There can be no greater insult to the remaining inhabitants of Gaza than to attempt yet another cool and “objective” piece of political commentary.
If a child in Gaza could be allowed to sing a rhyme before being mashed to a mangled pulp, she might say, using Shakespeare updated:
As flies to wanton boys
Are we to the Israeli military;
They kill us for their sport.
Not in darkness, hidden from the world, but in open sunlight, making concession to memory.
The roving minstrel might sing with Sahir Ludhianvi:
Here in this world
Human life is a toy;
Here, not the living but the dead bring joy;
Here corpses are more available
Then a living girl or boy.
You see, friends, civilised people have had enough of mourning.
Besides, sensible are those who know when to call it a day in the face of the ordained.
Only fools still roam the cemetery to report back on the latest numbers of the slaughtered, before they themselves join the duly departed.
Meanwhile, such things as a “bloodbath” or a “carnage” happen, when it does in the stock market, not in the killing fields of Palestine; and “sentiment” belongs to tariffs and investments, not to homo sapiens.
Hurry up please, it is time to make money, then some more money too.
After all, would you rather have Muslim men, women, and children in Gaza or a European riviera along the Mediterranean?
Let us please be reasonable: how may even the most puissant of Samaritans turn back God’s mysterious purposes?
God
Mysterious indeed: let us return to the bard for a takeaway.
You may recall what words Macduff, hiding in England from the Scottish Macbeth, uters as news is given to him of how the fascist butcher has put his wife and all his children to the sword in his absence:
Did Heaven look on,
and would not take their part?
So you see, gods have this old habit of looking on and leaving the meek to be slaughtered for sins known only to them; often perhaps just to relieve the boredom that excessive peace can engender among humans and gods alike.
So, you may well ask, where does this schema of divine and human intentions leave the next hundreds due for death in the coming round of bombings?
Short answer: to their own devices.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
