A Stateless Nation's Incredible Journey from a Holocaust Victim to, in turn, almost becoming a Genocidal State and almost Triggering a Regional War...

Almost 80 years ago, the Jews were a stateless nation and a victim of one of the most heinous crimes on humanity, the holocaust, which witnessed millions of Jews being gassed to death by the Nazi war machinery across a multitude of concentration camps created across Europe. However, within 2 years of the end of World War II, in 1947, the state of Israel was created as a dedicated nation-state for Jews under Ben Gurion's vision and with tacit support from the British & the Americans.

Facing existential threats in a hostile neighborhood, Israel fought multiple conversational wars valiantly over the subsequent decades with the active technical & military support from its biggest patron & benefactor, the U.S.

That's what ensured the exercise of the nuclear option by the Israelis in 1967 for existential reasons, despite CIA's roving eye on it and later Kennedy administration's deal-making over it, and the continued maintenance if the policy of ambivalence by Israel over its highly secretive nuclear program in the Negev desert.

With the threat landscape changing consequently from conventional & near-peer to asymmetric; Israel swiftly & rapidly pivoted its well-oiled war machine towards anti-terror operations. However, the brazen October 2023 terror attack on Israel, carried out with almost unprecedented impunity, Benjamin Netanyahu, too, responded with an unprecedented military ops intended at almost crushing & decimating Gaza.

It, however, either intentionally or unexpectedly, snowballed into a regional war on terror by also flaring up into a full-scale anti-terror ops against Iran-backed proxies, namely, Hezbollah, Hamas & the Houthis. Israel & Iran also traded ballistic missiles with each other, as part of this stand-off, and a closely aligned Israel-American alliance even conducted airstrikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. Israel's latest attacks on the Hamas leadership in the neutral zone, Doha, are only likely to further escalate and may also almost snowball into another regional war for itself. Further, UAE, too, has just warned Israel that its potential annexation of the occupied West Bank would be akin to crossing a red line, a clear violation of the spirit of Abraham Accords and effectively put an end to the process of regional integration.

However, after having pounded Gaza with American supplied bombs for years, Israel, now, seemingly, pursuing the 'final solution', trying to starve around half-a-million Gazans to death by blocking humanitarian aid supplies, in a stark & nefarious recollection & repeat of what a 'mad man' did to them over 80+ years ago out of sheer racial hatred. For the deniers and naysayers, the Israeli Supreme Court has just ruled days ago that the Palestinian detainees languishing in Israel's prisons, too, are not being given enough food to even survive by ensuring "a basic level of existence".

Further, on the grounds of further expanding its ground operations in Gaza, the Israeli forces are now forcing hungry, impoverished, bruised & battered Gazans to evict their homeland and flee so that it becomes a dedicated, Israeli-occupied territory, just like Golan Heights earlier. The Israeli political leadership and hardliners are in favor of it and argue that the children growing up in Gaza will grow up only to become terrorists who will invariably end up attacking Israel & it's citizens.

However, that's just hatred overwhelming reason in an overextended span of fury directed against a particular ethnicity on an en-masse & indiscriminate basis, something which had caused the Holocaust originally.

Seemingly, the hate has turned the original victims of hatred, themselves, into their original tormentors, the Nazis, over time. As a wise man said long ago, "You become whom You hate, invariably." And the consequences of hatred are seemingly the same once again, another millions of lives which are at stake in Gaza right now. Irony indeed...

Is this what the founding fathers of Israel wanted the state to become, a mass killer of civilians and a Genocidal State...totally doubt that...

Even India, as a nation, has been another major victim of terrorist strikes backed by its arch-rival, Pakistan, for over 4+ decades. However, India's approach, in terms of response to such strikes, has always been commensurate, calibrated & calculated and directed solely against the perpetrators and the proxies while carefully avoiding any collateral damage to harmless civilians, as has been evident over the series of recent strikes by the Indian armed forces directed solely against the terror infrastructure located across the international border in Pakistan since 2016.

Marx said long ago, "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy and second as farce." The current Israeli actions in Gaza; despite the presence of extensive U.N. provisions, like responsibility to protect (R2P), and given the lukewarm reaction of leading global powers (P5) & international community (and the game of thrones played at the UNSC over geopolitics, as always) to the plight of the Gazans, as they are busy placating Trump & tackling Putin over Ukraine; seemingly, just goes to prove that, somehow, somewhere Marx was right...

Somehow, for mankind, humanity has always ended up playing second fiddle to, and continues to be enslaved by hatred & Geopolitics even in the 21st century, with Gaza & Ukraine being prime examples, despite hundreds-of-millions of lives getting squandered & sacrificed in two world wars collectively in the last century...

Somehow, mankind will have to invariably realize, though painfully, but inevitably what Martin Luther King Jr. said long ago: "Darkness cannot drive darkness; only Light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only Love can do that...”