COMMENT | The land between the river and sea

COMMENT | The Malaysian Meteorological Department (MetMalaysia) says the northeast monsoon will start in mid-November 2023.

Nevertheless, on our land in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, between the Pengkalan Datu River and the South China Sea, it has been windy and rainy all day. There are rain clouds in the distance and the rain is likely to continue all day.

Yes, it was cool and pleasant yesterday, although I suppose somewhere around the world, it must be the hottest day in existence. For others, in the Gaza Strip, all existence is gone.

Hatem Abu Zaydeh, my former PhD student, is in Gaza City with his wife and five children.

“We are still alive”, he said.

He is a faculty member of the Islamic University of Gaza, which now lies in ruins. If you google the university, you will see that it is “permanently closed”. The 17,874 students and 307 faculty members are nowhere to be seen, all existence is gone.

When I last messaged Hatem a few days ago, he sent me a stark video clip showing his living room in ruins. He looked like he had not slept in days, his face etched with pain and worry.

I could hardly hear him. In the background was a sound just as horrendous as the beasts responsible for them. These were Israeli fighter jets and their ear-splitting sounds, like thunder arriving from over the horizon, followed by deadly explosions.

Hatem, in his video, says, “Alhamdulillah, death is close, but for now, we are safe.” For others, all existence is gone.

The need to humanise conflict

In his video clip, Hatem said, ”In the name of Allah the Merciful, there was a huge bomb for the Muharram family. The bomb was without warning. 12 people died including children and women and caused total destruction of the house. There was a bomb for Abul Aall and teacher Mahir’s family resulting in the death of nine to 10 people. Alhamdulillah.

(Edited for clarity and translated from Arabic by Banan and her husband Omar, postgraduate Iraqi students from USM.)

Do we need to know who died? When thousands of men, women, and children have died in Gaza, do we really need to know their names?

About 1,800km away from Gaza, Dragana Vucetic, a Serbian forensic anthropologist, is identifying victims of the 1995 Srebrenica genocide during the Bosnian War. Of the estimated 8,000 dead in the town of Srebrenica, roughly 1,000 are still awaiting identification.

She says, “To find a lost son, father, brother, or husband is to rescue the dead from anonymity. There is a name and a grave where families can go to mourn. There is closure.”

That same need drives a small group of activists in South Sudan that tracks down the names of those killed in a deadly political rivalry. They created a project called “Remembering the Ones We Lost”, a memory project not intended for blame but to recognise the loss of lives and the value they brought to the world.

So, Hatem, while we do not know your neighbours, or your family and friends, we understand the need for them to be recognised, to understand that in the time they were alive, and now in their death, they achieved something tangible.

At the very least, they made us stop and think of the futility of such wars. There is a need to humanise conflict, to accept, respect, and understand others, and to ensure justice, freedom, and solidarity.

The right to self-defence?

It has been said that Israel, as a country, has the right to defend itself after the Oct 7 Hamas attacks.

The self-defence law requires a proportional defence. The response must match the threat level in question. A person can only use as much force as required to remove the threat. If the threat involves deadly force, the person defending themselves can use deadly force to counteract the threat.

Any use of excessive, disproportionate force against the perpetrator is retaliatory and not self-defence. Sometime during the night of Oct 7, things changed, and self-defence became lex talionis.

What is lex talionis?

Conflicts between Israel and various Arab forces have been ongoing since 1948. In other words, the conflict of Oct 7, 2023, was 75 years in the making.

Was this a Palestinian response to previous injustice? Or, for the Israelis, surely if attacked, one has the right to self-defence? Either one or the other perspective speaks of lex talionis, the law of retaliation.

Lex talionis takes the view that punishment for crimes must exact “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” It is referenced in all three Abrahamic religions and dates as far back as the Code of Hammurabi.

In Islam, lex talionis is embedded in the law of qisas (retributive justice) but tempered with mercy through diyya (compensation). The general idea of lex talionis is that punishment should “fit the crime.”

However, at the time of this writing, the Palestinian death toll has reached 10,022 people, including 4,104 children and 2,641 women while the Israeli death toll is 1,400, mainly civilians killed during Hamas’ initial attack.

Where is the proportionality of lex talionis?

Right now, there is neither proportionality nor mercy. When the retribution is disproportionate, there can be nothing but violence.

The crime without a name

In his radio broadcast of Aug 24, 1941, Winston Churchill talked about the systematic murder of the Jewish people. He announced that Jews had nowhere to run and were being systematically exterminated. He said, “We are in the presence of a crime without a name.”

Fast forward to November 2023 in the Gaza Strip. If Churchill were alive, he would use social media to talk of the systematic extermination of Palestinians but with a difference. This time, thanks to Raphael Lemkin, a Polish-Jewish lawyer, the crime has a name.

In his 1944 book ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe’, Lemkin introduced the word genocide.

“It comes from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)… It is a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.

Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.”

Moshe Feiglin, Israeli politician and former Knesset member, said in an interview with Al Jazeera that the only solution is the “complete destruction of Gaza, before invading it… Destruction like Dresden and Hiroshima, without a nuclear weapon.”

Mr Churchill, this is the word you were looking for: genocide. It is as relevant in 1944 as it is today in Gaza, 2023. In the face of overwhelming evidence, this is the word the world knows but refuses to use: genocide.

The land between the river and the sea

Against a backdrop of incessant bombings, his house in ruins, and his children “safe” at a UN school that was bombed literally hours after he sent the message; Hatem and those like him, survive another day.

They send out similar messages like Hatem’s: “The situation is very miserable. No water, no food, no medicines. More than 4,000 children killed”.

Unlike my small riverine land within the mangroves of Pengkalan Datu that feeds into the South China Sea, my former student Hatem lives on a tiny sliver of land nestled between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

This contentious land is now part Israel, part Gaza, part West Bank. It is the land of Jesus, Moses, and Muhammad, of Christians, Jews, and Muslims. It is the confluence of the three Abrahamic religions. It is where the ongoing genocide of Palestinians is happening. Does anyone really care?

DR ZALINA ISMAIL is a former professor in Neurophysiology at the School of Health Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, as well as a fellow of the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.

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