Paris Demetriades
“I am 100 years old, and like the olive trees and fig trees, I am still standing. I swear that if they come to drive me away, I will throw stones at them,” a Lebanese grandmother tells an Al Jazeera camera, going viral as she stubbornly refuses to abandon her home in the south of the country. The reaction is entirely justified. Further comment is unnecessary, especially for a people like us who supposedly still carry the open wound of violent displacement.
Since March 2 of this year, invoking its familiar pretext of “combating terrorism,” the Israeli army has killed in neighboring Lebanon, at least up to the moment these lines are being written, more than a thousand people, including 118 children and 40 healthcare workers. It has injured more than 2,584 and displaced, pause for a moment and consider the number, over one million civilians. None of this comes from unreliable or propagandistic claims by a terrorist organization, but from Lebanese authorities and the United Nations. Why terrorist organizations have emerged in the region over the decades, and whether religious fundamentalism is the sole and conveniently simplistic explanation, remains, one would hope, a rhetorical question.
Roughly 180 kilometers farther south, once again in the name of “combating terrorism,” modern humanity has, over the past three years, revealed its most malevolent face. The two million Palestinians in the now completely flattened Gaza Strip continue to endure a hell without end. The story of little Hind Rajab, which reached the Oscars this year, is only one among hundreds of thousands. The six-year-old girl sent desperate voice messages pleading for help before dying in a car under fire, while her family lay beside her, dead and bleeding. These are the consequences of the brutality of the far-right governing coalition in today’s Israel. “Gaza has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a child,” Britain’s deputy ambassador to the UN, James Kariuki, told the Security Council last year. According to a United Nations report, the region not only counts thousands of dead children but also has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. Thousands more young children have been hospitalized for malnutrition. How they were treated, and under what conditions, given that most hospitals have been bombed, is another question entirely.
So the most reasonable question for anyone still unsure about the right and wrong side of history is this: how many thousands of dead children and how many millions of displaced and destitute civilians does it take to defeat terrorism? Perhaps, if you see the world as a video game like Call of Duty, as the social media managers in Trump’s office seem to, there is no limit. Perhaps the answer is until every “subhuman” in the affected countries “that threaten Israel” is wiped out. That is a plainly Nazi mindset, one that was applied during World War II against Jews, Slavs, Roma, homosexuals, and others deemed “subhuman.”
And what about us in Cyprus, standing a breath away from catastrophe? Will we continue to treat our alliance with Israel, largely for economic reasons, as the highest priority? We have done something similar before, when we granted citizenship to corruption-soaked Russian oligarchs. The larger issue is not what small Cyprus does, but how the major powers respond to the monsters of our time. With two of the five permanent members of the Security Council, Russia and the United States, having effectively created the worst fronts, there is little room for optimism. There is, however, a clearly right side of history, and it lies with the people under attack.
