Pearls and Irritations

In population terms, the deaths in Gaza since 7 October would be equivalent to killing about one million Australians.

Last April a man from Bethlehem visited Australia. Like an earlier man born in Bethlehem, he delivered some well-directed words that did not always settle on welcoming ears.

Professor Mazin Qumsiyeh is director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University. In Sydney, he spoke to about 500 mainly young people at the NSW Teachers’ Federation centre in Surry Hills.

He is also an untiring advocate for the Palestinian cause, and argues for an enduring peace in the region and for global sustainability rather than wars and colonialism. He is a Christian and his family has lived around Bethlehem since the time of Christ. “Bethlehem” derives from Beit Laham meaning House of Laham (or Lakham) who was the Canaanite god of sustenance or food. It was a rich agricultural area.

Professor Qumsiyeh outlined the injustice imposed on the indigenous Palestinians by followers of what he called a racist concept of colonial Zionism. He pointed out that apart from 36 million climate refugees around the world, Palestinians comprise the largest group of political refugees – eight million. This is supplemented by millions more from Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Afghanistan, and other countries in which Western imperialism and its proxies have taken an unhealthy interest.

He described how Israel Defence Forces personnel and settlers routinely demolish Palestinians’ homes, destroy their crops, uproot millions of olive trees. How Palestinians are discriminated against on religious grounds, whether Muslim or Christian, “Yet, if anyone from anywhere in the world converts to Judaism, they can get automatic Israeli citizenship and live on stolen Palestinian lands.“

He said one of the reasons for Israel’s drive to liquidate Palestinians, in addition to the usual colonisation idea of creating empty land for “Lebensraum”, is an estimated $US200 billion worth of gas off Gaza’s coast. He added that people in the United States State Department are “managed by Tel Aviv“ and that “the percentage of journalists killed by Israeli forces in Gaza is the highest of all professions“. Why Israel should be intent on killing journalists should be obvious to any informed person, particularly media people. Yet, this ongoing selective killing is apparently a taboo subject in mainstream Western media.

“In population terms, the deaths in Gaza since 7 October would be equivalent to killing about one million Australians,” he said.

Without a doubt the Hamas attack on 7 October should not have occurred. Was it necessary? In an ideal world, it would be unacceptable, but Palestinians have suffered daily oppression for 76 years without enough international attention to bring any respite. Professor Qumsiyeh added that his people have been living the earlier experience of Aboriginal Australians (genocide and marginalisation) since 1948.

This is illustrated by the fact that an estimated 60% of Hamas members have had at least one parent killed by Israeli military action.

Professor Qumsiyeh was asked what we in Australia could do to help bring a just end to this conflict. He put his finger on it.

“Expose Western hypocrisy. We have to think about where Western nations are headed. Young people understand but many older people, including your governments, don’t get it,” he said.

As an example, he said only one nation was acting according to international law and its associated treaties. “Only Yemen is trying to uphold international law by stopping an ongoing genocide via preventing ships from delivering arms to the offending nation. The rest of us are not.

“This is a critical time in human history, not just Palestinian history. This is because this conflict exposes the hypocrisy within us all,” he said. Now that we can see it will we combat it or ignore it?

The dangers of hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is not merely saying one thing and doing another, although it can appear so superficially. In a cultural sense hypocrisy operates at a deeper level: we know the right thing to do but, for one reason or another, we choose not to do it. In an attempt to satisfy our conscience we talk righteously and pretend to support what we know is right. In our minds we are doing the right thing. But of course we are not. What we are doing is trying to remove our need to do the right thing.

We are thus corrupting our thinking. When we corrupt our thinking, we corrupt our relations first with ourselves and then with others, then with our society, then our government, then our whole nation becomes corrupted. The corrupting is slow and evenly spread. It rises like a tide. We all remain level. The change is hardly noticeable, but it does increasing damage to our society. It metastasises. Slowly, but surely, it erodes our ethical standards, our ability to interact honestly and productively with ourselves and with each other. Trust in each other is gradually eroded. Without trust, society cannot function efficiently.

In our Western democracies, we are well down this path and our hypocritical treatment of the Palestinian issue is the clearest consistent example over the past 100 years of the moral corruption we are steadily conditioning ourselves to accept.

