Israel-Palestinian War: Quest for Dignity

By Elempe Dele

As usual, I will have to borrow from almost the entire lecture given by my demigod in the literary clan, Wole Soyinka, some 20 years ago. It was part of the Reith Lecture series by British Broadcasting Corperation, BBC, titled the Climate of Fear.

He discussed why Dignity means so much to the conscious human being almost right from birth. Dignity is part of our social documents whether they are written or not. And this led to the documentation of Fundamental Human Rights as part of the United Nations, UN, Charter.

The quest for dignity, he said, has always been part of or element of wars, voluntary sacrifices and contentions, as well as protestations.

He claimed that dignity, the human version, is in the menu of every human being, and this was recognized by philosophers who have thought about the metamorphosis of the social order. According to these philosophers; Hegel, Hobbes, Nietzche and even Locke, man is a choice between total bondage and quest for dignity, even if it leads to death. Dignity is no doubt, from their submissions, one of the most fundamental defining assignment of human existence.

Soyinka opined that dignity, which is unique to humans as social animals, is manifested in social interactions between the human species.

What reduces the human dignity? No doubt conduct under suffering. Victims of rape or even turture are humans that have been stripped of their dignity. What violaters achieve basically is to rob their victims of their social possession which bears dignity. Something precious is taken away and nothing can restore it to its original form in that individual. What can restore to the Chibok Girls their dignity? How can Leah Sharibu ever be compensated with in her permanent state of violation even if she is eventually rescued?

Like Wole said, we must consciously define dignity as self-worth, sheer integrity and the acknowledgment that we are equal in any given society, be it a nation, state or a close-knit community. These communities afforementioned are rooted in shared historical experience which may be negative – such as political and economic marginalization, which the people of Palestine has been subjected to for decades in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The walls of the Palestine elicits more than marginalization, they are built as common reductionizm of the people’s dignity.

Today, as always, the people of Palestine, and its supporters are saying we will not continue to submit to indignity even if this leads to our death. What they are saying is we need some forms of self-respect in our homeland being occupied under very deadly theocratic explanation. Like he said, dignity is another version of freedom.

Soyinka could not have described better the atrocities of the Jewish people against the Palestinians:

“The kind of power that humiliates is that which compels the head of a Palestinian family to sit helplessly under Israeli guns, drenched in tears, as he watches his ancestral olive grove, the sole source of the family livelihood, fall under the electric saw, tree by tree, to make way for the wall, that will, from there there on, reduce his space of volition.

“Or else wake up suddenly in the middle of the night to find strangers in your bedroom – a battering ram has knocked a huge hole in your wall, and a group of armed men are hustling you, your wife and your children into a holding pen – such experience must rank as the erosion of one’s self-self esteem. The diet of the average Palestinian in the Middle East today – for this is where we are headed – the table fare of the average citizen is the forced diet of indignity that even children swallow daily, and worse still, watch their parents ungergo, encounters that denigrate their very humanity…”.

In Palestine, what you notice first during visitation according to the Nobel Prize wjnner is a people that have been humiliated in their own occupied land. This emotions of the quest for dignity by these people will affect you very deeply. You will not fail, as a humanist to notice that these people seem hopeless when it comes to peace, but they are also eager to have their dignity restored to them. A contradiction that breeds fanaticism and terrorism in them.

Jose Saramango, the Portuguese novelist and Nobel Price winner, made his comparison using ‘concentration camps’ even when it didnt go well with political leaders in Europe.

According to Wole, anywhere you go in Palestine, you will see humiliation as occasioned by the occupying forces of Israel. “And this humiliation has hardened into a resolve not to abandon that inefitable possession, dignity, the loss of which would finally affirm the nullification of their human status. Most frightened of all, I saw it congealed into a hard, cold, unremitting hatred.”

Today, death is the harvest in the Middle East. The death toll is climbing daily as Israel is retaliating with disproportional force, targetting innocent civilians in spite of the attrocities of the terrorist group, Hamas. We cannot run away from the truth, the Republic of the disillusioned expands daily.

There is daily recruitment into this army of terrorists because they have abandoned the hope for justice from the UN and the West. But as it seems, they have not abandoned the all-consuming quest for dignity. I mean the willing recruits into the army of terror. They are recruited into this army to preserve their identity which is lurked in their dignity.

To resolve this issue, there must be a just solution to the crisis that will consume both nations if care is not taken. The UN, the accomplice West, and as well as the BRICS nations must come together now to find a lasting solution.

They must embrace the principle of justice, ensure that the Palestinians that have been dispossessed of their priceless possession are given restitution while the humiliated are restored to dignity. Without this, the war will rage on and both nations will face the possibility of annihilation

It is a matter of time.