Gaza… The Mindset of the 'Mural and the Wall'

In London’s Imperial War Museum, there stands a mural of the late Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein towering over a model of the Dome of the Rock and holding a rifle in one hand. It is among his most recognizable images - one that played a significant role in crafting his image in the Iraqi and Arab imagination.
The mural, which the museum documents say was brought from the entrance of the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr, encapsulates the crucial role that the Palestinian cause has played in both legitimizing Arab leadership, its political discourse, and its propaganda, through its capacity for mobilizing and rallying the masses, and in engineering political plots against adversaries. Saddam's mural brings to mind the exploitation of the Palestinian narrative we are seeing from Iran today, which justifies its actions in the name of Jerusalem, liberation, Islamic solidarity, and resistance to injustice, at a time when the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza is intensifying to an extent that reminds us of the worst tragedies seen in the wars of the 20th century.
There is nothing to suggest that Iran’s propaganda and its hubris will have a different fate represented than that of Saddam’s mural, which has become a mere piece in a museum that offers a grim reminder of what comes of hollow rhetoric and empty slogans. It's a painful testament to our repeated failure to learn from experience.
The developments in Gaza reaffirm the fact that the propagandistic investment in the Palestinian cause rarely translates into tangible benefits for Palestinians. Instead, it has perpetuated cyclic violence and solidified Palestinians’ status as beneficial victims for those using Palestinian flesh and blood to get ahead in the struggle for power, influence, and leadership in the Middle East. The mural of Saddam towering over Jerusalem embodies this disconnect between grandiose rhetoric and the grim reality on the ground.
Given that this hatred, on both the Arab-Palestinian side and the Israeli side, fuels this endless cycle of violence, we must move beyond the hubris about resistance and victory found in some corners of Arab-Islamic politics, as well as the crudeness of the military-security approach to dealing with Palestinians adopted by the extreme Israeli right.
The clash in Gaza is being fought between the mystical mind led by Iran and the Jihadist of political Islam, which is founded on the belief that extreme sacrifice offers a gateway toward absolute justice and the mind of Israeli artificial intelligence that believes in absolute technical superiority and making decisions based solely on data. Between absolute justice that leaves no room for the rights of the other and absolute technical superiority that leaves no room for the existence of the other, we find a glaring lack of even a minimal level of empathy on both sides. Only empathy can allow us to move beyond the mystic aspirations of the faithful and the cold, calculated logic of artificial intelligence.
The Palestinian militants, driven by their hostility to 'the Jewish other' and armed with a legitimacy supposedly granted to them by God, see nothing but in the victims of October 7th but people who deserve to die. Even more dangerous is the collective refusal to acknowledge the horrors committed on that day, including murder and worse. Similarly, the Israelis view the tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian casualties as mere collateral damage, refusing to acknowledge the responsibility of their superior military, with its advanced technologies and equipment, blaming either the victims themselves or those who hid behind them!
Given this mutual denial of the other's humanity, mutual empathy between Palestinians and Israelis has become a dire need. It can pave the way for a dialogue that allows for understanding and the integration of the emotional and spiritual experiences of both sides. These dimensions are often neglected in governance models dominated by data or the unwavering convictions of the religious mind. In politics and conflict resolution, empathy goes beyond mere understanding and sharing the feelings of the other. It has the capacity to change divergent perspectives and free them from the binary narratives of good and evil, oppressor and victim. This is what Palestinians and Israelis need most to move forward in the post-October 7th world.
If we want to draw a definitive line between the era between the pre and post October 7th eras, nothing could be better than elevating empathy and rendering it the enlightened virtue to separating these two periods.
Empathy does not negate the need for strong security measures on the Israeli side, nor does it undermine the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians for self-determination. Instead, it is a call for balancing rational self-interest, among both Palestinians and Israelis, with concerns for the other's welfare, dignity, and right to life, giving rise to joint mechanisms for cooperation and facilitating mutual understanding.
Saddam's mural is a visual embodiment of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, and it also serves as tangible proof that hubris and propaganda alone cannot achieve justice for the Palestinians. In turn, the high-tech barrier separating Gaza and its surroundings, with its cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies, embodies the failure of technology alone to protect the population from the ramifications of the injustices committed against the Palestinians in their name.
These hard truths should compel us to recognize the need to harness the power of empathy, which would allow us to forge new paths to peace and bridge the gap between Palestinian national aspirations and Israeli security concerns. This approach would provide a way forward rooted in our shared humanity that transcends the mentality of the “mural and the wall.”