Al-Qalam 
[Photo: REUTERS]
Palestinians are growing in faith and resilience, knowing that in their suffering they have gifted the world more than they have lost, writes Ambassador Ebrahim Rasool.
AWQAF SA has once again brought a moment of reflection as it convened on South African soil the Organisation of the Islamic Countries (OIC) and its Civilizational arm, IRCICA.
What does civilisation look like today as barbarism is given a licence for genocide (the killing of a Palestinian genealogy) and patriacide (the killing of even the idea of a Palestinian state)? The pushback against this barbarism is preventing the vericide – the killing of the truth about what is happening.
Civilisation, in this context, is both a refusal and an assertion. It refuses to accommodate and euphemise such barbarism though equivocation: ‘they caused it on October 7th’; ‘they are not resistors but terrorists’; the IDF is a moral army because it warns before it kills’; ‘Jews are the original victims of genocide and hold all definitional rights’. But civilisation is an assertion because, amid barbarism, it asserts humanity: it rescues the primordial human instinct across all humanity – the fitrah; it salvages humanity from the competing intuitions of rage and vengeance, and especially from numbness and cowardice; and it mobilises in each human being the better angels for action, speech and prayer.
Consistent with the Islamic tradition, the Islamic civilisational values appeal to an innate human inclination to primordial, God-given, righteousness; the civilisational impulse is often a response to adversity because its ease and relief is birthed from human and social difficulty and distress; and finally, there is no veil between God and those distressed, and so the appeal to the humanity in human beings knows no boundaries, harbours minimal pre-conditions, and is not premised on human or ideological purity.
In the 60th chapter of the Qur’an, Mumtahana (She Under Examination) God gives us the next steps for our contemporary defence against the barbarism of the Palestinian Genocide, against the impunity of Israel and its sponsors, against the inhumanity of the Zionist project, by declaring that “God does not prohibit Muslim engagement with those who do not fight you for your faith, nor drive you from your homes”. If anything, this is a strategic instruction to engage in the defence of Palestine and Palestinians – who are the real time victims of those who are on affront to faith (all faiths!) and are being driven from home and homeland – by rallying all who even have an inkling of conscience about what they witness.
They must be part of resistance to barbarism even if their understanding of history is limited, their commitment is partial, their ideology is faulty, their interests create ambiguity, their values are imperfect, or their staying power is doubtful. They may not share our endgame but they feel some outrage. There is no alternative strategy but to raise the citizenry of the world to stand for a humane civilisation against barbarism.
Conditions
The balance of forces doesn’t provide the conditions for an acceptance of Israel’s daily invitation to civilised forces: join me on the battlefield; test the strength of my military; let’s fight it out! And while there courageous combatants ready to respond , Israel knows it has the military back-up of the United States; Israel knows it has a nuclear arsenal; Israel knows that no Arab or Muslim state has a weapon for which Israel has not been given the antidote; and Israel knows the USA will not sell the Arabs/Muslims a weapon superior to what it has provided Israel. More importantly, Israel knows that every military encounter with its neighbours has resulted in a net gain of territory, sovereignty, and sympathy.
So, resisting the temptation to hard power may not satisfy our sense of outrage at the injustice. But South Africa has shown the impact of soft power in confronting Israel at the ICJ. It has so far not yielded a conviction, and neither is there a guarantee of corrective or punitive measures. But an evidence-backed and eloquent legal case, a persistent narrative and proof of genocide, a consistent exposure of food-traps and starvation, and a compelling case made to global citizenry and the human conscience, have started turning the campus against the capital in the USA, the street against the government in Europe, mobilized the squares and the bridges in the world, and put the surveillance states on full alert. Even Jews of faith and conscience have declared: not in our name! Here is the battlefield Israel wants to avoid because it has been stripped of moral capital; and here is the terrain that is increasingly isolating the USA.
Surah Mumtahana says to us that a civilisation against barbarism and a coalition of virtue against evil is founded on minimum conditions, purity and ideology. Where the human instinct even stirs, there is the mobilisation of the human spirit, and we need to be formless like water to create a flood of outrage against barbarism; rather than being mired in rigidity of religion , ideology or purity. The tide is turning, citizens are rising, governments are responding, and popular media is shifting at the behest of a manifest reality. Against this, Israel increases its bellicosity, its allies are splintering, and its citizens fragment.
All the while Palestinians are growing in faith and resilience, knowing that in their suffering they have gifted the world more than they have lost: humanity and conscience, the ingredients of a renewed civilization.
