Gaza weeps and Arab leaders smile – Sheikh Huseyn Zakaria
Story by Jessica Mbamah
Having failed to console myself after the aggression of the Benjamin Netanyahu government against Doha, though I woefully failed. Despite the uncomensurate step taken by the Arab leaders, I am still burning furiously inside me. It’s this feeling that forced me to write these cooling lines with the hope that I am speaking for many people around the world.
Indeed, there are many moments when words completely fail. When the weight of grief, betrayal, and rage becomes too heavy for polite or deceitful language. What happened in Doha was one of those moments.
As Gaza bleeds, its children buried beneath rubble, its hospitals turned to dust, its people hunted in their own homes, Arab leaders gathered in Qatar for an emergency summit. The world waited. We hoped. We prayed.
Maybe, just maybe, they would rise
appropriately and decisively to the occasion. Maybe they would speak not just with words, but with action, from which they will choose the commensurate. But instead, they drank ghahwa, ate tamr and smiled away.
They did not stop there; they even welcomed the American Secretary of State with open arms, warm receptions, and velvet hospitality.
The same America whose weapons, intelligence, and unwavering political cover make Israel’s war on Gaza possibly destructive and annihilating. The same America whose silence is louder than any missile.
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And yet, in Doha, it was as if nothing had happened, or rather, nothing else is happening. As if the blood of Palestinians had not soaked the soil of Gaza and stained the conscience of the whole human world.
The gathering and mere rhetorical condemnation felt like a betrayal to a full brother and just a cousin. Not just of Palestine, but of every peace-loving soul who still believes in justice.
Israel’s military campaign is not self-sustaining. It is powered, financed entirely, by American support and perceived even by many disgraced uncles. Financially, technologically, diplomatically. Without Washington, Netanyahu’s war machine would stall long time ago.
Yet, Arab states continue to pour billions into the American economy, indirectly fueling the very war that is annihilating and forcefully armed, robbing Gaza. Such a senseless act is like handing fuel to the arsonist burning down your closest neighbour’s home.
As of the summit? It ended in the usual, or rather traditional way: an empty statement, a condemnation. Those painless of few cinch paragraphs of political poetry that mean nothing to the mother who just lost her child.
Nothing to the father digging through rubble with his bare hands. Nothing to the people of Gaza who are being wiped out and obliterated, being witnessed by the so-called advanced and polite people in real time.
READ ALSO: Arab, Islamic foreign ministers condemn Netanyahu’s ‘Greater Israel’ remark
Frankly speaking, I feel a fire behind frosted glass like a scream swallowed whole, just like a volcano under velvet.
This isn’t just anger. It’s heartbreak. It is watching your own people suffer while those with power choose optics over outrage. It is knowing that the lion has been muzzled by love of comfort, by fear of consequence, and by addiction to diplomacy that serves no one but the powerful West and hypocrites.
In fact, none can deny that still waters run deep. And beneath the surface of these summits and speeches, and even the upcoming ones, there is a storm brewing in the hearts of ordinary and helpless people around the world. People who are tired of watching leaders applaud the very hands that strike us. People who are tired of void denunciation and empty waves.
If the axe forgets, the tree eternally remembers. And so Gaza will ever remember. Just like the Arab street and history will remember. That in a moment when courage was needed, silence prevailed. Just like when Gaza wept, Arab leaders smiled.
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