We know the present Gaza slaughter should not be happening. We say it should not be happening. And we do nothing to stop it happening. (Evidence? It’s still happening.) By doing nothing, our governments support it. To satisfy our conscience, we pretend we are trying to prevent or at least reduce this carnage. We protest, the United Nations issues declarations. Israel is asked to stop immediately, or “as soon as possible”. And the genocide continues.

The word hypocrisy has a long and shameful history. It entered the English language meaning “the sin of pretending to virtue or goodness” early in the 13th century, having travelled via Old French and Latin from Greek where it referred to “an actor under an assumed character”. The scope for deceit is obvious.

Perhaps appropriately, Western literature is not too concerned with the concept, if we discount the Bible’s opinion of hypocrites: “Their tongue is a deadly arrow; it speaks deceit; with his mouth he speaks peace to his neighbour, but inwardly he sets an ambush for him.” (Jeremiah 9:8)

Or “Woe to you, teachers of the law of the Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean.” (Matthew 23)

Having suffered long from Western abuse, sheltered by hypocrisy, it is not surprising that Arabs/Muslims and indigenous people elsewhere have a more acute understanding of the concept of hypocrisy, or nifaq.

According to the Hadith (sayings of Mohammad), “Three signs are found when one is a hypocrite even though he fasts and offers prayers and thinks he is a Muslim: when he is trusted, he is dishonest, when he talks he lies, and when he makes a promise, he breaks it.”

To bring us up to date here is an extract from a long article published in Qatar’s Gulf Times in October 2020:

“Scrutinising the essence of hypocrisy, you will find it a Satanic combination that comprises severe cowardice, greed for the immediate pleasures of this worldly life, denial of truth, and lying. Of course one can imagine the evil effects of such a combination.”

Little wonder that Arabs have described hypocrisy as “a disease of the soul”. Like other diseases it can prove lethal.

Jewish literature abounds with rejections of hypocrisy and warnings against it. The Jewish Encyclopedia, while noting that “Hypocrisy is a vice hardly known in primitive times when men are natural; it is practised only in a society that has established rules of piety and rectitude, and is deceived by appearances,”, quotes from the Psalms: “Let God destroy them that live by hypocrisy in the company of the saints.”

It adds, “Let the ravens peck out the eyes of the men that work hypocrisy,” and notes that hypocrites are called “men-pleasers”.

From at least Torah and Old Testament times through the New Testament and into Koranic times the insidious dangers of hypocrisy are obviously well understood. What do we learn about our times when we observe that our awareness of the dangers of hypocrisy has sunk almost to vanishing point?

This is where we in our liberal Western democracies find ourselves more firmly entrenched than we like to think, thus applying another layer of hypocrisy to our already generous supply of hypocrisies.

So, if we are to save ourselves from the social corruption that hypocrisy is inflicting on us, where should we start?

Why not start at the top? With the most powerful, supposedly, man in the world?

As an example of the dangerous consequences of hypocrisy, witness President Joe Biden’s recent simultaneous actions concerning Gaza. On one hand, his navy constructed a (temporary) jetty on the coast, ostensibly so desperately needed humanitarian aid could be delivered to Gaza. At the same time, he supported the ongoing starvation of Gaza via a suffocating Israeli blockade while continuing to deliver bombs and other weapons to Israel, so Israel’s killing spree could continue. We, in Australia, accepted this nonsense; indeed we quietly applauded.

Here we have hypocrisy directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the past 11 months. Hypocrisy is more than a philosophical or moral threat. It is killing thousands and corrupting millions.

Of course, Biden can fabricate excuses for his hypocrisy, but his excuses will hinge on the host of other hypocrisies embedded in the American (and other Western) systems of government. All in all, a poor demonstration of the merits of the liberal democratic system we hold so dear. Biden has decided against running for a second term, but we can rest assured the deeply entrenched hypocritical American political system will find a replacement of similar character. This is the depth of the danger Professor Qumsiyeh is warning us of.

As a further example of the dangers of hypocrisy we should note that we are applying the same hypocritical approach to our handling of climate change, which is surely the greatest crisis the world is facing: the UN issues declarations, we talk about it, saying all the right things, our companies talk vaguely about ESG (environment, social, governance), countries pass legislation. And underneath all the words we carry on as if nothing is amiss. Fuelled by selective economic arguments and comforted by our usual hypocrisy we are walking into two traps of our own making. Which will spring first: Palestine or the planet?

Unless we overcome our hypocrisy and start facing up to some hard facts, we are unlikely to escape the consequences of our moral decline. And we will have nobody to blame but ourselves.