Israel, IS and the futility of evil

Reality of Israeli and IS intransigence shows the futility of countering evil with evil, or terror with terror

The victory of Israel’s far right in the country’s general elections held in March this year, reflects a stunning endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard line stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu has ruled out a conciliatory, two-state solution to the conflict that Israel had supported for almost two decades. Supported by the UN and the international community, the two-state solution lies at the heart of the Middle East Peace Process. And Netanyahu has virtually confirmed its demise by appointing Ayelet Shaked, a founding member of the far-right Jewish Home Party. As Israel’s Justice Minister, Shaked, gained notoriety last year for posting an article on her Facebook page that virtually called for the extermination of the Palestinian people, the “destruction of Palestinian homes ... otherwise more little snakes will be raised here”.

Though the article was written by the Israeli writer Uri Elitzur, by putting it up on her social media account, Shaked owned up its content. The outrage caused by her genocidal stance against Palestinians was summed by Turkey’s President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who compared her to Adolf Hitler. However, for those living in Pakistan, the mindset reflected in Shaked’s Facebook post is all too familiar: it is no different from the mindset of our home grown jihadist terrorists waging war against Pakistan. Indeed, the surge in jihadist massacres of Muslim and non-Muslim across Pakistan shows that our own militants have, by far, upstaged Israelis’ killing of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Between 2000-2015, around 11,000 Palestinians were killed by Israelis, of which 4,228 were killed during the second intifada, or Palestinian uprising between 2000-2007. As for Pakistan, jihadi militants killed over 20,425 Pakistani citizens and 6,156 security personnel during the same period, according to various sources in the Middle East and South Asia.

Indeed, it might well be that Israeli violence against Palestinians and jihadist violence against Pakistanis have become a mirror image of each other. If the innocent Palestinian schoolboy, Mohammed Abu Khudeir, was burned alive and butchered by Israelis in the West Bank in May 2014, in Pakistan, Mrs Beenish Pervaiz, a teacher at a school in Peshawar, was burnt alive by jihadists when they attacked the Army Public School and killed nearly 150 students and teachers in December, 2014.

More recently, following in the footsteps of the self-styled Islamic State group, or IS, Pakistani jihadists killed nearly 50 Ismaili Shias in a bus in Karachi on 13 May, 2015. And even though pamphlets left by the jihadists triumphantly claimed their attack marked ‘The advent of ISIS in Pakistan’, officials and media sources attributed the massacre to the Indian intelligence agencies for several days, before acknowledging the killings were carried out by Pakistani terrorists to show their support for the IS group.

As for Ayelet Shaked, her advent as justice minister is a reminder that the evil of fascism, which created the Second World War, is as alive and kicking in Israel today, as it was in Hitler’s Germany. After all, Israel’s religious upmanship has turned Palestinians into ‘virtual Jews’ in the occupied territories. Indeed, Israel’s invocation of religion to justify a birthright over Palestinian territories is an avatar of the kind of fascism that created the Holocaust in Europe, and midwifed the IS group as Israel’s own twin. No wonder we are witnessing the unfolding of an interminable war in the Middle East, Pakistan and other countries around the world, in the name of imposing purist religious states.

Even so, the reality of Israeli and IS intransigence shows the futility of countering evil with evil, or in other words, terror with terror and violence with violence. After all, one has only to recall the speech of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, chief of the German police responsible for implementing the extermination of the Jews under Hitler’s Germany. During a meeting on October 6, 1943, Himmler urged Nazi party leaders not to spare any Jewish children in the concentration camps. Jewish children had to be killed in order to protect “our sons and grandchildren” from Jewish “avengers” in the future. However, rather than grandchildren of Jews taking revenge on the Germans, the grandchildren of Jewish survivors of Hitler’s genocide are calling for extermination of Palestinian children — dubbed ‘little snakes’ in the article Ayelet posted on her Facebook last year.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 9^th,  2015.

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