A Reflection on the Tragedy Unfolding in Gaza

26 February 2024

Dear Companions on the Path,

Many people throughout the world are inspired by the example of Pirzadi-Shahida Noor. She saw the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews, as well as other groups, and felt the need to stand for justice in the spirit of Sufi chivalry. She was prepared to give her life and did give her life, having performed crucial acts of service requiring immense bravery and commitment.

My father Pir Vilayat also valiantly offered his service, and only barely survived. Needless to say, neither Noor nor my father conceived the German people as their enemy; their only intention was to confront the Nazi program of systematically degrading and destroying the lives of the “other,” which for the Nazis primarily meant the Jews.

In the last years of his life, my father told me he saw a pattern repeating itself. A Jewish ethnic state had been created on lands long inhabited and cultivated by Palestinians, the latter comprising a melange of Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Druze. The state of Israel received its mandate from an empire based far away, and emerged from the trauma of the Holocaust, a heartbreaking abomination of immeasurable proportions.

Trauma needs healing, and collective healing requires the careful work of generations. What hinders and diverts a process of healing is, in the grip of a wound, to indulge in mirroring the violence and humiliation one has suffered, visiting it now on another group, and in this way perpetuating the cycle.

My father was deeply concerned that this was happening in the Holy Land, where Palestinians were becoming the outcast “other” on acres they had peacefully tended for long generations. Looking back on the Second World War, he asked me rhetorically, “Is this what we (Noor and I) fought for?”

Mind you, my father always held the Jewish people, their religion, and their culture in high regard—as he did all peoples of the world. He used to love to sing the Hebrew song “Hashi Venu,” and would listen to “Kol Nidre” in deep meditation.

The conversations in which my father expressed to me his profound concern over the plight of the Palestinians took place long before the immense devastation that is happening now—he left this world almost twenty years ago. What would my father say now? What would Noor say?

I can only say what I see. After the Holocaust the world promised, “Never again.” Never again has to mean, never again to anyone. Every people deserve their rights, and when whole rows of neighborhoods are blown to dust, it’s time to acknowledge that appalling old patterns are recurring, and it’s time—and past time—to say: this ghastly destruction, this mass wreckage of beautiful God-given lives, cannot be the way to a future that anyone would wish for. It is the opposite of healing.

Imagine a world of truly embodied universal kinship prevailing planetwide. It can begin tomorrow if we all choose it.

Yours ever,
Pir Zia