Gaza, the 21st century Warsaw Ghetto?

AS the Gaza death toll mounts, and as politicians scurry for peace talks, there is a lot for South Africans to ponder on. This is because for those who have moral scruples, Israel is – according to the 1973 UN Convention and the 2003 Rome Statutes – guilty of the international crime of apartheid.   

Ultimately, there has to be legal accountability for this, a fate that Israel has deftly avoided through the veto powers of its greatest ally since 1967, the US, and its own refusal to acknowledge the International Criminal Court.  

In the UN a vote on whether to investigate war crimes in Gaza was passed 29-1. There were limp-wristed European abstentions and the US – unconscionably – was against it. This should be a sober reminder of how certain countries, including Israel, quietly connived with South Africa during the dark apartheid years.  

This is something that as South Africans we have an institutional memory of. Did not the world’s most powerful nation regard our very own anti- apartheid activists, including Nelson Mandela,  as ‘terrorists’ deep into the 1990’s? Did not Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the Cold War hawks, deem apartheid as a lesser evil than communism? 

And in 2014, pandering to Israel’s major industry of manufactured paranoia, are these governments not cynically deeming that chaotic, militaristic secularism – vis à vis Egypt, for example – is the devil they’d rather know than Muslim-friendly regimes ruling from Cairo and Gaza City?  

And before local Zionist apologists (who benefitted from South African apartheid) get ready to bellow how comparisons can’t be made between South African and Israeli apartheid, we need to understand that Israel qualifies as an apartheid state on two critical questions within the conventions and statutes: intention and execution.  

South Africa created the model. The Afrikaner Nationalists, voted into power by a white minority in 1948, ensured that 80% of the indigenous population would be confined to less than 10% of the land in an act of economic and political domination, a domination based on race.  

Zionism (ironically an avowedly secular movement) intended to create a Jewish state, also based on racial domination. A master plan was executed that saw Zionists annexing nearly 80% of the land in defiance of the UN Partition Decision. Facts speak: over 500 Palestinian villages and 10 urban centres were ethnically cleansed with two-thirds of the indigenous population displaced.  

The incremental theft of Palestinian land has continued ever since, enhanced by the building of settlements in the illegally occupied West Bank. To deny that this hasn’t expressed the intention of naked dispossession and racial domination – as some do – is very naïve.  

Further confirmation is the ‘Security Barrier’, an eight metre-high monstrosity that meanders for over 600 kms through the West Bank like a concrete tapeworm. Considered an illegal construction by the International Court of Justice in 2004, it encircles Palestinian towns and cities, and cuts off Palestinian access to land.   

This is further exacerbated by the Absentee Property Law, which decrees that Israel can confiscate ‘unused Palestinian land’ on the other side of the wall. In this case, apartheid is legislated – something that the Afrikaners perfected. 

Of course, there can be no argument when it comes to degrees. Our monstrous experiment in racial domination came to an end in 1994. Israel’s pogrom has continued , and in the same way South Africa’s apartheid regime destabilised neighbouring states such as Angola and Mozambique, Israel has done exactly the same to Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt. 

By far the most tragic victim of all this has been Gaza, a fingernail of a territory bordered by Egypt and the Mediterranean. Once renowned for its fruit trees and ancient cultures, Gaza has become an Israeli house of slaughter. 

About 40 kms long and about 10 kms wide, it is one of the world’s most densely populated areas. Eighty percent of its population has refugee origins and 70% have to rely on aid to survive. Some commentators have even ventured that Gaza is the ‘Warsaw Ghetto’ of the 21st century.  

Granted, it is an extremely uncomfortable association – the Nazi progroms against Warsaw’s Jewish inhabitants were absolutely horrendous and unjustified – but surely that should nag at the conscience of those who, in possession of the world’s most lethal weapons, have been killing unarmed Gazan civilians since 2008? 

Cut off from Israel since 2007, punished for having elected Israel’s whipping-boy Hamas in 2006 and only partially open to Egypt through the Rafah border, Gazans are confined in an open-air prison they cannot leave. There is Israeli sanction on even the most basic of commodities like cement, fertiliser and even musical instruments.  

