At bay at the Rafah Crossing

It is a deeply unoptimistic time for the human species. We live in very stressful and distressing times. The war in Gaza has shattered all known paradigms of hostile contention. As Israeli tanks and heavy armour tore through the last remaining ramparts on their way to Rafah, all the known manuals about war and peace-making have disappeared in a hellish bonfire. All the appeals by the defeated and the world at large for a ceasefire, a humanitarian truce that would allow humanity to regain its composure and recover its poise, have been spurned by the victors.

There is a hardening of heart and of feelings about the Israeli war cabinet that is grimly and ironically biblical, reminiscent of the sufferings and tribulations of the ancient Jews in the hands of their Egyptian captors eons earlier. This time around, the shoe is on the other foot. You begin to wonder why history tends to repeat itself and about what Albert Camus, the great Algerian-French author, has called the solidarity of all humans in aberration.

It no longer makes sense to talk about an apocalypse in Gaza. The apocalypse is already here with us, what with the unspeakable carnage and the scale of destruction and human wastage. The situation is post-apocalyptic. Never in the history of modern warfare have a people and a nation been subject to such systematic destruction, such mindless evisceration and high-tech obliteration in full public view.

This century is only two decades old and the auguries for humanity are very dire. It will be recalled that the decade opened with the most deadly viral assault on humanity ever seen in modern times. Globalization ensured that the lethal scourge travelled far and wide, and quickly too. All the stockpile of the deadly weapons that human imagination could conceive and the arsenal of far-ranging nukes were of no avail as humanity and the entire human race were almost upended by a single virus.

A firm lid has been placed on the origins of this mysterious incubus and any inquisitions into its unholy provenance whatsoever by the global power masters. They are united by the fear of their own shadows. Traced to a laboratory in Wuhan, China, the Covid-19 scourge is a telling tribute to the destructive rat race among leading nations in the world. The rest of the world is just mere collateral damage.

For about a decade now, this column has repeatedly canvassed the notion that the nation-state paradigm is fraying at the edge and has probably reached the end of its tether. It will require a global gathering of sapiens or an assembly of luminaries on the scale of Westphalia or Utrecht to rejig it or plot the way forward for humanity. Without it, all the talk about a two-state solution to the Palestine/Israeli quandary will remain nothing but hot air.

Before our very eyes, Israel has emerged as a new type of colonial nation with the power of life and death over the subdued and subjugated Palestinians. Like the Jews themselves for almost two millennia, the Arab-Palestinians will now be reduced to aimless wandering and perambulating like a band of footloose gypsies.

A western creation in controversial circumstances, Israel is now cocking a snook at its benefactor with the western powers unable to do anything about it. The western powers knew what they were doing when they set the Jewish cat among Arab pigeons. But with the current upheaval among its populace, America may yet discover that it has lost more than power and prestige to the Middle East conflagration.

Next on this panoramic inventory of the infirmities of the nation-state paradigm is the long-simmering Russia/Ukraine war with Vladimir Putin insisting on dismembering Ukraine. He has succeeded elsewhere else and may yet succeed in this one too as Ukraine begins to manifest early signs of war-fatigue. Putin, who has fingered western conspiracy and manipulation in the collapse of the old Soviet Union, is bent on doing something to restore his notion of geo-political equity and equilibrium.

The cost of insisting that the brave and patriotic Ukrainians have a right to self-determination, like every other people, is proving prohibitive. Putin will not go back home without something to show for it. That will be suicidal. And since it has now been proved beyond reasonable doubt that international politics is not about being right or about higher morality, the western backers of Ukraine should persuade its leadership to cede territory in order to live to fight another day.

There are many other contemporary flashpoints of nation-state paralysis the world over, particularly in Asia and Africa. The toll has been prohibitive. Myanmar has been roiling in a bloodfest for almost twenty years. Burmese youths are seceding in droves to the insurrectionists in the jungles who have vowed not to relent until they have brought down the despicable tyrants in Rangoon. With their back to the wall, and in an irony of ironies, the junta has dredged up the image of the iconic founding father of the nation, the same man whose daughter they have treated with such contempt and brutal discourtesy.

