Tel Aviv: Menu #67

Maskwaith Ahsan
Art & Literature
Tel Aviv: Menu #67

The front page of daily Haaretz carried the photographs of 67 Palestinian children killed in the recent wave of Israeli bombing on Gaza. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem started smelling of children roasted in the bombardment. Restaurant menus started displaying it as a special happy meal item, with Israelis out on the streets celebrating the freedom after also having won the fight against Covid-19. Netanyahu and his warlords were the first to order from menu #67.
The lockdown brought back memories of the fateful and fearful World Way 2 but none of the 70 years of imprisoned Palestinian lives under Israeli occupation. Palestinians and Arabs remain haunted and hunted by Israeli dwellers with the same force even today.

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The virus is an enemy unseen; tiny soldiers united and indiscriminate against the world. But the sociopathic presence of Israeli soldiers snaring Palestinians is a reality the world has chosen to believe doesn’t exist.

Dressed in gifted military couture, the soldiers of Zionism act like they are still the chosen ones, wave like they still deserve to carry the stick of Moses and order the sea to part like that would unite the lost tribes.

The holy followers walked through paths of wisdom, winning Nobel prizes, inventing luxuries and helping move the world forward. In exchange they didn’t want a home, they wanted a country, wanted land with unlimited boundaries, and the power that comes from having a state. Spread across Berlin, Vienna, Warsaw wasn’t enough. A motherless child is the perhaps the most unfortunate one; intelligent perhaps but mostly emotionless. So Doctor Faustus had to ask Arthur Balfour: “Oh, Mephistopheles, can you find me a motherland.”

Eyes dancing with joy, Balfour took a sip of the holy water and said,

“Of course my lord. We will not let the sun set on the British Empire. Here are the papers to Palestine. Welcome to your new home.”

When mundane, everyday problems occupy us no more, the devil within starts to stir up distant memories of pathos and despair, seeking to plot revenge. The Zionist movement is just that. Even paradise on Earth is no longer enough. The one thing this paradise doesn’t provide is human flesh and blood. Proclaiming divinity would be the only way. And why not? After all, they are the chosen ones. Thus rise the vampires of Irgun, Haganah and Lehi from the fireplace of the smoky chambers of Zionism. And so begins the hunt for the blood of Palestinians and Arabs.

In Tel Aviv, the taste of Palestinian children can be found in most food. This food talks: about the Palestinian mother crying at home, the father numb with pain holding the copy of daily Haaretz with photographs of the 67 children killed by the vampires. It had to be 67, to celebrate the victory after victory since 1967.

Doctor Faustus’ dictionary has only words like Elite, Pedigree, Superman and Blue-blood. In that world, you have the right to the red blood of Palestinian children if you are a blue blood. Family connections, lawyers, friends in the judiciary, parliament, police and media whitewash any and all, create necessary illusions by portraying Palestinian and Arab children as terrorists, as a threat to the national security of Israel for fighting the onslaught of vampires with stones.

Hollywood is there to release one after another film crying about the victims of Second World War, as if Nazis are the only genociders and thereafter ‘No one Killed Palestine’, and the way 9/11 twin tower attack justifies US atrocities around the world, it’s as if the 9/11-1973 US-plotted brutality in El-Salvador never existed.

It is the academicians, film-makers and liberal capitalists living in their self-defined bubble of ethics and selective justice, harping on the liberalism of Netanyahu and the conservatism of Palestinian leaders, and declaring anti-Zionism to be Anti-Semitism, who are blocking all roads to peace. It is in their twisted heads that bikini is liberal but Al-bikini is conservative. For them #MeToo is front-page news but a Palestinian girl violated by Israeli soldiers is mere propaganda. Why? Because of Rambo and James Bond, who with their ‘successful’ missions to Ramallah are welcomed by Palestinian women.

Maskwaith Ahsan. Maskwaith Ahsan is an international journalist, educator and the author of over 14 books. His columns appear in several Bengali newspapers, magazines and websites across the globe. He also hosts his web TV show E-SouthAsia. With socio-political satire...

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