Is the Mediator Impartial?
On this site last week, Paris-based Spencer Brown concluded his informative but also spirited overview of the Gaza-Palestine-Israel scene by saying, “One day the wall of hate, terror, violence, domination, arrogance, crass materialism and bigotry will crack, and those who have invested in living together will come to the fore.”
Will the Trump Plan bring us closer to that day? That’s what much of humanity is asking. Including the tormented people of Gaza and the West Bank. We’ve been told that from October 6 negotiating teams from Israel and Hamas have been present in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt’s Red Sea resort on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, to discuss that Plan. While “the delegations aren't meeting face-to-face, mediators from Qatar, Egypt and the US” are evidently “holding shuttle talks between both sides.”
The BBC informs us, as of writing, that “major sticking points” that still need resolving include (1) “a hostage release structure, (2) Israel's demand for Hamas to disarm, (3) the future governance of Gaza, and (4) Israeli withdrawal from the territory.”
The future independence and protection of the West Bank should be added to the BBC’s short list.
CAPITULATION BY GAZA?
The torrent of news and speculation about the Trump Plan, and about Gaza’s ceaseless suffering, has hidden one quite astounding fact: Gaza has not yet capitulated. Neither the hell-like ferocity of attacks nor the unprecedented to-and-fro shoving of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, including babies and the elderly, as though they were so many pellets in a kaleidoscope of horror, has extracted the white flag. Though brutally hammered, tiny Gaza has defied Mammoth Power for two years.
Is this evidence of Hamas’s skills in deception? In burrowing tunnels? Or of the truth that denial and oppression cannot extinguish the flame of independence? Refusal to accept slavery appears to be a stubborn trait in human beings. It’s also a stirring trait.
If Israel will not accept a Palestinian state right next to it, and if Palestinians reject slavery, can “the world” intervene and take control of the “border” between the two? If Israel rejects the UN as the world’s representative, perhaps it will accept Trump? Plus, as Trump’s junior partner, Tony Blair? Will the Palestinians similarly accept a Trump-led consortium as a UN substitute?
This appears to be the rationale behind the Trump Plan. Despite the inevitable defects of any such consortium -- defects glaringly demonstrated in the history of US-led interventions in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan -- could such a consortium be an improvement on today’s unbearable situation? This is the sort of question today before the Middle East’s people and leaders.
The question cannot be answered without weighing a connected question. As Robert Malley, a veteran US peace negotiator and co-author (with Hussein Agha) of a new book, “Tomorrow Is Yesterday,” said to reporter Noah Lanard of Mother Jones:
“At the end of the day, on this issue, the US is not prepared to put its foot down (with Israel). Does that begin to change?”
IMPARTIAL MEDIATOR?
That’s the key question. In his open solicitation of the Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has spoken of the “centuries’ old” or “the thousands of years’ old” hates in the Middle East. We must ask, will Trump be a frank and impartial friend to all sides of the region’s disputes? The author of the “Art of the Deal” will need to offer more than inducements and threats if he wants history to laud his role. For a start, he has to end Washington’s historic partisanship in favor of Israel and against the Palestinians, a partisanship expressed in weapons and dollars.
Strength in arms and political weight might add to a mediator’s influence. But if a solution is the goal, they’re of use only if the mediator is neutral. Without impartiality, “peace” may be achievable, but not a solution. Flags might be raised, but only to recall the age of imperialism.
If the proposed Trump-led consortium will not be firm with Israel, if it refuses to prevent the seizure of Palestinian lands in the West Bank, if its priority is Gaza’s “redevelopment” and the profits that will go with it rather than the dignity of Palestinians and their state, then the proposed “solution” will merely add to our world’s cynicism.
I have no way of knowing what fire burns most strongly in Trump’s heart, or in the hearts of associates of his like Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, or in the hearts of rulers in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. But we may be fairly sure of one thing. These fires are influenced by public opinion.
IN THE PEOPLE’S COURT
The amazing and numerous Greta Thunbergs of our world (we only picture a handful of them) continue to remain crucial. Many of them are Israelis. Many are Palestinians. Most are human beings above all. It is they who in recent years and months have steadily shifted opinion in the US and Europe against the expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. The ball is in the court of the people.
Shared, it seems, by part of Israel’s population, the belief that God chose the Israelis and promised them the core of the Middle East’s lands sustains Israel’s policies of ethnic cleansing. People in other countries are not exempt from such a sense of being divinely chosen for supremacy.
In New Delhi on October 6, a lawyer evidently belonging to a so-called high caste threw his shoe at the Chief Justice of India, B. R. Gavai, who is Dalit by caste and Buddhist by religion. The shoe-throwing lawyer, 71-year-old Rakesh Kishore, is apparently a senior advocate of “high” caste with access to the court of India’s chief justice.
Some days earlier, Chief Justice Gavai had dismissed a “public interest litigation” (PIL) that demanded the renovation of a dilapidated statue of the Hindu god Vishnu in a site in Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh. Legalized over time by India’s supreme court, the “PIL” provision permits members of the public, in appropriate cases, to move India’s higher courts for relief. While rejecting the plea for statue renovation, the chief justice termed it a “publicity interest litigation.”
