The title of this article may be unacceptable to many readers across the world but that is what the ground reality is as far as the public opinion across the Muslim world is concerned, even though many Muslim governments enjoy a cozy relationship with Israel.
Whenever anything happens in Palestine, Muslims across the world react and sometimes the reactions turn violent. Recently, when Israeli troopers raided the Al-Aqsa Masjid, Muslim masses across the world protested on streets as well as on social media.Why it is like that? What is the nature of the relationship between Israel and Palestine?
While all of us know that the Jewish state called Israel and the Zionist ideology that sustains it along with the vested interests of international players like the USA, France and Britain is a recent invention of the erstwhile colonisers in the heart of the Arab world, what is more indigestible for a civilised human society that claims to thrive on the ideas of democracy, freedom and fraternity is that such an illegitimate construction of the colonisers has resulted in the dispossession and displacement of millions of Palestinian Arab Muslims.
With humiliating defeats that Egypt and other Arab states faced as a result of their defence against Israeli aggression which was supported and facilitated by the mightiest of Western powers, what people across the Muslim world understand about Israel is that it has been created for not only occupying the Arab world but for the creation of Greater Israel. The reality of Palestinian dispossession and displacement accompanied by their dehumanisation at the hands of Israel and Western powers is further accompanied by the idea of the Zionist plan of creating Greater Israel across the Middle East. Such remembrance and idea of Israel adds fuel to the fire and so the backlash whenever anything happens.
The biggest connection that the whole Muslim world has with Palestine is the existence of Bait ul Maqdis. For Muslims, it was their first Qibla before Prophet Mohammed started offering prayers in the direction of Ka’aba which is at Makka. There is this belief also that when Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) experienced ascension, he led all the one lakh and twenty four thousand prophets in a prayer at this Masjid before he started his journey towards the heavens.This element of faith and memory of a historical event connects Muslims living anywhere in the world with Palestine in general and Bait ul Maqdis in particular. It is, therefore, something natural that incidents like the recent raid and the subsequent desecration by Israeli troopers leads to widespread condemnation across the Muslim world as wherever there is a bond based on faith such things are inevitable.
Another thing that has been crippling the Muslim imagination is the fact that the powerful countries like the USA, Britain, France and Russia have not addressed the issue of Palestine; all these countries have rather supported Israel to the extent that the genuine issues of Palestinian Muslims have been reduced to a non-entity. Palwstine is being seen and portrayed as if it were a “land without people” without any right to dignified life. Muslims throughout the world not only see it like this but their postcolonial understanding of the issue confirms it. While they can understand that Jews too have a right to a dignified life but what they cannot understand is, and rightfully so, that it cannot be at the cost of Palestinian Muslims and their properties.
An important thing that the Western powers and Israel itself has to understand is that the creation of Israeli Jewish state stands on the claim that Jews have been in exile for a long period of time from a piece of land which they believe was once upon a time inhabited by their ancestors.There is no doubt about this claim. Jews lived in Palestine and other parts of the Arab world long before the arrival of Islam. All the three holy texts of Islam, Christianity and Judaism testify to this fact. The holy book of Islam, the Quran, talks about Jews and interacts with them also on a host of issues. When Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) migrated to Medina, Jews lived there also and there were many confrontations between the two. The history of the whole world has been like this. The question of originality and purity has always been a matter of serious debate and contestation.
As migration is one of the biggest facts of history, exiles on account of wars among people too have been a fact. While nobody on earth should and can contest the peaceful return of Jews to Palestine and other Arab countries, what everybody must contest is: 1) their forceful creation of a Zionist state that can be better described as an apartheid state and 2) their dispossessing and dehumanising of the present inhabitants of Palestine who include Muslims and Christians. If Hitler had been responsible for the holocaust of Jews and their ethnic cleansing, Jews have taken its revenge upon the Muslims community which never harmed them by snatching their land and olive gardens from them and by forcing them to leave Palestine and live in refugee camps away from their homes. This is what all humane souls across the world not only condemn but reject also. Noam Chomsky has criticised it and so has Edward Said and hundreds of other noted Christian, Jewish and Muslim intellectuals.
