by Ikemesit Effiong
While it is not my intent to venture into dissecting the salient arguments, views and points of the current conflict, there is something underwhelming from a Nigerian perspective about Israel’s current push of rid Gaza of what it calls “terrorists.”
I have always been fixated with news from other climes. I can faintly remember the crashing sound of rocket fire, the slow rumblings of giant size American armoured personnel carriers, (I remember them being called ‘tanks’ back in the 90s) bearing down from tiny Kuwait into Saddam Hussein’s belligerent Iraq and the somewhat beautiful but ultimately deadly illumination of the so called ‘precision guided’ missiles over the skies of Baghdad, the Iraqi capital during the First Persian Gulf War.
I was barely three years old.
I remember the foremost global events of the first decade I lived on this side of eternity – the paralysing crisis between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, the crash of TWA Flight 800 in the Atlantic off Newfoundland, Canada, the rise of Boris Yeltsin in Russia in the aftermath of the Cold War, the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and the famed story of that Hong Kong billionaire who was found playing golf the following day after losing a lifetime of earnings, the rise of East Timor out of the rubble of decades of conflict with Indonesia (Google is still a friend you know?), the disintegration of Yugoslavia with its bloody aftermath – Bosnia, the Sarajevo bombings, Srebenica, Serbia’s ultimate folly in violently attempting to keep Kosovo, the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo (which in an act of typically misguided braggadocio, he had named Zaire), the death of Diana, Princess of Wales (my mom cried half the night on August 31, 1997. Her tears made the date stick in my memory) and the rise of Nelson Mandela in South Africa – an event we unfolded almost miraculously before African eyes – events which occurred when my peers were more concerned with evading primary school homework, playing ‘ten-te’ and ‘police catcher,’ tasting the joys of football glory for the first time with the Super Eagles’ (my bad, they were the Green Eagles then) triumph at the African Cup of Nations (which we affectionately called the ‘Nations Cup’, no thanks to Supersport converting our lingo to the more generally accepted AFCON), and watching Cartoon Network.
If you feel I probably sold out on my childhood, you’d actually be inaccurate. I did all the things a typical adolescent would. I just added the news to my repertoire. Even now and much older, the burning issues of the day are firmly etched in the mind – Syria, Egypt, the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 and its unfortunate cousin, Flight MH17 which was violently shot down over Ukraine’s troubled skies – symbolic of its many internal contradictions and its geopolitical tussle with an increasingly assertive and bullying neighbour in Russia, the European debt crisis, South Sudan joining the African club of nations dealing with political wrangling so doused in a dangerous soup of ethnic strife and America stuttering through its self appointed role of world political and even more important, economic power. My news staple is at home in Al Jazeera, the Guardian of London, the New York Times, Vox and BuzzFeed as it is in the Guardian (of Lagos?), the Punch, YNaija and Thisday.One news story that has however remained a recurrent theme through my years of being a passive observer of global events has been Israel’s conflict with the Arab world in general, and the Palestinians in particular, under whatever guise – the Palestinian Authority under the enigmatic to some, rouge to others, Yasser Arafat and its eventual splinters – the ‘moderate,’ establishment party Fatah and the more ‘militant,’ ‘Israel-must-be-wiped-out-of-the-map’ Hamas.
Israel’s struggles to prove its right to exist and vigorously enforce same has been one of the fundamental headaches of the international community since its founding in 1948. Palestine’s aspiration to exist as a formal state on territory it views as it’s own and ripped off from it by Israel and Western powers during the settling of the mess thrown up by the aftermath of the Second World War has meant that part of the world has not known total peace – if you add two global conflicts, the many intermittent clashes with the Middle East’s hegemon at the turn on the 20th Century, the Ottoman Empire, and internal in-fighting (think the Iran-Iraq war of the 80s or the three Arabs attempts to invade Israel) – for at least four generations.
The ‘Israel question’ has always fascinated me. I have debated its salient points, written about it, heck, it was my undergraduate thesis paper in university, albeit examining the 2008-2009 ‘Operation Cast Lead’ installment against Hamas in Gaza (which feels eerily similar to the current 2014 confrontation) from the vantage point of international humanitarian law and been preached to about it – that favourite of many a Nigerian pastor urging Christian faithful to follow the biblical prescription to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem”.
While it is not my intent to venture into dissecting the salient arguments, views and points of the current conflict, there is something underwhelming from a Nigerian perspective about Israel’s current push of rid Gaza of what it calls “terrorists.”
The first one is a side note. Significant global actors and nation-states are forming (or have formed) a position on the actions of both parties to a conflict that I argue has significant international geopolitical consequences if it escalates into wider regional disharmony. Those national viewpoints are at the core of any discussion, negotiation or consideration aimed at resolving this international sore spot. Nigeria is not one of those nations.
That is putting it being charitably. Nigeria at this rate, may never become of those countries. Why should you care? Because we occupy a unique position in the place of nations – being the most populous collective of black people anywhere on earth – or in history for that matter. Because our national and cognitive resources should afford us a voice, a recognizable voice on pressing global questions. Because as probably the most significant national actor in Africa, we should take a stand representative of the aspiration of other fellow African nations for us to lead from the front.
Alas, we cannot be taken seriously because we do not take ourselves seriously. For a country that has 170 million people, Nigeria’s economy is barely larger than Israel’s (population, 7.4 million in 2008, 2014 est, 8.1 million). In fact, Israel is the 99th most populous nation in the world, we are the 7th. By implication, we are barely out producing a nation with a population we outnumber by a factor of 20! Charts by the United Nations, the World Bank and the CIA, put Isreal less than ten places below us in absolute economic numbers. The International Monetary Fund places Israel a place above us.
In per capita numbers we aren’t even close. Adjusted for the purchasing power of the average citizen, Israel is the 25th worldwide according to the IMF. Nigeria is 143rd. That is why Nigeria cannot have any form of leverage on Israel or even Palestine. It is simply not economically powerful enough to be thought of as significant.
The more powerful lesson is on a more human note. On Wednesday, in one of the worst single incidents of the conflict, an Israeli gunboat off Gaza’s Mediterranean coast shelled a beach, killing four boys – two aged 10 and the others 9 and 11 – from one family and critically wounding another youngster. Ahmed Abu Hassera, who witnessed the incident at the shore, told Reuters: “The kids were playing on the beach. They were all … under the age of 15.”
“When the first shell hit land, they ran away but another shell hit them all,” said Abu Hassera, himself sporting a blood stained shirt. “It looked as if the shells were chasing them.”
It is always a monumental tragedy when violence is visited on the innocent among us. When I first read the report, I couldn’t help but think about one thing – our missing girls.
The case of the missing Chibok schoolgirls is an even greater tragedy when you consider the possibility that they may be alive. Death is both a pain and a relief in itself – the suffering ends with the snuffing out of a life, the calamity being over. Experiencing pain while being alive is a different proposition altogether. And our girls have endured a harrowing experience for 97 days now.
We cannot continue to remain in denial about their plight of our girls, act as if it never happened or worse, check it off on a list of recurring Nigerian debacles and move on. We must demand, and continue to demand action – we need an explanation as to how this could happen in the first place, allocate accountability for our longest serial tragedies where it belongs and make every effort to have them reunited with our families. Silence is not an option.
This is what serious nations do. For the memory of Palestinian boys, and our girls, do not remain silent.
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Ikemesit Effiong is a legal practitioner, political blogger, research consultant and avid troller of online curiosities. He reads too much for his own good, talks too little for others’ comfort and believes that the best place to be is underwater – with a swim trunk of course. He tweets from @JudgeIyke.
Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.