of his people. He says,” Hope is not the opposite of despair. Perhaps it is the faith that springs from divine indifference which has left us dependent on our own special talents to make sense of the fog surrounding us.

Hope is neither something tangible nor an idea. It’s a talent.” While fighting against the entire military might of the global north with scarce resources, which Hassan Nasrallah admitted in his last speech, no one can blame the fighters for not developing such a unique, invincible talent.

Despite maintaining the policy of apartheid, and slaughtering humanity in the broad day light while surviving merely as a parasite on the American military and financial resources, and abhorred by the countries of global south why such a parasitic rootless entity, a cancer in the heart of the Middle East is resuscitated on a ventilator and made to survive is an existential question especially when its survival demands continuous aggression against its neighboring countries killing thousands if not millions innocent people with impunity?

The only answer to this quagmire is Western domination of expropriating the people of the Middle East by maintaining unrest in the region and to avoid the inherent capitalistic anarchy reaching their shores, which is already knocking at their doors.

Dispossession of the resources of the countries of the global south is a precondition for the continued affluence of the ruling classes of the global north.

The former French president Jacques Chirac admitted that once the access to the African resources was impeded, France was certain to become a third world country. Today, after kicking France and to a considerable extent the US terroristic empire, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso are expropriating the expropriators. They are heralding to the global north that the countries of the global South are not poor but are expropriated by the West on the barrel of their guns especially when the IMF and World Bank fail to do what is needed to gratify the Western interests and now they are refusing to remain their underdogs.

Who could have forgotten the words of Henry Kissinger, a death messenger awarded with a Nobel Prize for his least noble deeds when in Chile, under president Allende an elected, popular Marxist president he told CIA to make the economy shriek to topple him. The same mercenary ordered to destroy “everything that flies to everything that moves in Cambodia”. History is replete with such gory examples.

In the Philippines, a Christian country, the US forces went in and massacred the people to preserve Christianity. It saved Indonesia from communism by toppling Sukarno, slaughtering at least a million communists only to divide its resources in between them. Not to mention Libya, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan and many in the South America especially Venezuela, the countries which were not only plundered but devastated too.

All precious resources necessary for the Western survival come from the countries of the global south. Hence, all wars, including the Palestinian genocide, must be seen in this context. However, it does not mean that struggle against the western appropriation of resources needs to be given up. What the oppressed people of the world desperately need is unity, for they have nothing to lose but their chains and the live streaming of the genocide perpetrated in Palestine is making it possible.

The other suggestion about death as something to be paid as a debt to God denotes the collaboration of science, philosophy and religion in a capitalist system.

During the last century human has already increased the average age from 40 to nearly 90 years. It was possible through the scientific research but once the work on stem cell development was halted by the pharmaceutical industry to earn billion $ profits instead of finding a permanent cure of diseases and the national exchequer went to support the military industrial complex death decisively began to dominate life.

“In a repressive civilization”, Marcuse says, “death itself becomes an instrument of repression…. In contrast, a philosophy that does not work as the handmaiden of repression, responds to the fact of death with great refusal—-the refusal of the Orpheus, the liberator”.

A constant fear of death or a death glorified, or both, are symbols of submission that leaves behind a guilt for Civilization.

Western civilization is guilty of barbarism, of savagery, for imposing death on those who hardly breathed under its relentless sky. It had always been a civilization of submission, a stain and stigma, on the face of humankind, a guilt that mars the possibility of utopia of building a new world.

A world free of exploitation and expropriation. As long as it does not happen, the struggle for the Palestinian liberation will continue unabated. Death of Nasrallah and Sinwar will produce more Guevaras and Bhagats. The caravans of lovers, to whom Faiz alludes to, will continue to march on the unlit pathways to lighten them with the halo their blood emits.

Such heroes don’t die. As Bullah Shah, a Shakespeare of Punjabi language, said, “Bullahia we are not going to die; the man in the grave is certainly someone else.” Both Nasrallah and Sinwar were not born to die. They will live and cherish the human memory as Guevara and Rosa Luxemburg are warming humans’ hearts.

In 1963 Bob Dylan wrote a song. The folk music trio of Peter, Paul, Mary lyrically posed the question to humanity asked by Dylan “how many times must the cannon balls fly/Before they are banned/How many years can some people exist/Before they are allowed to be free/How many deaths will it take till he knows/That too many people have died/ The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind”.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024