Still on Gaza and the martyrdom of Jamilah Al-Shanti

As you are reading this, the total number of Palestinians who would have died from the Israeli invasion of Gaza in the past week would probably be four thousand now. In fact, on Wednesday night, Jamilah Al-Shanti, the first woman to be elected to the political bureau of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), was martyred in an Israeli bombing in the Gaza Strip. She was killed hours after the massacre of hundreds of patients in a hospital in the city. 

In the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza, nothing is capable of escaping the Jewish fire and fury. ‘’This is a war Hamas caused against itself’, the Jewish mouthpiece would argue. Hamas dared the tiger to show its ‘tigeritude’; the oppressed ‘invited’ the oppressor to a battle; the mouse wagged its tail in front of the cat. “Blame Hamas, not Israel for this war”, the Israeli propagandist said in a television interview. In other words, in a season where might is right, where justice is defined and determined by what pleases the powerful, where humans are described as ‘animals’ for daring to ‘speak up’, for reminding the world that Palestine is still under occupation, silence is and should be golden. The error committed by Hamas last Saturday resulted in its attempt to remind the world of the Palestinian question, not necessarily or exclusively that of showing to the world that there is no impenetrable fortress on this earth. 

While this tragedy unfolds, the powerful across the world have been busy paying solidarity visits to the oppressor. The powers that signed the Balfour Declaration that eventuated in the establishment of the state of Israel in the heartland of Palestine in 1948 have, as usual, continued to show their support to Israel in its retaliatory campaign in Gaza. On the contrary, there is no way anybody can visit Gaza now in order to show solidarity with close to two million Arab-Christian and Muslim (Palestinians) who are going through systematic annihilation and massacre. Gaza is a no-go area. It has always been. Gaza is hell on earth, it has always been. Nobody wants to go to hell. To live in Gaza before this war is to constantly take permission from Israel before you breathe; it is to live on the margins of life. 

Pondering how Tel Aviv has now become a Makkah of some sort to the powerful in our world today, and no thoughts are being spared by the latter for the victims of the Israeli invasion, Gaza then becomes a metaphor; a metaphor for the current state of affairs of the Arab-Muslim world. Gaza is a metaphor for how inconsequential the Muslim world has become. It is a metaphor for the utter state of lethargy into which the Arab world is steeped. Yes. Solidarity marches and rallies are being carried out all around the world. But what effect are these on the lives being lost in Gaza? Of what effect were the previous ones carried out since 1948 on the fortune and future of the inhabitants of the open hell in Gaza?

Gaza is also a metaphor for Jerusalem. Yes. No other city in the world today is host to the holy sites and monuments of the three Abrahamic faiths all at the same time and within the same geographical space such as Jerusalem. There in Jerusalem lies the al-Aqsa mosque- “the farthest mosque”: the first destination of Prophet Mohammad (s.a.w) on his night journey from Makkah, from where he ascended to heaven to speak with the Almighty. That journey is known in Islamic hermeneutics as al-Isra wa al-Miraaj. 

For Christians, Jerusalem is equally the land of choice, the ‘promised land’, the holy land. There, Christian theologians would argue, nests the holy site in which the whole Christian enterprise found exemplification. For Christians, Jesus, their messiah, was born in Jerusalem, there he was killed and there he came back to life. There in Jerusalem lies the Calvary where Jesus was supposedly crucified. Here in Nigeria, Christians go on pilgrimage to Israel regularly. Without a visit to Jerusalem and in the absence of the Christian Holy site in the city, the whole idea of Christendom would become invalid.

For the Jews, Jerusalem hosts the Wailing Wall or the Western Wall in Judaism, the religion of the Jews. The city is believed by Jews to be the centre of the world; it is the only city, in their estimation, where God could “reside”. There in the city lies the Temple Mount in Judaism, the temple reportedly built by King Solomon aeons ago. As of today, Jerusalem is under the control of Israel; access to al-Aqsa mosque remains encumbered and impeded. 

The least you can do today is remember your brethren in Gaza and pray that the Almighty send succour and support to them from Himself. The city is no longer an open prison; it is currently a slaughterhouse.