By now everyone on earth with an online access would have been aware of the incursion by Hamas across the Gaza with Israel and kidnapping and killing of innocent civilians. Israeli armed forces are on standby for a ground invasion into Gaza, with the aim of eliminating Hamas once and for all. It would be easier said than done. With a divided administration before this sortie, it be a challenge for Israel to muster enough consensus among its population for them if they be able to stomach caskets of Israeli soldiers coming home. With lack of sufficient intelligence on Hamas underground tunnels within Gaza, the casualties are expected to be sizeable. Remember high US casualties numbers in urban warfare along the streets of Fallujah and Mosul. And how the tunnel rats of Vietnam contributed to the US downfall in Indochina war of attrition.
Time is not on Israel side. As Sun Tzu noted, “Speed is the essence of war. Take advantage of the enemy’s unpreparedness; travel by unexpected routes and strike him where he has taken no precautions”. The world is also pressuring Israel to take the high road as it presses for the release of hostages and and the targeted revenge on Hamas terrorists, instead of widespread bombing of targets co-inhabited by civilians.
Both sides seem to be right from their own caucuses. The pessimistic ones would lament how unlikely this conflict would be resolved before the end of their life. Two states solutions have been argued and negotiated for years, since the times of resolution 242, but the none of these has born fruits. Essentially, the dispute can be boiled down on land ownership. Both Jews (Israeli) and Arabs (Palestinians) have claimed it as theirs alone. From a purely historical perspective, “Israel” predates “Palestine” by more than a millennium. But, with the Jewish people then dispersed from their homeland, “Palestine” became home to a substantial Arab population, again for more than a millennium.
If Hamas and the fundamentalists believe in wiping Israel out of this land, which according to the Book of Genesis, was the land promised by God to descendants of Abram’s, then the solution is even farther than the Alpha Centauri. Israel rhetoric in the past years have been, ‘If Palestinians lay down their arms, there will be peace in the Holy Land. If the Israeli lay down their arms, there would be no Israel.’ This oratory would not work as the solution either. In the mean time, the world awaits with an abated breath, praying that the altercation would not become a stepping stone for the all-dreaded WWIII!
Analogy and Contradiction with Western Myanmar
We are also in land dispute. On one side is the Myanmar people, Myanmar government and Myanmar Constitution. The other side is the Bangladeshi illegal immigrants, who labelled themselves as ‘Rohingyas’ demanding the self administrative land and the right to citizenship of Myanmar.
Myanmar people do not want them in Myanmar. Neither does the government. They are also not one of the 135 ethnic races recognised by our Constitution. Akin to the problems in the Holy Land, the British imperialists are the culprit of this problem and as usual, they left this trashy inheritance for the people of Myanmar. They brought these labourers from East Pakistan to work in rice fields within Myanmar and to work as their servants, yet as a role model for responsible and accountable behaviour of a fallen ex-super power, they did not bring them back to their places of origins post WWII period.
Most Islamic countries believe the land does not belong to Israel, despite the archeological fact that Jews were there prior. Yet, they want Myanmar to allow these ‘Rohingyas’ the right of stay and the right of citizenship, even though their invasion and illegal occupation has been less than 150 years old. It all boils down to land issue here too. The illegal occupation of land is still illegal.
Contrary to their position in Israel, most Arab countries and OIC are demanding the right of these illegal Bangladeshi to continue occupying the golden land. If they want the illegal occupiers of Arab lands to get out, should they not insist on illegal occupiers of Myanmar lands across the Western front to leave the land too?
