In the six days following Hamas’s dastardly attack on October 7 that killed 1,400 civilians and soldiers in Israel and injured more than 5,000, Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on the Gaza Strip, a thin, 41-km by 10-km strip of land on the Mediterranean coast which is also one of the most densely populated areas in the world with 2.3 million residents. As of October 31, the trail of death and destruction unleashed by Israeli bombs had killed over 8,500 people in Gaza including more than 3,500 children.

Every 15 minutes, a child is dying a painful death. The brutal bombardment has left thousands of civilians, mostly women and children, maimed and injured, destroyed thousands of residential buildings and displaced over 1.4 million people. Many will have no home to return to even if they survive the bombings. If Hamas has been a gang of marauding terrorists, Israel has proved itself to be no less. It has cut off the only sources of water, food, fuel and medicine for 2.3 million residents of the besieged strip, lest these go to the Hamas, and is not even allowing international aid to help alleviate the suffering of hapless residents, trapped between Hamas terrorists and a terrorist state.

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If extracting revenge means mindless killing of innocent civilians and children by deploying all the military might of a state, it cannot be supported by any logic regardless of provocations. As the military historian Michael Howard said after the 9/11 carnage, if innocent civilians were hurt in the heat of the response, the original atrocity would be soon forgotten and terrorists would already have achieved an important objective. When the media and the internet carry gory images of children bleeding to death, hospitals and refugee camps being hit, refugees fleeing their destroyed homes ~ it will only solidify hatred in the hearts of the victims and their children for generations which will supply an unending line of recruits to the ranks of future terrorists. The cycle of violence will never ever stop and October 7 will keep repeating. War does not bring peace in our times ~ it only begets more wars.

The mounting death toll is triggering protests across the world and there are fears that it might engulf the entire Middleeast in a wider regional war with unpredictably dangerous consequences. The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, was widely criticised for his remark that “Palestine has been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. So, October 7 attacks have not taken place in a vacuum.” As he said, Palestinians have seen their land steadily devoured by Israeli settlements, their lives plagued by violence, their economy stifled, their people displaced, their homes demolished and their hopes for a political solution unrealised.

The Friends of Israel, the USA, the UK and Western powers have pledged their unflinching support after October 7, but never tried to restrain Israel from unleashing one of the most ruthless campaigns against innocent civilians.

Their hypocrisy is indeed startling, given that the Middle-east imbroglio is their creation in the first place. Imitating his illustrious imperialist predecessor Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was “proud to stand here with you in Israel’s darkest hour”, but had nothing to say about Gaza’s darkest hour and the collective punishment that is being meted out to its besieged people against all international law, except a meek request to “minimise impact on civilians”, while Mr Joe Biden has only appealed to Israel not to be “consumed by rage”.

In fact, both countries have sent their aircraft carriers and warships to help Israel tighten its noose around Gaza. Colonial powers were the chief architects of today’s Middle-eastern mess, as in much of West Asia and Africa which still continue to bleed from unending internecine wars flowing from their decisions after the first and second world wars. Their much-diminished powers have done nothing to restrain their moral grandstanding and empty homilies.

Ever since the Ottoman Empire dissolved after World War I, colonial Britain had been in charge of Palestine which was home to a Jewish minority and an Arab majority. In 1916, the British and French diplomats, Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, appointed by their governments to secretly divide the territory of the Ottoman Empire between their respective spheres of influence signed an agreement by which Arab lands were divided without their knowledge by drawing straight lines in one of the most volatile regions of the world into states that cut through ethnic and religious boundaries, while Palestine was left as international territory due to its significance in Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

The curse of that agreement has haunted the Middle-east ever since, claiming millions of lives, plunging nations into misery and changing the course of history. It has led to a century of conflict between Palestinians and Jews in what is considered a Holy Land for both, and convulsed the entire region several times. It has completely torn apart the fabric of two states, Iraq and Syria, and disembodied and decimated them beyond recognition, causing unspeakable misery to millions of their people, recalling to memory the bloodbath into which the British had left India after creating two states which have ever since remained permanent enemies. Israel was the creation of British foreign secretary Lord Balfour in 1917 expressing support for “the establishment in Palestine, which had a majority of Arabs, of a national home for the Jewish people”.

Jewish author Arthur Koestler had called the Balfour Declaration the “most improbable political documents of all time” in which “one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third”. The League of Nations, precursor to the UN, legitimised the creation of Palestine and Transjordan (later Jordan in 1922, according to the Sykes-Picot agreement).

After the Balfour Declaration, Jewish people fleeing persecution in Europe started arriving in Palestine in large numbers, and the inflow became a deluge after the Nazi Holocaust during World War II. Jews had no land of their own and were persecuted throughout history, even before the Nazi Holocaust, and the Zionist movement founded by Theodor Herzl had declared its aim to create a Jewish homeland at its first congress in 1897. As Jews having nowhere to go started settling in Palestine, Arabs living there turned against the growing numbers of Jewish migrants, including German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. The Arab uprising in 1936 was crushed by the British who were unable to control the Jewish militant groups which had sprung up by then to counter the Arabs. Eventually the British handed the problem over to the UN. In November 1947, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution partitioning Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with Jerusalem under UN administration. The Arab world rejected the plan as unfair. Jewish militias launched attacks against Palestinian villages, forcing thousands to flee.

The situation escalated into a full-blown war in 1948, after the British had left with their forces. Jewish leaders announced the creation of the State of Israel and their militias went on a killing rampage that forced 750,000 Palestinians to flee to Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, while the rest got squeezed in the remaining territories of Gaza, West Bank and East Jerusalem.

This forced displacement of an entire population of Palestinians, somewhat resembling the Indian partition, is called the Nakba, the Arabic word for catastrophe. Neighbouring Arab countries then invaded Israel, but Israel fought back. In the Armistice of 1949, a “Green Line” served as the border between Israel and Arab states while the Gaza Strip and the West Bank came respectively under the control of Egypt and Jordan. In 1967, during the sixday war between Israel and its Arab neighbours, Israel defeated three Arab armies, gained territory four times its original size, and became the preeminent military power in the region. Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, annexed East Jerusalem and part of the West Bank, and started building Jewish settlements in the occupied lands.

The Arab armies extracted their revenge in October 1973, on the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur which ended in the Camp David accords of 1978 between Israel and Egypt. Egypt regained Sinai and Israel agreed to grant Palestinians autonomy. While outraged Arab countries threw Egypt out of the Arab League, Palestinian autonomy remained unresolved. In 1987 Palestinians began their first Intifada, the sustained campaign of protests and stone-pelting that led to the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which set out a five-year period of Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip under a new entity, the Palestinian Authority (PA).

This created a very messy situation in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with the PA getting full control only in a few small areas, while Israel retained ultimate security control over most of the territory. The Intifada broke out in 2000 and raged till 2005, but with guns and suicide bombs replacing stones. The Israeli response was to create a ghetto in the occupied territories and keep the Palestinians under constant surveillance and persecution. It is a democracy only for the Jews, not for the 3 million Arab population in the West bank and 2.3 million in the Gaza strip.

There are 450,000 Israelis in settlements outside East Jerusalem, which has increased fourfold since the Oslo accords. Gaza is especially vulnerable, under Hamas rule since 2007. Israel is aiming to exterminate them completely, which is an unattainable task.

(The writer is a commentator, author and academic. Opinions expressed are personal)