Though he was not, it seems, a party to the dismissed PIL, Mr. Kishore evidently took umbrage at the CJ’s comment. On October 6 he removed his shoe in the courtroom and threw it at the chief justice. Traditionally viewed as impure, leather, and footwear generally, is in India a demeaning weapon of assault. For a senior high-caste advocate to hurl it at a Dalit chief justice was an unmistakable act of calculated insult.
According to the online portal The Wire, the police later said that Mr. Kishore had also brought a slip of paper to the courtroom that said, “Sanatan Dharam ka apmaan, nahi sahega Hindustan” (India will not tolerate insults to “the eternal religion,” Hinduism.)
ORIGINAL SIN
Justice Gavai, unperturbed, made sure that the shoe was returned to its owner and showed no interest in prosecuting the attacker. From others, however, there has been widespread condemnation of this seeming return of the aggression that has been part of India’s original sin, untouchability, once prescribed as a virtuous practice for high castes to enforce and the untouchables to swallow.
The Wire observes: “The self-proclaimed protectors of the Hindu faith have come to enjoy an unforeseen degree of impunity... They can abuse an unsuspecting Muslim vendor on the streets, they can flog a Dalit leather worker in full public glare, they can give rape threats to assertive women, they can refuse food to a poor child on the basis of their faith, and they can also throw a shoe at the CJI.”
I should add that India’s justices, including the chief, retire when they reach the age of 65, which means that most have a short tenure at that highest level. Justice Gavai will retire on November 24 this year.
ATTACKS ON THE HELPLESS
It hurts me to have to report that attacks in India on poor and helpless Muslims continue. In the last two days, accounts of such attacks have come from Cuttack in Odisha state, hitherto a bustling city of amity; from Bareilly, a major town in northern India; and from Indore, the largest city in Madhya Pradesh, with a population of more than five-and-a-half million.
The Indian Express of October 7 carries this report from Indore by Anand Mohan J.:
“At the glittering Sitla Mata Bazaar in Madhya Pradesh’s Indore, Muslim shop-owners with skyrocketing debts work the phone lines to sell their stock, salesmen beg for a job, and tailors rush to wrap up last-minute orders – the last they are likely to see here.
“For more than a century, Sitla Mata Bazaar has maintained an intricate harmony between the predominantly Hindu owners and Muslim salesmen, tailors and helpers, who formed the backbone of this cloth market. The market is known for its jam-packed lanes crammed with sari bundles, lehengas in cascading hues, and shopfronts no wider than a door, yet stacked floor to ceiling with fabric.
“That equilibrium began to crack when Indore BJP unit vice-president Aklavya Gaur, who also heads the right-wing outfit, Hindu Rakshak (Protector of Hindus), issued an ultimatum to the Muslim community to leave the market by October 25. The son of Indore-4 MLA Malini Gaur, Aklavya first made news when he and his supporters stormed a cafe in Indore in January 2021, accusing Muslim comedian Munawar Faruqui and those performing with him of mocking Hindu deities and filing a police complaint...
“On why the Muslim community as a whole was targeted, he said, ‘I was in a meeting with the local traders, and they decided to remove people indulging in such acts. They decided to take action against a particular community.’...
“At the market, the economic hit has been immediate. A 25-year-old [Muslim] entrepreneur who recently took a loan of Rs 10 lakh to start his own saree store is distraught as he sells his stock at a loss. The man, who did not wish to be named for fear of further repercussions, said, ‘I am going to be in debt. How can we be boycotted in our own country? Where should I go now?’
“Empathising with him is Gaurav (48), under whose tutelage he learnt the tricks of the trade. (The name Gaurav identifies him as a Hindu.) ‘This Dusshera (says Gaurav), business was slow. We had to fire some staff, and celebrations were muted. This Hindu-Muslim controversy has wiped out the business.’
“Several Hindu shopkeepers resisted the diktat and staged small demonstrations to defend longtime colleagues; others complied out of fear. Vishnu Vijayvargiya, a trader, said that “our best labourers, our most skilled salesmen, have been here since they were children”.
“We’ve been here nine years. We started as helpers, then as salesmen, and finally managed to run our own small shops,” said a Muslim trader, adjusting a stack of saris as he spoke. “Now, 95 per cent of us are gone. We’re forced to sell at throwaway rates. Cloth worth a rupee, we’re letting go for 25 paisa. I’ve already lost Rs 25 lakh and have four loans on my head.”
Another person who has been forced to move out said, “We are afraid of even protesting; we don’t want to be booked in a police case. Forty years we’ve worked here. This market is a hundred years old. Sarees, lehengas and finishing work is our life. I am finding work at the adjacent markets; my friends have left their rented homes.”
In different parts of the world, Indian expats have latterly become wary of possible mistrust from “locals” who were migrants themselves not long ago. Within India, the eye of hostility is at times quick to confront fellow Indians deemed inferior because of their beliefs.
