P. A. Chacko S.J
Just a month old chick! Separated by a terrorist aggressor. There were 11 chicks and their mother. One fine morning our dog got furious and bit the mother and other chicks and tore them to pieces.
Now, lonely and sad, the only survivor chick tries to survive somehow by roaming alone and looking for feed. I felt sad seeing its abandoned and lonely situation.
I was reminded of the scene I saw in Gaza, projected on a TV screen. On a pavement, beside the heap of bombed buildings, a six year old girl child lay homeless as the only survivor of a family.
A gentle hand tapped her awake. Her appearance showed that she was starving, weak, helpless and frightened. Her eyes evoked empathy.
A hand was outstretched to her with some items of food. Probably, the hand that might guide her to a refugee camp!
But even refugee shelters are bombed. You hunt for a Hamas terrorist by killing a thousand Palestinians. Half of them children!
How long my Lord, how long this Operation Terror? Did you weaponize the aggressor? Did you allow him to weaponize the Bible?
Does it seem that the conscience of the world is numb, speechless and blacked out at this mindless and terrorist operation of genocide?
How long will this go on? This ethnic cleansing, this genocide, this mindless murder of innocents? The displacement of a hundred thousand and more?
The colluding nations ejaculate pious platitudes without insisting on ceasefire and cessation of hostilities? Some call for suspension, not cessation of hostilities or war. Some call for a humanitarian corridor to reach food supplies to Palestinian refugees in shelters and camps. But the war must go on! Just a corridor, not the end of war!
Israel’s conspirator colleague and accomplice says that a suspension of fighting is enough, not cessation of hostilities or stoppage of war. War drums should keep on sounding! His weapons should reach Israel without hindrance. Weaponizing is his avowed business.
The rejectionists and those opposed to peace in lacerated, bombed and pulverized Palestine either engage in the battlefield with men and material or by weaponizing the war-mongering aggressor, while some, like hypocrites, sit on the opportunistic fence. Some dish out pious platitudes seemingly to quieten their ‘troubled’ conscience. Some issue monumental and sinew-less resolutions one after another. To what end?
Some collaborate and collude with their silence. Silence is collusion. Some are lavish with a prayer in silence. And then retreat into their niche!
The aggressor can even weaponize the Bible and quote it boldly thinking that people will buy his argument. He dares to quote the Biblical passages like 1 Samuel 15.2-3: “Thus says the God of Israel…No go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” What a God of revenge! This is what the aggressor uses as his weapon to wage war against innocent men, women, children, infants and all in today’s Palestine! Even the devil quoted the Bible to Palestine-born Jesus to force him to work a miracle.
But one thing is sure. Truth cannot be buried for long. The blood of the thousands of innocent children, massacred in Palestine, as in the time of the Jewish king Herod, will spawn a new generation or generations of people, determined generations of men and women, claiming their rightful space in history, their rightful place as a secure nation among the community of nations.
They will have a thousand questions to ask their aggressors, their accomplices, those one-nation-pushers. Their soul-searching questions will act as a double- edged sword thrust into the heart of the United Nations, the self-proclaimed champion of human rights and protector of human lives for its week-kneed reactions and responses, for its being slavishly subservient to the damn Veto power of the so-called Mighty Five.
The new generations will dare to ask the god of war of any aggressor why he weaponizes psychopath, nationalist and megalomaniac political leaders who go on a mad war path to bomb and kill, to destroy and annihilate. Be he the God of the Old Testament Bible or a God of revenge, aggression and destruction, he will be confronted.
The new generation in Palestine or elsewhere, will confront and confound the silent onlookers, the silent collaborators when the innocent God of peace was crucified again by bombing his dwelling, by bombing people and their homes, by making thousands homeless and dispossessed.
I was silent when my neighbor was unjustly butchered. I even silently said a prayer for his eternal peace in the next world. And, when they put their bayonet against my chest, the bystanders moved away muttering a prayer that I may silently submit to my butchers!