menu_open Columnists
We use cookies to provide some features and experiences in QOSHE

More information  .  Close

From Venice to Gaza: the imperial fire and the spectacle of submission

17 1
yesterday

“I know a lady in Venice would have walked barefoot to Palestine for a touch of his nether lip,” Shakespeare says. Yet, the world, holding its breath, watched not a lady walking from Venice to Sharm el-Sheikh to rubber-stamp the fate of Palestine, but men who travelled eagerly from all around the world to touch the nether lip of the US president—cringing and flattering him as if he had set the Thames on fire.

No, he did not. But he left Palestine on fire—on imperialist fire that can only be extinguished through its eventual defeat.

An old and forgotten quote of Shakespeare has torn apart the Israeli myth of Palestine being a “land without people.” On the contrary, he did not mention Israel, for such an entity was an imperialist construct, created in the middle of the twentieth century—somewhat akin to a Fox production.

“For Mussalmans,” Marx wrote, “there is no such thing as subordination. Inequality is an abomination.” But the spineless Muslim leaders—maintaining their hegemony through coercion in their own countries, lacking revolutionary spirit—were gathered only to seek security or, akin to Shylock, a “pound of flesh” to feed their unfamished appetite. They knew well what Byron had alluded to: Trust not for freedom to the Franks—They have a king who buys and sells.

But ostriches are known to bury their heads in the sand whenever danger presents itself. When mediocrity is imposed upon a people, it leaves behind humiliation as its legacy—a collective, deep-seated humiliation, the irony of which escapes the psyche of the nation at large.

In slavery, human sense perception is compromised to the extent that one fails to perceive the possibility of an alternative. The chains one wears become the only reality. “Men,” Horkheimer says, “…take the jargon of their jailors and, with cold reason and mad consent, tell their story as if it could not have been otherwise, contending........

© Business Recorder