The Gaza genocide seems to have entered its final phase. Palestinians, driven south to “safe” zones on Israeli “advice”[ more than a million of them] got collected in the southernmost town of Rafah. Conveniently corralled there for Israel’s Genocidal purposes, they are now being massacred.

Genocide is not new to humans, but this one is.

• This is the first Genocide where the erstwhile victims, the Israelis, who learned the art of industrial-scale Genocide at the knees of the masters who invented it, the Germans, are now subjecting another people to it. And the Germans, in an act of supreme contrition, are abetting them.
• Genocide was supposed to be a mark of barbarians, but this time it has shifted and become a mark of civility and “civilization” because nearly all the “civilized” countries, most of them Western, are abetting this crime of crimes by either materially aiding the Genociders, or letting it pass by their silence.
• Before this, Genociders did their utmost to hide their crime. This time they are proudly advertising it.
• This is the first time this crime may almost be seen in real-time on the screens of your cell phones, but real protests against it are coming only from far away South Africa, Ireland, and nearby Houthis and Hizbullah. All the others are slumbering in various shades of silence.
•  On all previous occasions, vast numbers among the populations of Genociding countries, were unaware of the Genocide being committed in their names. This time a vast majority of the Israeli population is not only celebrating each sadistic act of Genocide, but is seen clamouring for more of the same. One is left wondering therefore if Adolf Hitler knew something which we do not!

Well before the attacks on Rafah began, one could guess that it was the goal of the Israelis, that if the Gazans could not be ethnically cleansed and pushed into the Sinai, conditions should be prepared whereby the Genocide could proceed on its own, so that the Gazans would keep dying on account of dehydration, starvation, disease, and epidemics.

I think we got there some time back, but it was only on Feb 15, that the death on account of starvation, of the seven-year-old Yousaf al Najjar, was reported on social media. He thus became the first martyr of Gaza to occupy a different category–of one who was starved to death. Sometime before he died, a Palestinian elder was exhorting his people to begin tying stones around their waists, just as the Holy Prophet [PBUH] had done in times of hunger.

In all this silence “gripping” the atrocities being inflicted on Gaza, the most piercing is that coming from Pakistan. In fact, by sending some of its navy ships to the Red Sea, Pakistan has signalled that it stands with the Genociders. This is the direct result of our High Command’s treacherous toppling of Pakistan’s legitimate government and hitching our ill-fated wagons to the West, while the whole lot of two hundred and forty million of us were still in those wagons.

Among themselves our High Command might well be justifying their betrayal of us by assuring each other that having given their “sacred” word to the U.S, they had nowhere else to go- a variation of: “an honest politician is one who, when bought, stays bought.” Or, in our parlance, it would be, “saadi gal ho gaee ae.”
It may be remembered though that about half a century ago, when marriage had great sanctity even among the elite, this was the phrase usually used to convey that a proposal of marriage had been accepted. It is a measure of our moral fall that today this phrase is used to signify that one’s most sacred trust had been successfully violated!

Ditching the Palestinians in the hour of their greatest need was thus the dictate of our foreign policy, crafted by the compulsions of the sellout of the state, by our High Command.

It is edifying to note that even in domestic policy our High Command has been equally consistent in honouring the sanctity of their given word. When PMLN was given to bruiting about the fact that they were certain to win the elections because, as they said, “saadi gal ho gaee ae’, there were some sceptics among us who found it difficult to believe that their High Command would go so far as to actually sell us off to thugs and pimps, knowing them to be such.

But by now any such doubts have been most emphatically laid to rest, because the rigging needed to keep their word had to be so shamelessly massive, that it remained a secret only from their dead consciences. To pull this off they needed to be nearly as honourable as Caeaser’s assassins, assuring each other that a word worth giving was a word worth keeping! This time, eventually they had to fall back on uniformed soldiers to shift ballot boxes, and also what was in them, from one box to the other. This time they covered themselves with disgrace as never before.

The only one to whom they gave their word, but refrained from “honouring”, was Maulana ‘Falstaff’ Fazal. So he has now decided to spill those beans which we had already read before he decided to spill them. His grouse is not that our High Command tore our Constitution to shreds with the assistance of Qazi Faez Isa, Sikander Sultan Raja, and some lesser vermin. He is mad why some of the seats won by Imran Khan were not thrown into his lap, as promised, just as they were thrown into the laps of the PMLN, the PPP, and the MQM.

I’d say the Maulana’s grouse is eminently just. But then, one can’t help feeling for the High Command. They had so much to manage. Surely they had to slip somewhere. After all, selling one’s country at every front was never going to be a walk in the park. One needs to applaud their efforts therefore, given their scarcity of resources [particularly of honour] for having achieved so much with so little.

What they have garnered in the process is an unprecedented disgrace. I cannot recall a time in history when a clutch of generals have brought such dishonour to their rank and uniform without going to war.