What is the Root of All These Atrocities
(One suggested answer starts with the letter P)
By Orna Coussin
One can put the October 7 massacre by Hamas terrorists [the killing, the raping, the men raping and mutilating women before killing them, and the kidnapping of Israeli civilians ] as well as the brutal retaliation by Israel’s IDF [the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians, the demolishment of their homes and towns] in a myriad of timelines; timelines that may put the atrocities in perspective and help us better understand the roots of all this evil: We may consider the timeline of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the timeline of the occupation, of Islam fundamentalism, of Antisemitism, of the Arab-West antagonism, as well as the timeline of the Russian-American conflict regarding trade routes between the far east and Europe, to name but a few contexts. Any one of these timelines would broaden our understanding of current affairs.
Here is my own suggestion for one such timeline:
October 7, 2023 and onwards:
Hamas male-terrorists enter Israel, massacre, rape women, and kidnap Israeli civilians, as young as 8 months old, as old as over 80, while chanting Allahu Acbar, God is the Greatest.
Israel’s government declares it’s going to wipe out Hamas. IDF bombards Gaza, killing terrorists and thousands of civilians.
Earlier, October, 2023
Female Israeli border soldiers on the lookout warn their male superiors that Hamas is ready to attack. The female soldiers are dismissed. “You are our eyes, not our decision-making brains”, a commander utters in response (Yaniv Kubovich, Haaretz, November 18, 2023)
July, 2023
A respected and experienced female NCO of the 8200 IDF intelligence unit issues a document for the third time this year detailing Hamas’s plans to enter Israel and to commit a massacre. She is dismissed by her male commander. “You are fantasizing,” is his response (Channel 12’s report, November 23, 2023)
December 2022
The thirty-seventh government of Israel, formed on 29 December 2022, is the most religious, fundamentalist, and right-wing government in the history of the state of Israel.
A majority of ministers and deputy ministers are religious jews and ultra-religious jews. The government consists of 26 male ministers and only five female ministers, none of whom head major ministries. The Coalition is devoted to weakening Israel’s democracy.
2009 onwards
“Since he took office as prime minister a second time in 2009 Netanyahu developed and advanced a destructive, warped political doctrine that held that strengthening Hamas at the expense of the Palestinian Authority would be good for Israel” (Dmitry Shumsky, Haaretz, October 2023)
2001
“Three Jewish Jerusalemite women first saw a military checkpoint in the West Bank and obeyed their conscience. From this point, Machsom Watch grew as an organization whose members are women of all walks of life in Israeli society. We painfully watch how destructive the occupation is for our own children, the soldiers who only ‘obey orders’ during their military service. We have taken it upon ourselves to recount the reality of the Occupation, publicize and pass on to the un-knowing Israeli public what has been taking place just minutes away from its homes, and in its name. (Machsom Watch decleration)
June, 2000
shortly after the Israeli army pulled its troops out of Lebanon, ending more than 20 years of war, "many Israelis celebrated with the ‘Four Mothers,' the most successful grass-roots movements in Israeli history that shaped the Lebanon pullout. The women took a classic Israeli stereotype — the silent, suffering soldier's mother — stood it on its head and dared to challenge the military.” (The New York Times)
4 November 1995
Yigal Amir, an Israeli religious ultranationalist, assassinates Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the occasion of a pro-peace rally. Earlier that year some right-wing rabbis had proclaimed “din rodef”, based on a traditional Jewish law of self-defense (Under certain interpretations of the Talmud, it is obligatory to kill a rodef, a stalker of a defenseless man, in order to save the intended victim), against Rabin personally, arguing that the Oslo Accords would endanger Jewish lives.
1987
The Hamas movement was founded in Gaza in 1987 by an imam, Sheikh Ahmed Yasin, and his aide Abdul Aziz al-Rantissi. The movement started as an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
“We shall not waive an inch of the Palestinian home soil no matter what the recent pressures are and no matter how long the occupation,” Khaled Meshaal, the leader-in-exile of the Palestinian group said in 2017. Hamas, (much like Israel’s right-wing settlers – O.C) violently opposes the Oslo peace accords negotiated by Israel and the PLO in the mid-1990s. (Aljazeera)
June, 1967
During the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured and occupied the Gaza strip, initiating its decades-long military occupation. The mid-1990s Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority to govern both territories, which it did under the leftist party Fatah until that party's electoral defeat in 2006 to militant Sunni Islamic organization Hamas.
610
Islam in founded, conceiving a male god and a male prophet speaking on behalf of his masculine God. "There is no deity but God, and I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God."
The Quran, 4:34: (as translated by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall): "Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other, and because they spend of their property [for the support of women]. So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them."
1st century AD
Christianity is founded, conceiving a male God the Father and a male Jesus.
“If God in HIS heaven is a father ruling HIS people, then it is in the “nature” of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated” (Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father, 1973).
Sometime between 1300 and 165 BC
Judaism is founded based on this Idea: (Exodus chapter 20): "I am the Lord, your God, who took you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
You shall not have the gods of others in My presence (…)
[There is no Allah besides Allah – O.C]
You shall neither prostrate yourself before them nor worship them, for I, the Lord, your God, am a zealous God, who visits the iniquity of the fathers upon the sons, upon the third and the fourth generation of those who hate Me,
and I perform loving kindness to thousands [of generations], to those who love Me and to those who keep My commandments.
1780 B.C.
Hammurabi code:
142. If a woman wishes to divorce her husband and refuses him sexual rights, an inquiry shall be held. If she has not committed adultery but her husband has, she may take her dowry and return to her father's house. 143. If she has committed adultery, then she shall be executed by being thrown into the water.
3000 B.C.
The first clear signs of women being treated categorically differently from men appear in the first states in ancient Mesopotamia, the historical region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, Syria and Turkey (Around 5,000 years ago).
The elites in these early societies needed people to be available to produce a surplus of resources for them, and to be available to defend the state – even to give up their lives, if needed, in times of war. Maintaining population levels put an inevitable pressure on families. Over time, young women were expected to focus on having more and more babies, especially sons who would grow up to fight. (Angela Saini, “The Patriarchs”, BBC, May, 2023)
אתם חייבים להיות מחוברים על מנת לשלוח תגובה.