By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

IN a dream, I found myself among a throng of people at a party. In that dream, my sister Emma was gifted with a box of birds. Most of the birds were small, the size of maya birds (tree sparrows). Some birds were the size of a peanut, others the size of a mungbean. I picked those that had the ability to move and put them back inside the box, but the bean-sized ones were difficult to pick up. As the visitors moved around, some of the birds were stepped upon. Some were crushed between the shoes and the marble floor, unnoticed. There were many of them and no matter how I tried, I could not pick them all. My helplessness was overwhelming my body.  I felt like a heavy rock was falling upon me, the size of the boulder being rolled uphill by Sisyphus, and I was too tired to push it back.

That feeling of helplessness presents itself, in reality, as I watched the morgue at Gaza’s biggest hospital overflow with bodies as Israel continues to shell the territory of 2.3 million people, in response to Hamas’ attack. So far 1,417 people were reported killed and 6,250 wounded. The morgue at Shifa Hospital in Gaza, with a capacity for some 30 bodies at a time had to “stack corpses three high outside the walk-in cooler and put dozens more, side by side, in the parking lot. Some were placed in a tent, and others were sprawled on the cement, under the sun.” Israel reported 1,300 of its own citizens were killed and more than 3,000 were wounded, during the Hamas’ assault.

Deaths and injuries on both sides took their toll mostly on civilians who became the cold statistics in a long-drawn war that spanned decades, as Palestinians continue to struggle and plead for world help in ending Israeli occupation of Gaza. Despite numerous resolutions made by the United Nations favoring human rights of Israeli-occupied territories, nothing has been implemented on the ground.

The latest in this unending odyssey of conflict, happened on October 7, where, “in a stunning display of low-tech guerilla warfare, a few dozen sparsely armed commandos disabled Israeli watchtowers and paraglided over the electrified fences that have kept two million people caged in appalling conditions for nearly two decades in full view of the world, while Israel bombed them repeatedly to test its latest weaponry on Palestinian bodies and psyches.” Israel and its Western allies claimed surprise, and responded quickly in an overkill, with analysts pondering how such a horrific failure of their combined intelligence apparatus  can possibly occur, considering that their intelligence network is one of the most sophisticated and extensive around the world, if not the best. The narrative is flawed. A bigger, more sinister scenario is likely building up.

We are helpless in the face of such monstrosity. We have become inutile observers to large-scale military operations that violate human dignity. A friend, Luz María López says, “We can pray, voice our views and feelings, which is important too. However, and regrettably, countries with political power are turning away or are biased and don’t want to stop this never-ending battle, much to the shame of humanity and humans’ rights… it’s ALL about political power and we can’t fix this. This system is miserably rotten. Peace is always hanging on a broken pole.”

We are being conditioned to take sides in a conflict where we all become losers.  Social media has become a powerful tool for those who have control over it, capitalizing on the gullibility of people, masking the real reasons for the unending war. Religion is an alibi, it has very little to do with this war. God is absent in the conversation.

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