The Koboi Project has been silent for a full year now. I have not made any new posts since 25 December 2023, having become despondent over the ever-deepening genocide in Palestine. Nevertheless, this blog has had a doubling in viewership in 2024 due to the success of one post – ‘The Poppy is the Flower of Palestine,’ which has had nearly 5,000 views since 12 Nov 2023.
The Koboi Project Blog will be active again in 2025. It will address the same questions of power and justice, but in a more metaphysical manner, beginning with a series of posts on Ananda Coomaraswamy’s ‘Spiritual Authority And Temporal Power In The Indian Theory Of Government’.
Many critics and commentators have characterized Ukraine as a proxy for the collective West in a geopolitical strategy against Russia. As Ramesh Thakur puts it, “Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West … that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War.” Perhaps Israel’s position vis-a-vis Palestine and the wider Middle East belies an analogous imperative of great power politics. Israel was created under the auspices of a declining British empire, whose mantle was assumed by the United States which remains the greatest power in the world today. While Israel appears to have co-opted the United States polity in its Genocide of Palestinians and must, of course, be held responsible for its actions, it is the Americans who are ultimately answerable, as Israel is wholly dependent on their enablement.
In fact, Alexander Haig, a four-star general in the US Army who served as its vice chief of staff, as Supreme Allied Commander Europe, as United States Secretary of State, and as White House Chief of Staff under two presidents is reported to have said that Israel is “America’s largest aircraft carrier which never could be sunk.” Indeed, the United States is a great power and, as such, must be held responsible for its actions within its expansive sphere of influence on the world stage. In this light, the idea that the Israeli lobby determines US policy towards Palestine is, regardless of this lobby’s enormous influence, a profound misconception. At best it is a misunderstanding of the machinations of the United States military-industrial complex; at worst, it is yet another expression, albeit a subliminal one, of an underlying anti-semitism!
To restate this argument as a counter-idiomatic interrogative – can the tail really wag its dog?
The image above is adapted from the perspicacious and prescient 2014 cartoon by Rob Rogers pictured below.
Note: There is a mental health disorder, that involves a behavioral pattern between a caregiver (perpetrator) and a person cared for (victim), called ‘Munchausen syndrome by proxy,’ in which a caregiver makes up fake symptoms or causes real symptoms in a victim to make it appear that the victim has a true physical or mental health issue.
This is the state of Indians in Malaysia. When our own Prime Minister can use a slur against us without any consequences. I am utterly disgusted. Disgusted for believing that he was different. You will never ever have my vote. Tapi tu la, kita ni minority sangat. So you don't… pic.twitter.com/7iCcPIyh4B
While the tweet above is a little over the top, the Malaysian Prime Minister certainly missed the mark in terms of political correctness by the use of the word ‘keling’ in the course of his address at the Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI). Anwar quickly aplogized to the Tamils of the nations whose offence is understandable, given that they have been assailed, in recent years, by the use of this term as a racist slur. In mitigation, however, he claimed that the sense in which he used the word is correct in the context of his literary reference. I for one, understand his assumption of intellectual privilege, his belief that he was rising above the slur to the respectful connotations evidenced by the etymology of the term. There is however no doubt that the Malay language displays both benign and derisory senses of the term and it is very revealing of the status of Indians in our nation, that our Malay Prime Ministers seem consistantly unable to keep this terminology out of their public utterances. See: A Keling Lexicon A – J See Also: Pantun Keling Kedah!
Historian Rashid Khalidi explains how early Zionism was a self-identified Colonial project, a European colonial project backed by British imperialism (see Democracy Now interview below). He points out that up until 1958, an official Jewish Colonization Agency was tasked with the settler colonial transformation of the British Mandate by a systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population. Khalidi claims that the formation of Israel is a unique phenomenon in the annals of Colonialism in that is paradoxically a Nationalist project and a settler Colonial project at the same time. Europeans forcibly settled Arab lands while Jews established an indigenous nation-state, the Europeanness of the settlers being subsumed in their Jewish nationalism.
