Palestine: A large Victorian workhouse?
Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been forced to live a dreadful life amid the intermittent horrors of bombings and killings. After over a year of Israeli genocide in Gaza, there is now a fragile ceasefire. However, US President Donald Trump's repeated threats of "all hell breaking loose" upon the Gazans have been looming large.
We are tired of being mentally shocked and morally bruised by the extent of the depravity of which Israel and its international backers are capable. All these have numbing effects on our moral sensibilities and do not seem to sufficiently outrage people's common sense and reason anymore.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. While Gaza is currently under the media spotlight, Israeli murders and mayhem of the Palestinians who live in Jenin and other refugee camps in the West Bank have gone unabated. As devastation sites, according to Palestine's foremost political commentator Mustafa Barghouti, there is not much difference between Gaza and places in the West Bank.
Given the level of Israeli cruelty inflicted on Palestinians, we can safely say that the Zionist authorities and their Western allies are fuelled and intoxicated by bloodlust and that the IDF soldiers are unhinged psychotics. But why do they massacre Palestinians? Are they driven by sadistic tendencies alone?
There are methods behind their murderous madness. A discussion of the abuses of children and other vulnerable groups in Victorian workhouses may help understand the schemes of Israeli settler colonialism and the logic of its domination and oppressive tactics.
In Victorian England, workhouses were meant to keep the paupers off the streets. The inmates had to work hard without any payment and were forced to live in squalid and disease-infested conditions. Even though the poor were provided with accommodation and (inadequate) food in the workhouse, the system bore hallmarks of slavery.
Victorian writer Charles Dickens was a formidable critic of the workhouse system. In his April 1850 essay "Pet Prisoners," Dickens drew a comparison between the treatment convicted felons received at London's Pentonville Prison and the treatment the poor got at a nearby workhouse at Saint Pancras. In order to highlight points of contrast, he mentioned the amount of food provided for the prisoners of Pentonville and that for the inmates of the workhouse to show the malnutrition of the latter. Dickens concluded that the lodging of the workhouse inmate was "very inferior" to that of the prisoner.
A month later, in May 1850, Dickens wrote another essay, titled "A Walk in a Workhouse," where he discussed the pitiable condition of "fatherless," "desolate and oppressed" children in a workhouse that he visited. He characterised the workhouse as a "little world of poverty" that was "inhabited by a population of some fifteen hundred or two thousand paupers, ranging from the infant newly born or not yet come into the pauper world to the old man dying on his bed." Here again, Dickens alluded to "the Model Prison at Pentonville" and reasserted that "in respect of cleanliness, order, diet, and accommodation," the "dishonest felon is … better provided for and taken care of than the honest pauper" in the workhouse.
Dickens's novel Oliver Twist is perhaps the most vivid—though fictional—account of the abuse and cruelty against inmates in Victorian workhouses. The narrator of the story describes the state of food deprivation of the poor children in the workhouse of Mr Bumble in the following way:
"Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and wild with hunger that one boy, who was tall for his age … hinted darkly to his companions that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next to him." (Chapter 2)
Since the intention of the authorities was to deter the poor from seeking parish relief, they rendered the conditions inside the workhouse deliberately harsh and sufficiently degrading so that the poor did not wish to live there. As the narrator in Oliver Twist informs us, the workhouse authorities "established the rule that all poor people should have the alternative … of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it."
In the novel, the board of the workhouse is composed of "long-headed men" and "practical," "sound-judging," and "mighty philosophers" who make "wise and humane regulations." They had in mind that the sole intent of establishing Victorian workhouses was to curtail public spending on poverty. In order to deter people from resorting to government support, the inmates of workhouses were subjected to hard work, (semi-) starvation, and other adverse living conditions. The authorities made the conditions of the workhouses repellent so that the poor did not opt to live there.
The Zionist blueprint for Palestine resonates with the strategy of the workhouse authorities of Victorian England. Practitioners of Israeli realpolitik seem to have been following in the footsteps of the "practical philosophers" in Oliver Twist. They have taken measures to subject Palestinians to cruel treatment and excruciating hardships to expel them from their land. The Israeli authorities have been making the conditions in Palestine increasingly difficult so that the Palestinians do not want to live there and so that the former can extend their occupation and settler colonial control over the lands of the latter.
The recent declaration by President Donald Trump to forcibly transfer and resettle the population of Gaza elsewhere exposed the design of the US-Israel alliance. One justification that the US president offered is that Gaza is now "a demolition site" where no one can live. What Trump didn't say is that Gaza didn't become unliveable because of any natural disaster. The demolition man—Benjamin Netanyahu—who was next to Trump when he made the reprehensible statement is primarily responsible for what Palestine is today. Netanyahu has been rightly awarded an arrest warrant by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for his war crimes in the region.
The spectre of repeated Israeli violence in Gaza and the West Bank seems to have attained a semblance of normality in the face of world leaders' indifference to the suffering of Palestinians. Like "the humble, half-starved" Oliver Twist in Dickens's novel, Palestinians are "despised by all, and pitied by none" of the global powers.
But the violent, broad-daylight atrocities and war crimes of Israel against Palestinians will remain a blot on the conscience of the global community. In order to understand what Palestine is, one has to visualise a Victorian workhouse that has been subjected to bombings, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and other dastardly crimes for many decades.
Dr Md Mahmudul Hasan is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the International Islamic University Malaysia. He can be reached at mmhasan@iium.edu.my.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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