From peace talks to targeted killing

Ismail Haniyeh was murdered by Israel while attending the inauguration of the Iranian president in Tehran. Israel had already murdered three of his sons as well as three of his grandchildren. He was involved in negotiations with Israel for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza which could have led to the release of Israeli prisoners and conceivably a more durable peace process that would end the ongoing genocide against the Palestinians perpetrated and abetted by Israel and the US respectively.

Israel has now more or less admitted to having murdered Ismail Haniyeh and his security guard, and vowed to retaliate against any response from Iran and its Arab allies, while the US is sending its military forces to the Persian Gulf to protect Israel against any consequence for its genocide and capital crimes.

The two contestants for the US presidency are respectively an open supporter of Israeli crimes against the Palestinians and a pretend critic of Israel’s genocidal policies who as vice president visited Israel to confirm US support for its genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. Israel is a lethal cancer forcibly implanted in the Arab and Muslim world by British and American imperialism which today threatens not just the Palestinians as a political community, but eventually the Arab and Muslim world as a civilization.

Given the moral pretensions of the US, its intelligence cooperation, military assistance, and diplomatic support for Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide define the scale of its hypocrisy and hostility towards the Muslim world today. Just when the Doomsday Clock is seconds away from ‘midnight’, the US-led West and Israel have decided to escalate a war of civilization against the Muslim world.

However, the scale of this threat today is not just the result of American and Israeli policies; it is just as much the cumulative consequence of the failure of Muslim governance and politics over the past century and more. This failure is highlighted today by Arab ruling elites who seek American protection against the fury and outrage of their own betrayed peoples in return for which they negotiate surrender under the guise of Abrahamic Accords with the mortal enemy of the Palestinians.

Given this ruling elite treachery, existential questions arise: What would today’s Arab and Muslim world be able to do to protect even its most sacred of sites – the very source of its faith and identity - against the not inconceivable prospect of an evil Western impulse to wipe out Islamic civilization in the name of some racist-fascist ideology, the ugly signs of which are already apparent in the UK, Europe and the US? Would today’s Muslims be able to do much more than raise their hands in prayer for divine protection?

Or would they pathetically rely on assumed humane impulses of Western peoples to constrain such mega-genocidal tendencies among their Muslim-hating cohorts? Or would they merely resort to desperate and hopeless violence in suicidal testimony to their faith, which by their collective social and political negligence they shall have utterly betrayed? Would they expect Heaven to be their reward?

Do we really need to ask such questions, let alone answer them? After all, we are for the moment reasonably safe and secure in our wretched degradation and have become used to living with defeat, humiliation, resignation – and poetry. Moreover, the world does not appear to be collapsing upon us any time soon, or so we assume. Accordingly, we can always pretend we are not defeated and, as Sartre would say, continue to “live in bad faith”.

As for the prospect of a cataclysmic scenario that is being delineated by current developments in the West, we can take the ostrich view that nothing is inevitable. We may be doomed as a civilization. And then again we may not. Who can say? So why bother? What will be, will be. Especially, if ruling elites convince themselves that at least their children and grandchildren will be safe and secure, if sadly not the vast majority of their compatriots. They may say there will always be losers and praise God as long as they have their golden nest eggs safely tucked away in the lands of their Western benefactors whom they have served at the expense of their own people.

This is essentially what we have become, or are in the process of becoming. And we presume to be the protectors of our spiritual, civilizational and cultural inheritance – and the guarantors of our future.

Needless to say, it does not have to be like this. There are paths forward that other people have trodden. Pakistan can emulate them. We happen to be a neighbour of the world’s most successful developing country – China. And we have excellent relations with it – relations that are now fraying because our elites have sold us out and are beholden to the adversaries of China – adversaries who prefer our principal adversary to us.

These benefactors and masters of our ruling elites condemn alleged electoral fraud in Venezuela and recognize the defeated opposition as the elected government, but carefully ignore actual electoral fraud in Pakistan which they have acknowledged to have taken place. They condemn alleged atrocities in Ukraine but assist them in Gaza. The rape and torture of nearly ten thousand Palestinians languishing in Israeli jails do not disturb them. Their youth does indeed protest. But they will be co-opted sooner or later.

Nevertheless, the people of Pakistan have spoken. They have made clear what they want and whom they trust to deliver it. They have also made clear they will not be denied. Nor will they compromise. But they may forgive if given a chance. That chance needs to be given so that the country may yet come together in a great national and civilizational endeavour that will need to be a multifaceted reforming, learning and achieving process which can realize the potential of all our people.

This potential is not just wasted today, its realization is forbidden by the structures around us. Nevertheless, those structures are human and are part of us. As such, they can and therefore must respond to the imperatives of country, faith, and principle that we all share. Those who refuse shall rule themselves out.

If we can prioritize and act upon these imperatives, the ten thousand specific things we will need to do in hundreds of fields of endeavour will all become possible, and Pakistan may yet become the exemplary beacon of possibility and achievement for the Muslim world and beyond that it was meant to be.

Isn’t this an exciting, motivating, and transforming prospect, to the realization of which we should dedicate the rest of our lives? Or should we dismiss it as a romantic illusion and thereby condemn our country, our nation and ourselves to failure and extinction? In which case it may well be asked: do the already dead ever listen?

The writer is a formerambassador to the US, India and China and head of UN

missions in Iraq and Sudan. He can be reached at: ashrafjqazi@gmail.com