In other words, the new Israeli apartheid is called ‘containment’ – herd people into confined areas and make life so unpleasant that they want to leave. As more and more bodies are dragged out from the rubble of Gaza, it is evident Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has through Operation Protective Edge, taken Israeli ‘containment’ to an entirely new level of barbarism. 

As the Norwegian doctor, Dr Mads Gilbert at Shifa hospital told me angrily last week: “…the Israelis have become more ruthless than ever, they’re killing whole families and knocking out whole apartment blocks. I tell you, ISIS is here in Israel!” 

Or as an emotional UNICEF official told me after a UN School had been bombed by the IDF. “I doubt whether there is any compassion left for the people of Gaza.” 

These are strong statements from normally sanguine people. 

Back in post-apartheid South Africa we have a lot to be grateful for, in spite of fears surrounding corruption, crime and poverty. Thankfully our townships, once ‘little Gaza’s’ due to their being easily contained during the apartheid era, were never bombed for days on end from the sea and air by US provided munitions.  

But given the massive extent of the carnage in Gaza, it’s a small consolation right now. For not only do the people of Gaza need our prayers, they need our help to become human by putting Israel in the dock for its war crimes. 

March for Gaza, Cape Town, 16 July

IMAGES from the march to Parliament on Gaza organised by the Muslim Judicial Council and the Al Quds Foundation with the support of the trade union COSATU, the BDS campaign, the Palestine solidarity movement, Kairos and political parties such as the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and the Economic Freedom Fighters.

About 25,000 people bedecked in Palestinan colours marched from District Six to parliament to hand over a memorandum demanding the recall of the SA amabassador in Tel Aviv and the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador in South Africa. Calls were made for an intensification of boycotts and the prosecution of South Africans serving in the IDF in Gaza.

The Palestinian ambassador to South Africa, Abdul Hafiz Nofal, attended the march and spoke to the crowd, saying the situation in Gaza was getting worse by the day. The memorandum was accepted by Sipho Masongo, chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on International Relations and Co-operation.

 

 

 

Photos copyright Shafiq Morton

Gaza: yet another Israeli miscalculation

 

Gaza, with its 1.7 million population
 is one of the most crowded places on the planet.
Photo Copyright Shafiq Morton

 

THE gloves need to come off on the truth of what has been happening in Gaza – not only since the launch of Operation Protective Edge last week, but also since Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012 and Operation Cast Lead in 2008. What is the real purpose of these bare-fisted operations?

To call Israeli acts of aggression in Gaza – in which Palestinian civilians are by far the worst victims – a ‘war’ is to do a disservice to the meaning of the word. A war is when two armies face each other and fight on the basis of a military equivalence.

So if there is no war, what is there? Informed commentators such as the The Independent’s Robert Fisk have observed that the story we are deliberately not being told is that the Gaza offensive is about land. Politically, it is about final Zionist hegemony.

In this model if you neutralise the land, you neutralise any chance of Palestinian sovereignty and any chance of territorial sacrifice. The Apartheid Wall has already cut the West Bank into pieces that can be further shrunk by illegal settlements. And if you squeeze long enough, maybe the people on the land will leave too.

Israeli apartheid already  determines when West Bankers can cross the 600-odd checkpoints, when they can receive water, when they can have electricity and when they can seek medical care and even what roads they can drive on.

Gaza is the last sliver of territory where a Palestinian administration has a few shreds of autonomy. But it has had to face three military incursions in six years designed at destroying its infrastructure. The dark purpose here has been to either foment insurrection against Hamas, or to encourage depopulation.

To justify its latest episode of brutality, the Israeli administration has had to play its usual game of equivalence and manufactured paranoia. Iran is poised to drop an atomic bomb. ISIS in Iraq might sweep into Jordan and over-run the whole region. Boko Haram is a cousin of ISIS and Hamas is the Big Brother.

But how do you justify your next crack at Gaza? All you do is create hype about an unrelated kidnapping incident on the West Bank. You blame it on Hamas, your favourite whipping boy;  a Hamas that dared to defy the script of being a monster when it entered into a unity government with Fatah, and actually posed a prospect of peace.

