THE ARAB FACADE: OCCUPIED PALESTINE STRIPPED OF RESISTANCE

In one of his celebrated poems, the famous Tamil poet Subramania Bharathi said, “Let’s destroy the world, if a single person cannot find food.” Reflecting moral urgency and responsibility, he also wrote, “If the young go hungry without food, let the world be destroyed!”

- By Ameen Izzadeen

His radical and resonant words, rooted in Asian ethical traditions, stand in stark contrast to the so-called Western values which are being corrupted by imperial powers that continue to shield Israel despite the Zionist entity's morally reprehensible use of starvation as a weapon against the Palestinian people, including children.

Humanitarianism is neither Western nor Oriental. If we have a modicum of humanity left in us, the basic working-class meal we partake of should appear to us as vulgar luxury when children in Gaza die of hunger.

Yet feeding the hungry has become conditional. There is no altruism. Only politics.

The condition is that Hamas must hand over the hostages and surrender its weapons for the war to end and the siege to be lifted. As much as these are Israel's demands, they are now also the Arab rulers’ demands. They are part of a surrender document euphemistically called the New York Declaration, adopted at the end of an international conference two weeks ago—a white paper of sorts, envisioning Gaza as an occupied territory stripped of resistance.

Keep Hamas aside and focus solely on resistance. International law defines resistance as the collective or individual actions taken by a people to oppose, challenge, or overthrow a foreign occupying power that exercises control over their territory without consent. This definition fully legitimises the Palestinian struggle from 1947. At that time, world powers manipulated the newly formed United Nations to pass an unjust resolution. This resolution gave native Arabs, who constituted about 70 percent of Palestine’s population, only 45 percent of the territory, while granting Jews, many of whom were European with little or no connection to the land, 55 percent of Palestine.”