The rootlessness and wordlessness of Zionism

The savage attacks that Israel has been conducting for 34 days against the people of Gaza, to whom it had already been giving concentration-camp conditions for 17 years, are exhausting its reputation more each day in the eyes of all the peoples of the world and are making everyone standing behind it sink into the ground. That Israel is not a state shows more with every one of its acts. It behaves merely like a heavily armed, uncontrolled, ruleless, rootless organization.

That, at the hour when, after 33 days, the first implementation of the "pause in the bombardment" promise, which it had agreed at the request of the US to apply for 4 hours a day, was expected, it violated the agreement by again bombing a hospital, is somehow received as a surprise.

Yet this is a typical Israeli mode of behavior. Israel has done the same thing in all the peace negotiations with Palestine until now. It is not very hard to get a promise out of Israel on certain matters. To appear peace-minded it can sometimes give every kind of promise. But when it comes to keeping those promises, it turns out that it has no word that binds it. For it, giving a promise is like writing on water.

In all its talks with Palestine, especially those held under US mediation, one of the most important conditions expected of it, and which it itself accepted, was that it would not open new settlements. Yet on return from every negotiation, despite the promises it had given, as if mocking the whole world, it went on, at a faster pace, opening new usurped settlements.

For Israel there is no such virtue as keeping promises made to people. So it is no surprise that it did not keep even the promise, at the insistence of the US, to pause its massacres 4 hours a day; indeed the very request for a 4-hour pause instead of stopping the massacres altogether means nothing other than a support that spoils Israel even more in all this criminal aggression. Here the US's unlimited support is of course Israel's greatest strength, but as we said before, attributing it to Abdelwahab el-Messiri, another source of Israel's power is the Arab countries' unlimited indifference. In fact we can say that it is more than this indifference. Many of them are eagerly awaiting Hamas's defeat before Israel, and unfortunately they give the necessary support for this under the table or over it.

However, Hamas has no remaining possibility of defeat from this hour on. Because, with the routs it has inflicted on Israel up to this hour, with its meager means, it has shattered the entire legendary military, intelligence, media and political dome of Israel, which has many means. From this hour on, even if Hamas is destroyed, it will have achieved what it was to achieve, and will have lit a flame of independence and freedom unparalleled in the entire Islamic world, indeed in the eyes of all the world's peoples. This success of Hamas has already settled in the hearts of those who want its destruction as a nightmare. From this hour on their fear will not help their demise either; every measure they take will hasten their end all the more.

It is fitting to recall Heidegger's famous saying, inspired by Hölderlin's poem: "Where danger grows, the saving power grows as well." The world is moving further from humanity each day under the dazzling, exploitative, unjust, criminal hegemony of Zionism. A world power that drowns the world in corruption with the mischief it makes, corrupts generations, tramples the sacred, moves away from justice, and makes oppression sovereign is a great danger for humanity. An order that has made oppression, corruption, mischief, exploitation and massacres routine also forms habits.

Yet these habits are the most dangerous, and can drive those who want to get out of this vise to great despair. This is precisely the danger. Yet God's earth is wide. The will that God has given to man, if he seeks, always enables him to find a way for an exit. Provided that man believes he deserves freedom. With every hardship there is an ease. Surely with every hardship there is an ease. Here, in the world that Israel and the greatest armed power behind it are choking, from the very place they choke most, from Gaza, the Qassam Brigades, with the breakout they made, rubbed the nose to the ground of that raging, arrogant and haughty power called invincible. By doing so they perhaps sacrificed themselves, but they also showed that no power is invincible. Those who eagerly await their defeat by the occupying Zionist power will of course themselves see by what kind of revolution they will be overthrown.

The metaphor that the late Egyptian intellectual Abdelwahab el-Messiri, a former Marxist who afterwards, in a later search, settled on an Islamic way of life and thought, attributed to the power of Israel and Zionism, we had said, was "Spider Webs." After embracing Islam, Messiri did very comprehensive studies on Israel and Zionism. These studies are very valuable works that can enable us to know Zionism in all its dimensions.

For example, in one place he draws attention to the existence in Israel (as of the late nineties when he did his studies) of a large number of museums, amounting to 1,500 archaeology museums. The emphasis standing out in the background of this Israeli fondness for museums is the creation of a ground for self-admiration, self-glorification, claims of supremacy. But on the other hand, the real psychology beneath this search to find so many roots for itself in the name of self-glorification stems from the absence of the roots it claims.

To be able to claim a common origin for people gathered from all over the world, from among people with different histories, different cultures, different social environments, one has of course to go very deep into history. But to the extent that you go back there, you move away from today's conditions, law, time, history.

Whoever wishes may move as far from today's history as he likes and live in his own illusion of origin, but the problem is that he is not content to go to this origin alone, and tries to carry all humanity there as well. Zionism is precisely the name of this return backwards. The "danger of reaction" with which they put us to sleep for years was in fact precisely this. Muslims never had any claim or search of going backwards. For Muslims the road was the road of hijra, not the road of Zion. Hijra is always going forward. That is why it is liberating, not only for Muslims

but for all humanity.