The other point, also ignored, is that the constitution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party does not recognise a Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s idea of peace with Palestinians, if he can’t find reasons not to talk to them, is to batter them into total submission à la Ariel Sharon.

In terms of Israel striking at Gaza, there needs to be perspective. The reality in Gaza and the West Bank is that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas do not have armies. There is no equivalence here whatsoever. The Palestinian Authority does not have tanks, F16 fighter jets, anti-aircraft artillery, helicopter gunships, drones, naval vessels or Iron Dome Defence Systems.

The Palestinians do not even have generals, and yet – if one believes the nonsense emitted from Tel Aviv – they are somehow capable of conducting a fully-blown ‘war’ against the world’s fourth largest army. Worse still, this is an army that has been fingered in the Goldstone Report  for white-flag killings and the use of illegal phosphorous and cluster bombs on civilians.

Hamas’ rockets, which are glorified fire-crackers in steel drums, have never been a match for the technological might of the Israeli Defence Force. And if they were to ever penetrate the Iron Dome System, it would be an extremely severe indictment on the Israeli military. The Al-Qassem rockets are more useful to the Israelis for their intent than their failure.

And whilst targeting civilians is morally reprehensible, the more pertinent question should be: why are the Al-Qassem and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades firing the rockets into Israel in the first place?

These groups are informed by their circumstances – a brutal seven year siege of Gaza that violates international law. It is supremely ironic that the main brunt of the rocket attacks has been nearby Sderot, a former Palestinian town.

It has to be remembered that Gaza is a refugee camp into which many Palestinians fled after the conflicts of 1948 and 1967. Gaza has an institutional memory of suffering. And since the total Israeli blockade of 2007 it has been converted into the world’s largest outdoor jail.

It has to be remembered too, that Gaza is only 6-12  kms wide and 40 kms long. With nearly 2 million people crammed into this narrow coastal corridor, it is one of the most crowded places on earth.

Therefore, the nonsense spouted by Israeli spin doctors becomes even more preposterous when they claim that the ‘enemy’ hides amongst the civilian population. What is not spoken about is the fact that in a ‘normal scenario’, the civilian population – its non-combatants – would be able to flee.

But in overcrowded Gaza, bursting at the seams, there is nowhere to go. No Gazan can venture more than four kilometres out to sea. The borders are sealed. In other words, Gazans are stuck, fated to become refugees without refuge. This makes Israel’s attack a turkey shoot.

There have been claims that Israel phones people before the attacks. The woman, who died with a spoon in her mouth as she broke her Ramadan fast, did not get a call. Nor did the driver of a Red Crescent ambulance, and nor did the residents of a home for the disabled in Beit Lahiya.

But ultimately, as Dr Azzam Tamimi, a Hamas commentator, has observed in The Guardian. Operation Protective Edge will prove to be yet another Israeli miscalculation. And the longer it takes and the higher the body count, the more damaging it will  be for Israel and its patrons as sympathy for Hamas is boosted.

Listening and giving

Listening for the birdsong....

IN my long career spanning nearly four decades I’ve witnessed enough triumph of the human spirit and enough of its tragedy to fill volumes. I’ve seen the highs and lows of contemporary history from the fall of the Soviet Union and the Cold War to the ‘War on Terror’.

But this is not about making lists and saying ‘I was there’. That can be embarrassingly self-indulgent. And, of course, lists can be endlessly boring, if not self-congratulatory as well. And so this topic is not about me, but more about the lesson of the times.

Looking at the greed and materialism of the 21st century, one thing that has always amazed me is how mindlessly cruel we can be to each other. Man’s inhumanity to man is a sober truism – and I sometimes wonder what the angels must think. In fact, the celestial beings did once pose the same question to God Himself.

For mortal isms, the altar of the dollar, a dogmatic literalist ideology or a rabid nationalism we are prepared to tear each other apart. Read Palestine, Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria...read Nazism, Fascism, Ba’athism…read Apartheid, Stalinism, Maoism, Wahhabism, Zionism...read the IMF, the Federal Reserve...well, I did say no lists.

However, the thread running through all this is the personality of self-righteous conviction – I’m right and you’re wrong – a messianic mantra that blinds us to our unbounded arrogance. Indeed, at times, the human can be a scary, if not totally irrational species when blinded by the light of its own vision, which paradoxically, is so often a veil.

