It’s a lopsided love story
And as is the norm, Pakistanis seemed to be more worried about the killing of Palestinian ‘brothers’ than the Pakistani ‘brothers’ that were biting the dust on a daily basis. No one’s bothered about the turbulence in Karachi and Balochistan. Until Wednesday’s blast, nobody was taking notice of the Shia killings and there is no coverage of the siege and massacre in Parachanar, which is dubbed the ‘Pakistani Gaza’, where more people are killed in a day than the Palestinians over the past week. Deaths in Gaza make the front page headlines, while the turmoil Pakistani Muslims are facing is just another run-of-the-mill story. It’s like fretting over the ailment of your second cousins, while your own siblings are on the deathbed.
Let’s also recall how we treated our ‘Muslim brothers’ in East Pakistan until 1971 did us part. That abhorring treatment is being matched by our treatment of our ‘Muslim brothers’ in Balochistan. Let’s acknowledge the hate speech spurting out of speakers of mosques of different sects targeting ‘Muslim brothers’ of other sects. Let’s realise that as you read this Saudis are upping the ante on their oil production, helping the US and Israel up their sanctions on Iran – our ‘Muslim brothers’. Another manifestation of the Arab concept of ‘Muslim brotherhood’ is how they never seem to speak in favour of Pakistan internationally and that there isn’t even as much as a murmur in the Arab countries about the ‘Muslim brothers’ being killed in Kashmir and Myanmar. And then there are 165 Muslims on average being killed by Syrian Army in Syria on a daily basis since August this year, and yet no protests or condemnations are witnessed in the Muslim media or social media against these atrocities, while the 20 that were killed in Gaza last Friday grabbed the limelight and sympathies.
Oh but of course, a non-Muslim killing a Muslim is obviously a more heinous act than a Muslim killing a Muslim. Since everything is centred round the Muslim brotherhood, the bond of Islam that binds the Muslims and non-Muslims don’t really have much of a say in this. And hence every Muslim being killed by a “kafir” is the collective responsibility of the Muslim Ummah who should fight tooth and nail to bring the infidels down to their knees. Yup, that mentality is a nail on the solution for peace.
How about condemning the act of killing regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, nationality, or any other discrimination whatsoever? How about condemning the killing of Jews that fall to Islamic extremism as well? There is no yardstick to gauge the comparative innocence of victims in the Gaza conflict. Israel has more militaristic wherewithal as things stand and is hence doing more damage compared to Hamas. When Muslims had more military power they were the ones conjuring more destruction. How can you criticise Israel for its annexations in Palestine and then conveniently forget that it was the Arabs that annexed the area in the 7th century in the first place.
We need to realise that the Palestinian conflict existed before 14 May 1948 as well. The holy city of Jerusalem has been captured and recaptured 44 times over the course of the past 4,000 years, by the propagators of the three Abrahamic religions. It is both historically and logically unfair to highlight the brutality in the region over the past 64 years without acknowledging the cruelty served out by all concerned parties over the past four millennia. The atrocities by the Jews are well-documented in our neck of the woods but we need to understand that Muslims haven’t exactly been saints either.
Arabs once famously trapped a Jewish tribe in a fort and decapitated their men. There is the Granda incident of 1066, Fez incidents in 1033, 1276 and 1465, Damascus Affair of 1840, among many other such noteworthy examples where the Jews were subdued by the Muslims. Even after Israel’s formation you’ve had examples of Arab countries instigating aggression and suppressing the Jews that were present in their countries initially. When the establishment of Israel was announced, Egypt, Syria, Transjordan and Iraq all attacked it the very next day, instigating the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, and Egypt expelled over 25,000 Jews and sent thousands in detention following the Suez Crisis of 1956.
Again, who has committed more atrocities over the course of history depends on which ‘brand’ of history you read. The guilty party has always concealed their violence by tampering historical narrations, shrouding aggression in the garb of “self-defence” or simply justifying everything obnoxious as religious duty. There is absolutely no way of getting a seamlessly balanced account of a conflict that spans over almost 1,500 years. Therefore, from both the Muslim and the Jewish point of view, clamouring for justice every time followers of their religion die and unyieldingly justifying the massacre of other party, adds more fuel to a conflict that requires massive compromise on both sides.
The first thing that the Muslim countries need to do is to recognise Israel as a sovereign state – you can’t talk to, accuse or negotiate with someone you don’t even claim exists. Muslims need to realise that Jews inhabited the region before Islam came into being, and as holy as Jerusalem is for both Christians and Muslims, it is the holiest city for the Jews. If hypothetically at a time of global reshuffle, where nations are being carved, boundaries being adjusted and people are being displaced left, right and centre you had to pick one region to earmark as the only Muslim-majority region, you’d pick the Arabian Peninsula – you’d pick Mecca and Madina. How hard is it for us to accept a 22,000 square kilometre region as the world’s only Jewish country, when around a quarter of the world is constituted by Muslim-majority areas?
When you are not recognising Israel as a nation, when Hamas’ official charter has ‘Israel’s destruction’ written in its goals, when Muslim leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad openly manifest anti-Semitism and talk about eradicating Israel, how can you say that the Muslims want peace and Jews don’t. Sure Benjamin Netanyahu is a bit of a nut-head, but then again so are most of the Arab leaders. None of them actually wants peace; they just want to assert the superiority of their religions and nations at the cost of the rivals, much like their predecessors did.
For peace in Palestine, and pretty much every other part of the world, you need people of every religion, ethnicity and nation to condemn the act of killing, period. Regardless of who the killers and victims are. We need to stop recreating the horrors that mar the legacies of our ideological predecessors, and realise that no ideology is worth killing another human being for. And as for Pakistan, we really need to rethink our lopsided love-in with the Arabs, and focus instead on getting our own house in order.
Author’s note: 10,000 bucks say, this column would be declared by most readers as US/Israel funded. Is anyone up for a wager?
The writer is Editor, Business and City (Karachi) Pakistan Today. Email: khulduneshahid@gmail.com, Twitter: @khuldune