As far as Muslim masses across the world are concerned, such a thing is nothing but sheer injustice and oppression and so shall be always unacceptable. Drunk with the power of tanks, missiles, air force and nuclear technology which is all funded and supported by the Western powers, Israel continues to dehumanise, infantilise and miniaturise the Palestinian Muslim while feeling no shame in being an illegitimate state.
True that Israel with the help of the USA and other Western powers has been successful in neutralising the governments of Muslims states across the world including of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, but what it could not do is the management of the perception and understanding that Muslim masses across the world have about its place and position. It is also true that many Muslim leaders and Islamic scholars across the world have called for peace with Israel; however, what Muslims across the world have been calling for is the return of dignity, freedom, land and property to the dispossessed Palestinian Muslims and what Muslim masses reject is the Zionist agenda of the Jewish state.The way Israel has been expanding its control and authority over what does not belong to it has been acting as thorn in the Muslim perception of Israel; as a result of which Hamas and Islamic Jehad continue to have a strong support base among Palestinians, though Israel, the Western powers and some Muslim countries have unleashed a long and sustained propaganda against them for their de-legitimisation.
What to do?
In the backdrop of all these facts, the question is: what to do? And how to solve this long-pending humanitarian issue? In this regard, one can offer some humble submissions to the concerned parties of this long-drawn dispute which can at any time have disastrous impact on the whole Arab world.
Firstly, Israel and its Western supporters have to be honest before man and God and come forward with the resolution that they will not commit any aggression against the wretched Palestinian people. Going by their power politics, it sounds impossible but it is not difficult provided Israel and the USA are honest to the God who they invoke for the creation and development of Israel. Until the aggressor and powerful corrects his policies, genuine peace shall never have a chance in the world. The powerful countries and people have to learn to be honest and accountable before man and God and then only they can sermonise the wretched.
Secondly, after having closed the doors for all aggression and violence from both the sides, an amicable atmosphere for dialogue between the Palestinian state as it existed before the creation of Israel and Israelis could be initiated wherein the two parties can negotiate 1) the peaceful coexistence of all the religious communities without encroaching upon each other’s human rights and the right to free and dignified life; 2) the three religious communities can work out the Quranic formula of coming to commonalities between them and thus enter into an agreement of not hurting each other’s religious and worldly rights; 3) Israeli settlers would ensure that only Arab Jews can live there and Jews coming from France, America, Russia and other countries can come for religious rites only but not for having permanent homes on the land that is being snatched from Palestinians day in and day out; 4) that Israelis would be duty-bound to shun their Zionist agenda and their plan for Greater Israel in order to create a peaceful atmosphere for coexistence with their Muslim cousins.
The problem with human history has been that it is the weak who is always asked to straighten himself.The powerful is not dared to correct the wrongs that it does to mankind. If the world has to be a peaceful paradise, the corridors of power have to be just, humane and peace-loving; otherwise, their lust for land, colonialism, settlement and loot will continue to create “largest open prisons” like Palestine and other such places. Whether we like it not, the fact of the matter is that Israel and America, despite having state of art modern warfare technologies and control over the world market, are ultimately losers because they do not rule on the hearts of the people they forcibly rule and control. The USA and other powerful countries would be serving the interests of mankind if only they learn the art of humanising their power; otherwise, where there is power, there is resistance also.
Concluding, Israel must unilaterally stop the war that it has fuelled and come out of the gyre of genocide that it has been commiting for the last seventy years. Such an act itself would be a passport for dialogue and better perception among Muslim masses across the world. Until this happens, the binary of resistance vs power would continue to exist and this is something that the larger interests of the human world cannot afford for long.

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Ameen Fayaz