But why shoot fish in a barrel? We all instinctively know these things, don’t we? The bigger socio-economic evils are so obvious, so clear-cut and so well-known to us. What I want to get at is the simple, everyday things – the more subtle things that collectivise into undesirable traits that can dehumanise whole societies.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learnt is that we don’t listen. The modern world, a social media space, has become a noisy virtual world, but within it one cannot hear the tummies grumble, the roofs leak and the babies cry. These are the real voices in society, voices drowned out by a cacophony of distraction.

In another sense, it’s like sitting in a jungle next to a roaring freeway and learning how to hear and understand the birdsong.

For example, just refusing to acknowledge another person who crosses our path – whether it is in the street or workplace – is not only ill-mannered, but cruel. Indifference can be as mean as the torturer or as deadly as the bullet. Don’t we all hate being ignored?

So imagine a stranger at the door, desperately trying to explain to you why he needs help. He is smelly; he is dirty. He stutters and stammers; you become angry. The door is in your hand; for a moment you’re god. In your mind you ask why he is wasting your time. You smile, but you don’t mean it.

Whatever the case, is the stranger – the wayfarer – not going to notice the warm smells wafting over your threshold? Is he not going to notice your comfort? Is he, an outcast in the hard streets, not going to sense your hostile demeanour and start to become resentful of you?

But how many times have we closed the door, throwing abuse or a few coins at the person hoping that he will go away, and not threaten our bubble of well-being again?

I’m the last to preach, but it does remind me that the Prophet (saw) when approached always listened, always responded – and if he couldn’t physically help – always said good words or made a prayer. And, of course, he rarely spoke in anger.

Charity, I believe, is a two-way process. The beneficiary has to honour the benefactor, who in turn has to honour the beneficiary. In other words, if the giver doesn’t receive the mendicant with humility, what is there? Attitude, but certainly not charity.

It’s about attitude. It’s about how you give. A gift given without good intention is what it is, a bad gesture underlined with an ignoble intent. The barakah, or blessing of the event, becomes an empty action devoid of sincerity or reward.

It is for this reason that I believe one of the most important, foundational charities is as basic as the cheery good morning, the warm salam, a pleasant smile, a handshake or a passing pleasantry. If we can’t remember people’s names, the least we can do is remember that they are there.

Surely it’s for a good reason that we humans, social beings that we are, are attracted to those who acknowledge us? This is surely the basis of adab, or godly conduct? Sometimes, when you’re in the proverbial gutter, it’s a good word - rather than a chastening dollar thrown at your feet – that picks you up.

The genuine Sufi leaders, the masters of true mysticism, attract people like honey (rich or poor, black or white) because of their sweet demeanour, the golden light of their humility and their love of the Sacred Law as a communal oasis of reason and mercy.

There’s a good reason why those who shout, condemn and poke others in the eye don’t have many followers.

Our anger, pride and arrogance are like foul, repellent cloudfarts to the delicate inner senses of the spiritual masters. These men, schooled in human nature and acutely sensitive, often have the right medicine – or soul food – for us. Indeed, their job is to cool the egotistical fevers by reminding us who created us.

Now I’m not propagating a mass migration towards tasawwuf or Sufism – it might annoy some – but rather a movement towards values. These are universal, individual values that enrich any society, irrespective of faith or culture.  

As South Africans, who have been wrestling with the demons of a past ism called apartheid, we have to be careful. Some would even say post-apartheid that we have been seduced by Mammon and forgotten the poor. This has caused us to be self-centred, greedy and forgetful of ubuntu – the sense of being who we are through others.

In other words, the material has superceded things like self-worth, personal dignity, inner peace and social compassion. Of course, one can’t eat inner peace or self-worth, but we can at least be kind to the stranger. 

Shaikh Naazim 'Adil al-Haqqani: a giant of our time passes on

Sh Naazim prays on the top of Table Mountain, Cape Town.
 © Shafiq Morton

ON 7 May the Muslim world lost one of this era’s most extraordinary personalities. Maulana Shaikh Naazim ‘Adil al-Haqqani – the 40th in a line of Naqshbandi Sufi Shaikhs from Sayyidina Abu Bakr (ra) and the Prophet (SAW) – passed away in his 92nd year.

