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EID-ul-Azha is a re-enactment of the moment when Abraham surrendered to God’s command and prepared to sacrifice his beloved son Ismail.
Over time, the other lineal descendants of Abraham — the Jews and the Christians — have buried this custom. Modern Israelis have revived it. For them, every day is a day of ‘sacrifice’. They slaughter thousands of helpless Palestinian Arabs who, like sacrificial goats, are tethered to their land. Centuries from now, the relentless massacre at Gaza will be spoken of in the same breath as an earlier genocide — the Holocaust.
Since 1945, the world has not been allowed to forget the Holocaust, nor in particular the teenage German Jewess, Anne Frank. For two years (1942-1944) she hid with her parents in an attic in a house in Amsterdam. During that incarceration, she maintained a diary, “recounting day-to-day life in hiding, from ordinary annoyances to the fear of capture”. She included “typical adolescent issues as well as her hopes for the future, which included becoming a journalist or a writer”.
In 1944, the Frank family was betrayed and deported. Anne died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945. A monument to her has been erected there. Her attic in Amsterdam is now a museum. Her diary (retrieved by friends) was published by her father. It has been translated into 70 languages and sold over 30 million copies.
There is no weapon that has not been used against Pakistan.
PM Netanyahu is determined there should never be a Palestinian Anne Frank, nor any monument erected in her name. It will be for posterity to give voice to her silent, merciless evaporation.
One sentence in Anne’s diary resonates still, especially in today’s turmoil: “I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” It takes a giant leap in optimism to cling to that conviction, especially when the entire world (like hers in the 1940s) is ablaze.
Russia is engaged in an open-ended war with Ukraine. Western countries are again arming themselves, this time to fight a former saviour — Russia. And India and Pakistan continue to confront each other, bloodshot eyeball to reddened eyeball over Kashmir and now the Indus Waters Treaty. Everyone familiar with mythology knows that the river Ganges is said to flow through the matted locks of the deity Shiva. The Indus has no such divine origins. Its hydrology runs through the tangled clauses of the IWT of 1960.
If one was to survey Indo-Pak relations (to use a hyphenation abhorrent to India) over the past 70 years, one would detect that there is no weapon — military, diplomatic, media, social, and water — that has not been used against Pakistan. Bludgeoned for so long by a stronger adversary, Pakistan should by now have been weakened into submission. It has proved resilient beyond the expectation of most pessimists.
In 1941, the defeatist French Marshal Pétain predicted that an embattled Britain would “have its neck wrung like a chicken”. Winston Churchill’s defiant retort was: “Some chicken! Some neck!” Pakistan’s gullet is still intact. It is India’s ‘chicken neck’ — its north-eastern Siliguri Corridor — that is vulnerable.
PM Modi dismisses the IWT as ‘a scrap of paper’. Hitler did the same in 1938 when he repudiated his agreement with Chamberlain. Of course, the IWT is just that — a scrap of paper — yet, it is much more. It is akin to a marriage contract, whose purpose lies in faithful observance, not betrayal.
That Pakistan — an agricultural plain — is dependent on a regular supply of water from an upper riparian is a geophysical reality. David Lilienthal, who conceived the IWT, reminds us of its critical significance: “Armies with bombs and shellfire could devastate a land as thoroughly as Pakistan could be devastated by simple expedient of India’s permanently shutting off the source of water.”
Reneging on the IWT will have serious consequences — for India and the regional neighbours with whom it has treaties: water-sharing with Bangladesh (Ganga, 1996) and Nepal (Mahakali, 1996), and power-sharing with Bhutan (2006).
If every such international agreement becomes non-binding, then what sanctity does law have? When the United Nations with its toothless resolutions and the International Court of Justice (ICJ) with its denture decisions cannot enforce their writ, then what use are they to countries like Pakistan?
President Trump has already torn away the gossamer authority of the ICJ by ordering sanctions against four of its sitting judges from Benin, Peru, Slovenia and Uganda for “illegitimate and baseless actions targeting America or our close ally, Israel”. The ICJ cannot protect itself, let alone others in this predatory age.
Some believe that we live in Kali Yuga — “an age of darkness, moral decline, and spiritual degradation”. One cannot wait for it to finish. It should end 426,874 years from now.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, June 12th, 2025