Today, while Gaza is being decimated and depopulated in what Khalidi has called the ‘last colonial war of the modern age’, the settlement of the West Bank continues at an accelerated pace. While I agree with Khalidi that Israel is a settler-colonial nation and that the assault on Gaza is a colonial war, I wonder if he is right about it being the last such war in the modern age – remember Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Libya, etc. There is nothing to suggest that more colonial incursions are not forthcoming. Perhaps Khalidi meant to say ‘the last settler-colonial war of the Modern Age’, which I think is a more apt characterization, on the basis of his own premises. Given the extent of Israel’s ongoing aggression in Palestine, and given the history of colonial and neo-colonial incursions in the Middle East, I am surprised at the lack of meaningful opposition and intervention by the other Arab nations.
The Mullaivakkal massacre of Tamil civilians by the Sri Lankan Army (SLA) took place in May 2009, on a rural beach in an era when social media had not as yet established itself as a powerhouse of alternative news. While images and news of the slaughter was ciurculating among the Tamil Diaspora, nothing of them made it past the Mainstream Media’s blockade of news of this event. The SLA was enabled in their merciless goal of elimination the Tamil Tigers and the defacto Tamil state, regardless of the cost in civillian lives. Today, by contrast, the Israeli Defence Force’s (IDF) massacre of Palestinians in Gaza is presented in mainstream media, not so much because the media has reformed, but because it is now unable to ignore the pervasiveness of social media and citizen journalism. Gazans have been able to document and present the horror of their experience of destruction, displacement, and death, to the global gaze and conscience.
In the context of this reflection on the state of mainstream journalism, I want to recount a personal experience that symbolizes the decrepit state of the media. As the Third Elam War was coming to its violent close, I joined fellow Tamils in the public gatherings that took place in Vancouver. One of these gatherings was outside the CBC Regional Broadcast Centre in Vancouver and was aimed at appealing to the CBC to address the ongoing massacre of civilians in the Jaffna peninsula. I remember the mood as relatively sedate and not boisterous or assertive in any way. I was standing towards the front of the group when the acclaimed news anchor Ian Hanomansing, came along, presumably to prepare for the day’s news broadcast. Mr Hanomansing was, at that time, the co-anchor of CBC News: Vancouver, an evening newscast. The leader of our group led a party across the road with a petition and tried to hand it over. I went forward instinctively and found myself in line of sight to observe the pleading demeanor of the leader as he asked for our appeal to be forwarded to CBC management. I will never forget the evasive countenance of this esteemed Journalist, as he shuffled past our party without any engagement. This image, couched as it is inpersonal and communal experience of rejection and erasure, is seared in my awareness as an icon for the end of mainstream journalism in Canada – the end of truth in the neo-liberal era.
Paul Williams contextualizes and reads a statement by British Philosopher Bertrand Russell dated 31st January 1970 that was read on 3rd February, the day after Bertrand Russell’s death, at an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo. Below, I have identified key recommendations, made in 1970, that remain moral imperatives today –
The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annex foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world will tolerate.
A permanent just settlement of the refugees in their homeland is an essential ingredient of any genuine settlement in the Middle East.
What Israel is doing today cannot be condoned, and to invoke the horrors of the past to justify those of the present is gross hypocrisy.
Justice requires that the first step towards a settlement must be an Israeli withdrawal from all the territories occupied in June 1967.
The Pastor of the Lutheran Church in Bethlehem, Munther Ishaq, says that this year, Christmas celebrations are canceled because “it is impossible to celebrate Christmas when our people in Gaza are going through a Genocide.” The nativity display in this church will have figures of Joseph and Mary and the Magi set up as if they are looking for baby Jesus amid the rubble. While celebrations are canceled, in solidarity with the people of Gaza, he says that there will be Christmas prayers and “maybe when we look at the image of Jesus under the rubble we see a light of Hope and Life coming out of Destruction.”
