Viewing the enemy as a human being is not easy. Devi Rajab
THE Greek saying “Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad” is perhaps most applicable in the case of the Middle Eastern conflict.
As Israel and Hamas lock horns in Gaza, a tessellated state of a once-proud Palestine, they are causing havoc in the lives of citizens. The unspeakable atrocity enacted before our eyes of beautiful innocent children and poor vulnerable people carrying their life’s earnings in plastic bags and of mothers laden with babies and helpless fathers in search of dead children running into nowhere as missiles attack them from both sides, is shocking.
What we are seeing on our television screens is just the beginning of their nightmare. The impact of war lives on and on in the hearts and minds of its victims.
What a sin for the men and women who nod their approval behind the scenes and go on to eat their breakfast and tuck their children into warm fluffy beds at night without a care.
The American taxpayer is contributing $3 billion (R57.5bn) in military aid annually to support Israel without making this contingent on resolving the problem.
As we go about our daily business, can we switch off the reality of what human beings are doing to our planet? In the Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon? We certainly cannot, because in the words of John Donne, “No man is an island unto himself”.
At the end of the day, we are all mere specks in the global stratosphere. Our false sense of imposed identities is superficial, man-made, and unnecessary in the whole scheme of things.
When Shylock the Jew poignantly asks in The Merchant of Venice: “If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
He did so to raise awareness of Jewish suffering and humiliation.
Ironically, this would apply equally to the Palestinians or whoever else the enemy may be.
But viewing the enemy as a human being is not easy. In war or territorial conflicts of this nature, the tendency is to dehumanise the enemy, making them mindless, soulless and heartless, and therefore easy to eliminate without feeling remorse.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describes the Palestinians as uncivilised. In a strange way, the oppressor becomes his own victim as he dehumanises himself in the process. To the Israelis, the Palestinians are not people, and to the Palestinians, the Israelis are incommunicable demons.
What do the Palestinians want other than their homeland? What do the Israelis want other than their separate state on shifting sands?
I came face to face with the problem in 1970. Sitting in the courtyard of the American University in Cairo, I was watching the antics of the rich and beautiful play tennis, sip coffee and glide gracefully by. A young man came and sat beside me and we exchanged platitudes about our national origins.
“South African,” I hesitantly stated. “Palestinian,” he proudly claimed.
I can’t recall whether he was Christian or Muslim but we had similar stories to share.
“My family left because of the Group Areas Act,” I explained.
“You went quietly,” he asked, “without a fight?”
The young Palestinian was angry. I was philosophical like most first- or second-generation settlers.
Shrugging my shoulders, I said: “We had two choices – either to accept our lot and move to whatever areas they allocated to us or find new pastures.”
“Never,” he stated emphatically.
“My pasture is my heritage. You are wandering around the world. I am hovering in the flanks, along the borders of my ancestral land – in transit, waiting to go home.
“Someday, I want my children to touch the soil and call home Palestine. The British had no right to go beyond their mandate over Palestine to create a Jewish state by giving away Palestinian land,” he said.
Most Jewish Israelis view their conflict with their Palestinian neighbour as a nationalist one between two irreconcilable nationalist claims to the same small land, holy places and scarce water.
Most Palestinians, on the other hand, consider the conflict as a colonial conquest by foreign intruders who occupy ancestral territory by superior force and displace the original inhabitants.
Over the years, the Israelis have been subjecting the first-nation Palestinians as old as their olive trees to a dehumanising process of psychological warfare.
Similar to what the nationalist government did to the African people when they controlled access to land, education and self-rule and stifled their aspirations, so too (but on a much larger scale) has the Israeli government curtailed the development of the Palestinian people. Daily, their lives are, in the words of Noam Chomsky, “worse than it was for black people under apartheid”.
Our sense of global humanity evokes strong feelings and responsibilities towards our fellow human beings more acutely than ever before. The threat to world peace is real. Where is this eye-for-an-eye logic going to leave us but all blinded?
William Faulkner’s words need to be heeded when he said: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
Devi Rajab is an award-winning columnist and psychologist. She is the author of Indian Women from Indenture to Democracy.
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