Solidarity Week not doing justice to Palestinian cause

Solidarity Week not doing justice to Palestinian cause

S Thayaparan


“The childhood of tens of thousands of Palestinian youngsters is being lived from one trauma to the next, from horror to horror. Their homes are demolished, their parents are humiliated in front of their eyes, soldiers storm into their homes brutally in the middle of the night, tanks open fire on their classrooms. And they don’t have a psychological service. Have you ever heard of a Palestinian child who is a ‘victim of anxiety’?”

- Norman G Finkelstein, author of 

‘Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of 

Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History’

COMMENT | As someone who has been on the receiving end of the muzzle of an automatic weapon pointed at him by a child soldier in Sri Lanka, the sight of school children walking around with toy guns proudly sanctioned by adults was, to put it mildly, distasteful.

Adults in conflict zones all over the world put guns in the hands of young children. They exploit the bodies and minds of young children with drugs, or worse, and give them the feeling of control, with a loaded weapon in their hands.

So, to see young children dressed in the symbols of occupation and resistance play-acting is the worst form of propaganda and demeans Palestinian children, living under occupation. In other words, their trauma is fodder for propaganda.

As a parent, if you want to buy your child a toy gun, that’s up to you. But this is different. What these adults did was put toy guns in the hands of children for a specific cause, teaching them that a violent solution is the only solution for Muslims in the Middle East or elsewhere.

Now, does anyone really think that Palestinian parents want guns in the hands of their children? Do you really think that Palestinian parents want their children to live in a world where they have to carry guns to kill their occupiers?

Missing from the outrage of the debacle of Solidarity Week are the Palestinians themselves. Lost in the outrage of young Malaysian school children being taught to “hate” is the trauma young Palestinians in occupied zones face every day.

What does this say about adults in Malaysia, who view the Palestinian experience as only that of violent, head scarf-clad combatants? What this does to the Palestinian cause is to reduce their experience to that of a propaganda video.

Watching these children parade around with their toy guns is akin to watching a propaganda video by an extremist group. This is not about the Palestinians but rather about indoctrination.

Think about that for a moment. Rational people disavow violence especially when the victims are children from both sides of the conflict. Palestinians who have not voted for a government for over a decade want freedom, not carnage.

They do not want to be represented as violent scarf-clad-wearing combatants and they certainly do not want their children fighting against occupiers who have demonstrated a cavalier attitude when it comes to using lethal force.

What they want is for their stories heard, especially in the Western press, but more importantly, they want their children to be safe and not out in the streets engaging with well-trained professional soldiers, which is what the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is.

But Solidarity Week is not about them, is it? It is about flag burning and championing nihilism as martyrdom.

Reality of Palestinian children

Think about it this way. You are a Palestinian parent. You want your children to go to school. But the school has been destroyed and you have to make do with what is available.

Your children, like most children everywhere, just want to play with their friends. However, because this is an occupation, for some of the older children, this is not a playground but a battlefield. These children have to worry about their security.

They could be influenced by other older children who have been radicalised. I do not mean radicalised like how some folks are radicalised in this country.

I mean radicalised by the fact that their family members have been killed by bombings or imprisoned (in some cases for throwing stones), or died from lack of medicine, or shot by mistake, or even killed by the very people who claim they want to liberate them from their Zionist oppressors.

Aid which was meant for children has been siphoned off for other purposes. This is the reality for these parents and children.

But did you get any of that from what these adults did in Malaysian schools? What you got was self-aggrandisement, extremism informed by religiosity, and a carnival atmosphere far removed from the trauma experienced by Palestinians.

Indeed, the Palestinian experience was nowhere in these displays of solidarity.


‘Much-needed revised relationship’

The response from this administration has been juvenile from the beginning. Indeed, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim could have taken a page from former prime minister and current jailbird Najib Razak when he addressed the UN with regard to Israel during the Temple Mount tensions.

As reported in The Times of Israel:

“Given the Rosh Hashanah violations of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and aggression against its worshipers three weeks ago, I call on the Israeli government to live up to Judaism’s highest ethical principles, and the essential message of the Torah as succinctly expressed by the first century BC sage Hillel.

“When asked to describe the Torah in a soundbite, [Hillel] said: ‘That which is hateful to you, don’t do to your fellow human being,’” Najib said.

“This dictum, known universally in all religions as the Golden Rule, could herald the dawn of a much-needed revised relationship between Muslims and Jews.”

The Palestinian Solidarity Week is not about the Palestinians. This is about galvanising a polity in support of a cause but using the cause as a stand-in for something else. The same could be said of the march organized by Perikatan Nasional this weekend.

Palestinian voices are missing in mainstream media, especially Western mainstream media. They are missing in the Solidarity Week and all these performative rallies too.

S THAYAPARAN is Commander (Rtd) of the Royal Malaysian Navy. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum - “Let justice be done though the heavens fall.”