WITH all the barbarism that is going around in occupied Palestinian territories, there is a dire need for the Muslim world to come together and communicate a sense of unity to the larger world. The recent World Cup in Qatar, which was supposed to be about football, became an effective platform to display solidarity with the Palestinians by people from across the world.

It was heart-warming to watch people from countries as diverse as Japan, Brazil, Argentina and others, snubbing the Israelis who were present in Qatar during football matches. The occupiers of Palestine thought that with a string of ‘peace treaties’ with various Gulf countries, they would be welcomed and accepted by the masses. To their own horror and expense, they found out how wrong they were.

They were surprised when people from across the world did not even hide their hatred for the occupiers of Palestine. The reaction was so harsh that the Israelis preferred not to identify themselves with the Jewish state, and, instead, started mentioning the names of European countries to which they had originally belonged before moving to Israel.

Such expressions of love and empathy for the Palestinians by the global population was a slap in the face of the countries that have embraced the occupiers. The ‘normalisers’, who watch daily genocide of Arabs and attacks on the third holiest site in Islam, continue doing business with the occupying force.

The occupiers have always worked with rulers or heads of governments to achieve their goal because dictators can easily be bought or manipulated.

It would be interesting to see which ruler would embrace the new butchers in occupied Palestine; Benjamin Natanyahu and Itamar Ben Gvir, who are shamelessly extending their blood-stained hands with active support from the United States, in their bit to ‘normalise’ Israel’s relations with more entities across the Middle East.

Netanyahu, a Polish, has killed over 2,000 Palestinians, and Ben Gvir is infamous for his ‘death to Arab’ chants and for supporting European settler mobs in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, where settlers have been forcing Palestinians out of their homes.

During a recent settler rampage, Ben Gvir brandished a pistol, encouraging settlers to shoot directly at the resisting Palestinians.

The fact is that the world at large needs Arab cash since Europe and the US instigated a crisis that led to war between Russia and Ukraine. The conflict has taken a toll on the treasury. This means the Palestinians should work with Pakistan, Iran, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, China, Oman, Kuwait, Yemen, Syria, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Somalia, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Qatar, Bangladesh, South Africa and central Asian countries to stop the colonists from attacking them.

Iran and Saudi Arabia should unite and help the Palestinians. They will be a strong force in the Arabian peninsula, which is why the Israelis are desperately working on keeping them divided.

The Muslims should work actively and unitedly to send the warmongers in Palestine back to where they come from; just as the Algerians did to the French. People have clearly sided with the Palestinians.

How can any nation embrace the Netanyahu-Zionist axis of genocide? So bad is the situation with this power axis that it even made the US, whose citizens Rachel Corrie and Shireen Abu Akleh, among several others, have been killed by the Israelis, issue a response over the genocide taking place in Palestine. It is time for the US and the world to end this occupation, and to give Palestine back to the Palestinians.

Angabeen Ahmad
Karachi

Published in Dawn, February 10th, 2023