WARNING:DO NOT PROCEED TO THE VIDEO ABOVE IF YOU ARE UNDER 18 YEARS OF AGE THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DISTURBING DOCUMENTARY WITH VIDEO AND PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE OF DEATH, INJURY, SEXUAL VIOLENCE, TORTURE, AND MURDER. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE VIDEO ABOVE ONLY AFTER REFLECTING ON THE POSSIBLE IMPACT ON YOUR EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING.
Following the establishment of the de-facto Tamil state in the North and East of the island, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government maintained a tenuous ceasefire from 2001 to 2006. Between 2004 and 2005, the tsunami hit eastern Sri Lanka, the LTTE Eastern wing broke away from the Northern Command, weakening the Tamil Tigers hold on their territory. In late 2006, large-scale fighting resumed, and by May the LTTE was finally defeated ending the de-facto state of Tamil Elam. The last months of this bloody three-decade-long war are the subject of a deeply disturbing documentary titled No Fire Zone: The Killing Fields of Sri Lanka.
With the resumption of hostilities in Gaza, the seemingly deliberate targeting of civilians by the Israeli Defence Forces, and the scale of the casualties recorded thus far, there is good reason to remember such precedents as the Sri Lankan Genocide evidenced in the video above and to call for an end to the Israeli action. Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, reports how the Israeli Defence Force’s extensive use of Artificial Intelligence programmes that treat high-rise buildings as “power targets” with large civilian casualties, has turned it into a “mass assassination factory.” Between October 7th and December 3rd, there have been 15,207 killed of which 6,150 are children.
According to Peter Adams of the BBC, an estimated 2.2 million people are now crammed into the southern two-thirds of the Gaza Strip. Conditions are dire, with many ill, injured, and traumatized by the indiscriminate Israeli bombing campaign, in the name of eviscerating Hamas. This terrible situation has been exacerbated by winter rains and flooding. Further, Adams notes that Israeli authorities have been urging these desperate Gazans to move into an even smaller “safe area” called al-Mawasi on the coast, near the Egyptian border. Al-Mawasi is estimated to be only about 2.5km wide by 4km (2.5 miles) long. In a sinister but wholly predictable development, the IDF’s Arabic social media is reported to have messaged that al-Mawasi would provide “the appropriate conditions to protect your loved ones.” In light of Israel’s promise to resume its assault on Hamas at the end of the present ceasefire, the implication that other than this tiny sliver of land, the rest of Gaza is unsafe, raises the terrifying spectre of an impending massacre. (Update : The Ceasefire ended on the 30th Nov and Isreal has indeed resumed its assault with a vengance).
I am a Jaffna Tamil and, this relentless heading and corralling of the population of Gaza into progressively smaller ‘safe areas’, brings memories of my people being forced into that narrow seaside strip in Mullivaikkal in the Mullaitivu District, towards the end of the Fourth Elam War in 2009. This area was declared a “no fire zone” to protect civilians during this final battle in the Government of Sri Lanka’s relentless war to eradicate the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE). However, in the aftermath of this battle the Government is accused of indiscriminately, even deliberately, shelling this “safe zone” and the LTTE, in turn, of using the desperate civilians as human shields. The UN has estimated a civilian death toll of 40,000 in the last days of this war but a UN internal inquiry has acknowledged that the number that up to 70,000 deaths were possible. However, when World Bank spreadsheets for 2010 are set against Statistical Handbook Numbers for 2007, the difference suggests that 101,748 people are unaccounted for in the Mullaitivu District.
I fear that Israel might be on the way to applying theSri Lanka Genocide Model as a solution to the conflict in Gaza. As of December 4th, (UPDATED), 15,523 have been killed, 41,316 injured and 6,800 are missing. Of the 15,000 who have been killed so far, 6,600 children and 4,300 are women. Israeli attacks are as follows. Those of us who live in nations that continue to stand with Israel regardless of the illegality and the inhumanity of its actions must impress upon our leaders that, regardless of how Israel’s negotiations develop vis-a-vis Hamas (Update : The Ceasefire ended on the 30th Nov and Isreal has indeed resumed its assault with a vengance), this genocide must not continue. What happened at the end of the Elam War should not be allowed to happen in Gaza.
The Koboi Project 
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