Tomichan Matheikal's blog

A Palestinian child whose dear ones were killed Pic from Malayalam weekly   They are killing each other because their gods are different. Each of the gods is a jealous entity. Yahweh, the God of the Jews, admitted his own jealousy. He told the Jews, his chosen race, “For you shall worship no other god, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God.” [Exodus 20:4] Allah of Islam makes no less claims. While Yahweh allows other gods to exist, Allah apparently isn’t as generous as that. La ilaha illallah. Both these gods together have caused endless misery on the earth. They have made their chosen people squeamishly narrowminded and incapable of living in harmony with others. Why on earth did anyone think of putting these two people together on a desert? Mahatma Gandhi was right. He was against the creation of Israel as a country for the Jews. He was not one who would give credence to fairy tales such as a race being God’s favourite and so on. “I am not moved by the argument that...

Shoah is the Hebrew word for catastrophe.  Al-Nakba is the Arabic word for the same thing.  The Israelis use Shoah to mean the Holocaust.  The Palestinians use al-Nakba to refer to their exodus caused by the creation of Israel.  Shoah created al-Nakba; one catastrophe led to the other.  The victims of one catastrophe created another catastrophe and its victims.  6 million Jews were the victims of Shoah and their relatives uprooted 700,000 Arabs from their homes in Palestine.  The latter figure has kept on increasing since the Nakba has not ended.  In the words of Anton La Guardia (whose book on the issue was the basis of a former blog of mine), “The wandering Jew found a home, while the homeless Palestinians still wander the Middle East.”  La Guardia wrote that in 2002.  Twelve years down the line, the Jews are so well settled in their homes that they are in a position to eliminate the remaining Palestinians. One catastrophe l...

It was midnight.   27 Nov 1917. Khalil al-Sakakini had put aside the book he was reading and was getting ready to go to bed when a knock on the door of his home in the Katamon area of Jerusalem jolted him, gentle though the knock was.  “Alter Levin!” gasped Khalil on seeing his midnight visitor.  Levin was known to Khalil as an American citizen, an insurance agent, and also a poet of some repute.  Worse, Levin was a Jew.  “Give me refuge,” pleaded Levin.  As an American citizen, he had been ordered to surrender himself to the Ottoman authorities.  The War was going on.  Khalil could hear the rumble of artillery around Jerusalem rolling like reverberating thunder.  The British troops were closing in.  Any foreigner who failed to surrender to the authorities would be considered a spy, as would anyone sheltering one. Here was a Jew seeking refuge at the door of a Muslim. Khalil was not a bigot. Rather, he...