OF CABBAGES AND KINGS | Rebuild, but don’t displace: Will world compel Trump to retract Gaza plan? | Farrukh Dhondy
I was certainly aware that Israel had been established after Hitler’s Holocaust, but didn’t connect it with Balfour’s 1917 declaration
“The empty shell
The crumbled walls
No chance of an echo though
The shell holds the promise of hollows
--Home of all that resounds.
As through a ruined abbey
The prayers pronounced
When there was a roof
Penetrated and rose like steam
Aiming for heaven
Several light-years away.”
From The Alchemy of Tin Turn, by Bachchoo
As a teenager I knew a lot about the history of India and a substantial amount about the history of Britain from the Roman conquest, through Henry VIII’s execution of his wives to the East India Company’s initiation of colonialism.
As a Parsi I knew something of the Hakamanyush (“Achaemenid”) and Sassanian dynasties and the conquest by Arab barbarians of Zoroastrian Persia in around 642 AD.
I was certainly aware that Israel had been established after Hitler’s Holocaust, but didn’t connect it with Balfour’s 1917 declaration. I suppose I knew about the 1948 defeat of the British Mandate in Palestine and the establishment of the Zionist nation. I don’t think I thought about the cost and to whom.
Having grown up attending Christian schools, I and my mates were familiar with the story of Moses and the Israelites and were probably induced to believe that the Philistines were the enemies of humanity and decency. Didn’t they pit the monster Goliath against the young David and lose?
How history reverses itself? Many decades later we see Israel as Goliath and pray that Palestinian Dawood can be equipped with a sling.
In my youth anti-Semitism was not something I was aware of. The Holocaust and the liberation of Jews from concentration camps generated sympathy for the establishment of a Jewish homeland.
And that not just through recent recollections of history but through my firm and friendly acquaintance with boys of my age from the Baghdadi Jewish families who had settled in Pune (then Poona) and were my classmates. My very close friend was one George Iny, with whom I shared many pre-teen and teenage adventures -- innocent and naughty.
Then there was in my class one of my chief rivals for mathematical supremacy called Sassoon Daniel. There were others, the Mordecai brothers, whose family owned the Imperial Hosiery on Mahatma Gandhi Road, and the boarders in our Poona school sent from Mumbai, among these a friend called Eli Nissan.
Yes, they talked and sang about Israel and, as we were in and out of each other’s houses, I heard the talk and the lyrics of longing about transforming the Negev desert and what they boasted were acts of civilisation. Still no real information about the devastation to the native Palestinian population.
And then came a book by the editor of Blitz, the weekly mag (or rag) published in Bombay. The editor was a fellow Parsi called R.K. Karanjia and his weekly was a cross between a scurrilous gossip sheet and socialistic conviction. The book he wrote was called The Dagger of Israel, the title being inspired by the shape of the country on the map.
The book spoke of the displacement of the native Palestinian population. It did change my perspective and did lead to arguments and inconclusive estrangements from my Jewish friends.
As the decades pass, the world witnesses the tragedy of Palestine, the relentless erosion of land, life and liberty. Despite mutterings of solidarity from Iran and some ambivalent “support” from the Arab nations, no one has yet stepped forward to provide Dawood with the slings and stones to confront Goliath.
We have recently witnessed the ineffectual participation of Iran with its missiles being shot down by the “Iron Dome” or whatever the Zionists call their so-far-impenetrable defences. And Goliath is well armed with American and British death-dealing and destructive weapons.
It was not as if the leaders of Hamas, safe in Qatar or elsewhere, who got their foot soldiers to launch the October 7, 2023 attack weren’t aware of this balance of forces. Neither could they have been oblivious to the vicious ideology of the Benjamin Netanyahu Cabinet. They knew that mass retaliation would follow their murder and hostage-taking and perhaps even calculated that this would change world opinion in favour of Palestine.
One may even speculate that they didn’t imagine that the retaliation would turn to genocide, believing that significant players in the world would restrain “Bibi” Netanyahu’s hand?
It didn’t happen. Gaza today is a wasteland with 80,000 dead and millions displaced, homeless and without adequate food, medicines and even water.
Just as Hamas’ leaders miscalculated or misread the disposition of nations, who they thought had the will or capacity to come to the aid and protection of Palestine, we are now faced with what I read as the miscalculation of the opposing side.
US President Donald Trump, with his mandate from 48 per cent of the American voting population, declares that he is going to “rebuild” Gaza -- probably planning to bully the Arab oil-producing nations to finance it -- and turn it into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.
Perhaps he thinks he can have a monopoly of Trump family hotels along Gaza’s beaches. The corollary is the displacement, the forcible expulsion, of the entire Palestinian population to other countries, mainly Jordan and Egypt.
Both those countries and a majority of the displaced Palestinians have said it can’t be done. The coming weeks will, in my estimation, prove that Donald Trump has alienated world opinion with this plan and he’ll have to retract.
Rebuild, yes, displace? No!