The Shaikh, who visited South Africa in 2000 together with his son-in-law, Shaikh Hisham Kabbani, was renowned for his simple wisdom and ability to appeal to the heart. He is said to have had millions of mureeds, or followers.

Born in Larnaca, Cyprus, Shaikh Naazim displayed spiritual qualities from the age of five, engaging in ‘conversation’ with Umm Hiram, a Prophetic companion buried near his birthplace. When his mother would call him, he would answer that she was one of his ancestors.

His grandfather was a Sufi Shaikh, and on his father’s side, his lineage went back to Sayyid Abdul Qadir Jilani, the Islamic spiritual colossus of the 5th century. On his mother’s side, his lineage traced back to Maulana Jalal ud-Din Rumi, the most widely read mystical poet of all time.

This made Shaikh Naazim a Sayyid – a blessed descendant of the Prophet (SAW) – from the Hasani and Hussaini lines.

Sh Naazim, a moment of mid-morning reflection.

As a youth, Shaikh Naazim completed secular and religious studies. He qualified as a chemical engineer in Istanbul, and when asked by his professors to engage in scientific research, answered that his heart was more attracted to the spiritual sciences.

He studied under a number of famous Shuyukh of his era, and took on Shaikh Abdullah Fa’iz ad-Daghestani in Syria as his master in the Naqshbandiyah Sufi order. When he returned to Cyprus, the Ottoman Caliphate had been abolished and religious practice had been banned.

His first action was to climb the minaret of Larnaca and to make the call to prayer. The authorities jailed him for a week as a warning. He then went to Nicosia and made the adhan in all its mosques. The authorities laid 114 charges against him, and he was facing over 100 years in jail when the law was changed.

Shaikh Naazim moved to Damascus in 1952, and was given many character tests by his Shaikh. In one, he was ordered to walk from Damascus to Aleppo, and to stop at every village and town to talk about Islam. It took him a year. He did the same in Cyprus and Turkey, earning the nickname of the ‘Green Shaikh’.

He was also ordered to perform several spiritual seclusions. The one he did in Baghdad at the burial site of Sayyid Abdul Qadir Jilani (ra) is the most remarkable. There he was taken into the ethereal presence of Sayyid Abdul Qadir and inducted into the Qadiri Sufi Order by him personally.

In another karamat, or miraculous sign, Shaikh Naazim was given ten coins by the great Sayyid. These coins, which date to the fifth century, are kept in the family home at Lefke in Cyprus.

In 1973, Shaikh Naazim’s Grand-Shaikh passed away and the mantle of the Naqshbandi tariqat, or path, was passed on to him. He moved back to Cyprus, and until his health slowed him down, travelled to the Far East, the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia where he spread the influence of the Naqshbandi Order.

Shaikh Naazim was a fierce protagonist of the Prophetic middle way, and he always preached moderation, good manners and tolerance whilst being a strict disciplinarian with his close mureeds. His forthrightness, however, earned him the wrath of the Salafi-Wahhabis who felt he was an undesirable innovator.

In the US and South Africa I was fortunate, as a photographer, to witness the quality of his character. Having lived with his entourage in New York and Washington in 1998, I never saw him ever utter anything contrary to Shari’ah, and I never saw him ever miss the night prayer – or say any of the strange things attributed to him by his antagonists.

A man of great humour and compassion, he was always accessible. I saw thousands mesmerised by his spiritual luminosity and become Muslim at his hands.

Even in South Africa, his blessings were evident. He was also a man of many karamat, or saintly miracles, which he never dwelt upon. I saw some myself, but to him, they were just things that happened. My abiding impression of him is his istiqama, or total consistency, as a Muslim and  decent human being.

Space does not allow to me further encapsulate the life of a spiritual giant of our time, a man who brought millions – including kings, queens and presidents – around the globe together in humility and love.  May his illuminated soul rest in peace, ameen.

Skaikh Naazim (left) and Shaikh Hisham Kabbani at Cape Town aquarium.