Victory remains in Gaza if we don’t win too
On Tuesday, Hamas and Israel finally reached an open-ended truce deal that ended 50 days of intense fighting. Both sides claimed victorious but the response from the people from both sides was an obvious gauge to which side actually got the upper hand in the battle and gained the most from the ceasefire negotiation.
Almost immediately, the people of Gaza joyously came out of the rubbles of their destroyed homes and in bandages to join a huge celebration rally attended by all resistance factions led by the Al-Qassam Brigades. Youths were seen taking selfies with the fighters, kids collecting sweets while the others cheering to speeches by their leaders.
An absolutely different atmosphere was observed in Tel Aviv, less than 100km north. The announcement by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was returned with ridicules by the local media and the public. Some of his cabinet partners publicly reconsidered their political support as Operation Protective Edge entered the history book as another humiliating failure to the Zionist State.
As a matter of fact, Israel not only lost in the battlefield, it is also increasingly losing the remaining support to its oppressive agenda as waves of awareness once again swept through the world.
Rallies protesting the inhumane treatment of the Palestinians were held in major cities around the globe, with larger number of participants, during the 7-week conflict with calls for tougher political pressure on Israel from world powers become louder than ever.
It is the growing of the global awareness and pressure like this that worries Israel, and the US as its biggest sponsor, protector and weapon provider, more than the rockets of Hamas do. It has all the precursors to the ending of the apartheid era in South Africa not too long ago, and the powerful Jewish lobby in the US will do all it can not to let that happen to Israel.
Even more worrying to the US especially is the close relation between the misery of the Palestinians and the Islamic revival globally. It can be observed how during the past several wars in Gaza, Islamic countries, organisations and individuals throughout the world come together providing financial and medical supports, organizing awareness campaigns, pooling diplomatic backing and so on.
The Muslim world has witnessed how acting in solidarity could gain so much and was actually not at all impossible. Some even managed to set aside their differences in order to achieve a bigger aspiration for the ummah.
It was believed that one of the key drivers for Israel to begin the attack last month was to disrupt the Palestinian unity government agreement signed between rivals Hamas and Fatah early in June.
Closer to home, the awareness of the Palestinians issue, and by extension on the Islamic causes, has spread remarkably too among the public.
Millions of ringgit were collected from the masses in a short period of time and delivered to Gaza. Thousands registered as volunteers to join countrywide campaigns, demonstrations or just to pass leaflets around.
A Facebook page by the name of We Are All Al Qassam initiated by Aman Palestin had garnered more than 100,000 ‘Likes’ barely a month from its launch. It was obvious that some were troubled by this development when Facebook suddenly removed the page without warnings to the administrators.
(Undeterred, Aman Palestin initiated another page, Himpunan Solidariti Ummah, as its replacement and it now has accumulated the same number of followers in just 2 weeks!)
Sabotages such as that are always expected. It is a well-known fact that the Western media, for example, have been working extra hard to put any effort for Islamic causes in bad light.
Hamas for example, is still referred to as militants and terrorists by this media and always blamed for the ongoing suffering of the Palestinians. It is somewhat ironic as the liberation of these very people is the fundamental purpose of its establishment.
The idea is for the world community to distance themselves from the resistance movement. Palestinians were then expected to demonstrate ‘hospitality’ and move on with whatever amount of land, and dignity, that remain.
They were told that Hamas is to blame for all their suffering as if deliberately forgetting the fact that the movement was only established by late 1980s, when almost 90% of the Palestinian land already seized by Israel, millions displaced in refugee camps and hundreds of thousands killed or injured.
Sadly, a similar line of propaganda can also be heard here in Malaysia. In his column, Zurairi AR of The Malaymail Online, for instance, not only parroted the same line of argument, he even fell back to the banal anti-semitism assertion when referring to the local groups that campaign for the awareness of the Israel’s atrocities.
(It would be ‘interesting’ to see how those Malaysians that subscribe to this line of thought would reinterpret the story of our pre-Independence heroes that fought relentlessly against foreign exploitation and subjugation. After all, the British also referred Mat Kilau, Tok Janggut, Syarif Masahor and the others as extremists, terrorists and the likes.)
Given how extensive the Palestinian issue has positively catalyzed the Islamic revival globally, it is easy to understand why this media chose to simply ignore the historical aspect of the conflict, and even the suffering, and instead resorted to highlight, albeit wrongly, on the resistance struggle.
It is part of a concerted effort to create a pacified Muslims, ones with submitting mindset, who would just follow how the US would expect them to respond in such a situation or risked being stereotyped as hostile, extreme, conservative and indoctrinated.
It is designed to make Muslims feel awkward to exercise their right or to pursue Islamic causes such as uniting the ummah, return to the original teaching of Islam or liberating Palestine. A submissive Muslims that simply toed to the line is essential for the continuation of the US hegemony.
And now a dubious group called Islamic State becomes the flavor of the month for this media to implicate as bad an image to Islam as possible. The opportunity to liberally associate those who support Palestinian resistance, or Islamic causes in general, with this ruthless group is being fully leveraged on by this media, including by their proxy in Malaysia too.
(Who is actually behind this group remains shady, but going by the modus operandi of the US in previous conflict zones it involved in (Salvador, Angola, Cambodia and Afghanistan to name a few), it is totally justifiable if one were not to conclude differently with this one. It is a tested approach to directly turn the tide of the conflicts to its favour and had been so repeatedly deployed that it is not surprising if Islamic State is actually an asset of the US or its allies.)
As Muslims, we should recognize that Palestinian conflict is not just about the issue of territorial occupation. Therein lays the key to a united ummah, one that is totally revived with a clear Islamic vision and understanding as taught by the Prophet.
We must realize that nothing can be achieved if we only do this seasonally – that is only when Palestine is under attacks. It is the attack to our mindset, shrewdly propagated by their media machinery, that we should be most cautious of and need to be always prepared for.
Let our continuous support for a liberated Palestine complements our effort in improving our understanding of Islam and returning to its original teaching without any doubt. Let us all strive to achieve this so that the day will come when the celebration rally will be held grandly for one last time, not in Gaza, but in the compound of the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
Umar Hakim Mohd Tajuddin
ISMA Activist
ISMA Activist
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