Israeli aggression and the state of the Islamic world

As we move toward the middle of the month of Ramadan, the state of the Islamic world is heartbreaking. Because of hot conflicts everywhere, hundreds of people die on average every day, hundreds are wounded, and thousands are driven from their homes and homelands.

There is certainly the hand and finger of external powers, but in the end all these deaths are at the hands of Muslims.

Unfortunately, although in all the war zones the fighting elements are also supported by some Western powers, they are incited more by certain so-called Muslim countries. Iraq, Syria and Yemen are in fact the stage for a war between the Gulf countries and Iran. These countries settle their accounts with one another by turning these countries into lakes of blood.

Of course, whether these countries wage these wars they sponsor on their own account, or whether they too have another owner of their own wars, is also always a rightful and valid question. Did the Gulf countries sponsor the coup in Egypt on their own account, or under the pressure of a club to which they belong?

How can Iran, by supporting the Houthis, fall into the same camp as Saudi Arabia in Yemen, which was trying to find its stability, for better or worse, and had recently covered quite a distance on that road? One of the rare moments when the two countries can form an alliance turns out to be the dragging back into war of an Islamic country walking in peace on a blessed path.

What has happened recently in all these countries shows that the great obstacles to the Islamic world's truly being a "world" are much more complex than they appear, and that the internal and external resistance to it is much greater than supposed. Moreover, every day we face the existence of very different instruments that this resistance is able to set in motion.

While the Islamic world is under the influence of this fragmentation and storm of fitna within itself, Israel steps onto the stage to put on its own classic. This time its pretext for the attacks on Gaza is that three kidnapped children were found dead.

Although Hamas has declared repeatedly that it has nothing to do with this kidnapping, and moreover although revenge for this incident was taken through the kidnapping and savage burning to death of an innocent Palestinian child by Jewish settlers, Israel, using this incident as a pretext, launched one more of its routine attacks on Gaza with heavy bombardment, without regard even for Ramadan. The number of those killed in these attacks so far has exceeded one hundred, and the number of wounded has reached the hundreds.

In response to these attacks, Israel manages to have the rocket attacks coming from Gaza read and watched by the world as a great story of victimhood. The answer to rockets that fall in fields and have no real effect is to rain death on the Palestinian civilians who have been living in a complete concentration camp in Gaza for years already.

It is striking that the timing of this asymmetric aggression comes right after the agreement reached in Palestine between Hamas and al-Fatah. Israel has announced from the beginning that it does not recognize this agreement, but it needed to invent a pretext in order to make a move against it. The kidnapped Israeli children of course do not provide a justification for these attacks, but they provide this pretext well enough.

In any case, the story of an Israeli child with an itch on his head, polished by the BBC and CNN, is always far more interesting than the pain and story of hundreds of Palestinian children who die in the most horrific ways. When these attacks force Hamas to respond, no one sees Israel's aggression and the people it has killed, but rather the rockets Hamas has fired. In this way Israel has once again launched Hamas to the world as a terrorist that cannot be negotiated with.

Against earlier Israeli attacks too, the Islamic world did not give an effective voice in response to the silence of the entire world. But this time the inaction displayed on the part of the Islamic world in particular is far more striking. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation convened in Jeddah with an emergency agenda, but it is futile to expect this union, which has no solution or intervention regarding the deadly conflicts within itself, to give an effective voice in defense of Palestine.

It is quite clear that this dispersion of the Islamic world further emboldens Israel's aggression and whets its appetite. And if you like, remember also the fact that the Muslims' being this preoccupied with one another is a strategic goal of Israel's own international politics. See how these events will look then.