Venezuela and Guyana are up in arms against each other over a disputed oil-rich enclave. Many countries in Latin America are economically unviable and their states effectively defunct as hordes of refugees make nonsense of the sanctity of national borders. Sudan, Somalia, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Spanish Sahara are in need of an urgent make-over.

The modern instances of Pakistan, Bangladesh, East Timor, Malaysia, Singapore, South Sudan, Slovakia and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire show that territorial mapping and reconfiguration cannot be a once and for all time affair. There are usually unanticipated developments, emergent contradictions and the resurgence of old ancestral feuds which can no longer be contained within the old format without something nasty and sinister giving. Unless global statesmen are inured to human suffering and bloodletting on an industrial scale, it may be time to put on their thinking cap.

In all this, perhaps the biggest elephant in the room is the Israeli/ Palestine conflict which began innocuously enough in the first week of October last year with a frenzied Hamas assault on the Israeli homeland and has now escalated to become the greatest global conflict of our time with the potential to degenerate into a nuclear confrontation. This column calls it the conundrum of cousins. It has held the world spellbound since the creation of Israeli nation by the victorious world powers in 1948.

In the murky and phantasmagoric world of super power intelligence, what we are witnessing in the Gaza Strip may well be an intelligence stunt gone awry, just like the Covid-19 gambit. In retrospect, it is highly unlikely that the punitively proactive Israeli spy network or the various western listening posts in the Middle East would have missed the furtive rumbling of Hamas prior to the eruption on October 7th.

It is possible that Israel and its western patrons actually encouraged Hamas to deliver the weaker reporter in order to give the organisation a terminal sucker reporter which would put its nose permanently out of joint. What happened next is the law of unintended consequences or the logic of unanticipated developments.

Hamas has proved much stronger, more determined and far more durable than conventionally expected while an embattled, humiliated and severely jolted Israel has decided to go for broke with no hostages taken. The biblical Masada complex, of fighting to the last man is at play once again.

The result has been the horrific carnage and wanton destruction that are now winging their way to a surreal finale on the storied border crossing with Egypt. The modern world is no longer safe when Israel decides to reenact the valour and feckless heroism of its ancient forebears.

It has been suggested that the Israeli Prime minister fears peace because he is eminently aware that a peace settlement will signal the end of his stranglehold on his nation. But other opinions suggest a far more ambivalent public with about half the populace secretly applauding Benjamin Netanyahu’s gung-ho and up and at “em” militarism.

It is a play of giants and the common mass of humanity has little or nothing to contribute except to watch in fretful silence as the grim denouement approaches. In the sanctuary of power, men and women are expendable just as flies are to wanton boys. Not even the UN and its humane and emotionally intelligent Secretary General have anything to say except to issue advisories brimming with apocalyptic forebodings. How many divisions does Antonio Guterres have?

However what may be, the only silver lining in the cloud in all this is the huge moral and ethical reawakening the Palestine/Israeli conflict has triggered the world over particularly among the youth which happen to be the most vital demographic. Dachau and Auschwitz happened a long time ago. It is no longer part of contemporary consciousness. All the young can see is the brutal battering and decimation of the hapless Palestinians as projected unto their screen.

The youthful Americans see their government as complicit in what they think is crime against humanity perpetrated by an American satellite with the military connivance of their own government. This is why all over American university campuses, from the east to the west coast and from the north to the deep south, irate and implacable students are up in arms.

It will not deter the belligerents. Only superior force can do that. But here again is where the law of unintended consequences and the logic of unanticipated developments may yet kick in again. If the current ferment and tempest drive America into the hands of an ultra-right government led by a berserk narcissist and megalomaniac conman come November, the wheel of fortunes would have turned full circle and America would have paid a dreadful price for its namby-pamby policy in the Middle East.