Who speaks for the children of Gaza?

The world has become extremely bitter, violent and confrontational. Petty men with their inflated egos stride the world like a colossus. Lined up against them are starving men, women and children tethered in a war-zone. The children are the most at risk, with independent observers pointing out that in the present Gaza war 18,000 children have been killed so far at a rate of 28 per day, enough to fill a classroom every day, a class room they will never fill. Their bullet wounds tell a chilling story of target practice by sharp shooters. The Americans have a term, "shooting fish in a barrel" that comes close to describing it, but the American sport does not denote the cruelty that's ongoing in Gaza.

Earlier wars between the Israelis and the Palestinians provided us some haunting poems, notably that of Mahmoud Darwish and Muin Bseiso written during Israel's attack on Beirut:

The war will end.

The leaders will shake hands.

The old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son.

That girl will wait for her beloved husband.

And those children will wait for their heroic father.

I don't know who sold our homeland.

But I saw who paid the price.

Undoubtedly, this time around, the children have paid the price. And when children are killed either through bullets, bombs or starvation in such large numbers then the only way to describe this despicable atrocity is targeted genocide, because the perpetrators have killed off a generation of young men and women.

Sadly, there is a dearth of Nelson Mandelas and Martin Luther Kings in the present age. There have been no Bertrand Russells either. Noam Chomsky has fallen silent since he suffered a stroke two years ago. There is no one who can be called "the conscience of the world", not even, "the keeper of the flame".

While I try to put pen to paper and make some sense in the hoary darkness of what's happening all around us, I am afraid we are witnessing the final solution to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. When there are no Palestinians left in Gaza, the issue would be resolved, wouldn't it? The aid Groups could go home. There would be no Palestinian children left to feed. The journalists, those who survived the targeted killings, they too could go home because with one side vanquished totally, the guns would fall silent and a present-day Erich Maria Remarque could write that it was all quiet on the Gaza front.

While at school in Dhaka I had come across the Desiderata, the prose poem of Max Enhrmann, the last lines of which state: "With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world." Shall I tell this to the Palestinian child who died of starvation while aid trucks full of food were forcibly halted nearby and stopped from feeding the children?

Syed M Ahmed is a former banker and freelance columnist.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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