Some Middle East heroes’ exploits: A boomer’s reflection

Ake distressful video of 24-year-old Israeli hostage Evyatar David, made to dig his own grave in a Gazan tunnel reminded me of the harrowing accounts of the worst anti-Semetic violence perpetrated on Jews in the last century under Germany’s NAZI leader Adolf Hitler during World War II (1939-45).

- by Rohana R. Wasala

From the creation of Israel in 1948, they became persistent pursuers of their sadistic NAZI tormentors of the Holocaust. In our adolescent years in the ‘60s, we read exciting press narratives (in Sinhala newspapers and magazine periodicals) about shrewd Israeli agents hunting down Nazi persecutors of European Jews. The stories of their successful missions warmed our proud patriotic hearts, as did the accounts of the boxing ring victories since 1960 of the Black American Cassius Clay (who in 1964 became a Muslim convert as Muhammad Ali in protest against the racial prejudice that he experienced in his native America); the amazing power of his punches in the ring (punch force) was once a topic of excited discussion among us then. No doubt, we were more thrilled than our parents by such displays of brave defiance and independent self-assertion against white supremacists by descendants of their former victims, though we would have been unable to describe such feelings of strong empathy with Nazi pursuing Israeli Jews and Black American boxing champion Mohamed Ali as due to our own instinctive defiance of White imperial dominance, which really was the case.