The Universal Church, otherwise known as the Catholic Church in many parts of the world including ours, designates the month of October as the month of Mother Mary. It is the month during which praying the Rosary by the faithful is encouraged every day to ask for Mary’s intervention in the affairs of man especially in areas of conflict and injustice. November 1, is designated the All Saints Day.

Again the intercession of powerful Saints is sought in the affairs of man in personal, communal and global spheres. This religious circuit is rounded up by the All Souls Day on November 2, a day designated to remembering the dead, especially the untimely dead – and they are many in Gaza today.

Mary, to whom the month is devoted, lived and walked the crannies of those areas in Gaza and Palestine that have now become almost inhabitable. The early Saints, to whom this special day has been devoted, also walked these crannies. It is unlikely that many of the current inhabitants of the area remembered them this October, or will remember them in any October soon except in private closets. To Palestine, Israel, the Middle-East and the world at large, October will be remembered for a long time as the day Israel was attacked. An attack to which Israel responded with utmost ferocity and brutality.

To the cynical, it would seem, judging from the mismatched level of retaliation, as if Israel was hoping to be provoked so it could find an excuse to wipe out indigenes and take over large swathes of territories. Last month was the first anniversary of the October 7 attack. Time enough for an unbiased observer to wonder if the punishment meted out this past year, fitted the crime. The scale of destruction in the past one year has been unimaginable. The innocents, including women and children, were not left out in this continuous orgy of violence.

Sometimes, it seemed they were even specially targeted for annihilation considering how hospitals and health facilities were also targeted. Humanitarian aid had been reluctantly allowed in places and utterly denied in others. Its hard to think the same people who were once victims of genocide are now perpetrators of what can now be described as a modern day genocide. I do not excuse the heinous crimes of Hitler and his gang of murderers, but the total lack of compassion and disdain for humanity by the Israeli government in the prosecution of this ‘war’ makes one wonder what the Germans saw in the Jews in the first instance that the rest of the world did not see.

The whole world stood behind the Jews in their hours of darkness and homelessness. The conscience of the world would not rest until Israel found a home. Again, with hindsight, one wonders what the Arabs saw to make them reluctant to have them as neighbors. The same United Nations which pulled strings to make the State of Israel legal internationally is now treated with disdain and humiliation. Its advice and admonitions are not only routinely ignored, they are responded to with insults. Yet, where would the world be today without the UN despite its shortcomings?

The two major religions of the world are founded on love of God and of neighbor. They preach peace and charity to all people. They espouse the principles of humanity and the protection of underdogs. It is hard to think they have their roots in an area that has been consumed by hatred and conflict for so long. Can we them blame cynics who see religion as a mere opium of the poor, when the cradle of three major religions – if one includes Judaism – is as conflicted as it is today? If, as the bible says, ‘by their fruits, you shall know them’, then the fruits from Israel and even Palestine are definitely not fruits of the spirit which are love, peace, goodwill among many desirables. 

Like many, I was an admirer of Israel. I admired its resourcefulness, its advancement in the sciences, its agricultural and military ingenuity. I admired the fact that they earned the respect of their neighbors and the world through hard work and self-belief. I also admired the biblical fact that they were a chosen race. Like many, I was taken to the moon and back by the resounding victory of the six-day war. It was, to me, a victory of David over Goliath. It was proof to my young, impressionable mind then, that God had a hand in the victory and made His people invincible just as He did in the ancient past. But over the years, the journalist in me started to place available facts over religious sentiments.

My visit to Israel over a decade ago led to the beginning of my disillusionment. I found that Christianity was not only in the minority, it was an inconvenient minority. Jesus was not the Messiah of the people I met and the holy places were more of tourist attractions – believe me, I know the difference having visited a lot of holy sites in my lifetime. I found a people whose self-belief has almost led to a feeling of racial superiority. It is easy to admire them and what they have achieved but not so easy to like them.

Whatever I had left of my feeling was further eroded when I visited the occupied territory, almost against advice. Those people were not only treated with distrust and suspicion, they were treated as sub-humans in their ancestral land. The repression and oppression were uncomfortable for me. It was clear that the situation should not be allowed to exist in a modern world. It was clear that their condition would have to be brought to the fore of global awareness at some point which was what I think the October 7 attack tried to do.

Israel might have unleashed its military prowess. It might have unleashed its enormous propaganda machinery to try to change the narratives around this one-sided war. But an Israel which is prepared to risk the lives of the hostages to score a punitive point, loses empathy with every passing day the war goes on. It is losing the minds of global youths who are the future of the world. It is in the process hardening the hearts of its neighbors who cannot be subjugated forever. In addition, Big Brother US will not be the dominating superpower in the world forever – its reign is about being reined in. In the end, long after the current actors would have died, Israel could find that it merely won some battles and not the war.