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THE Palestinian woman was breastfeeding her baby in a tattered shelter abutting the ruins of her devastated home. Right then, a direct sniper shot pierced the infant’s semi-formed skull, leaving a limp body without scratching the mother. The child evidently posed a threat to the ancient oracle’s prophecy for a country called Israel, which would prosper from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea but only after vanquishing its enemies, the Amalek. The child Amalek of Gaza would become an adult Amalek and that’s problematic.
Pinpointed precision with which the well-planned genocide is being executed in Gaza borrows inevitably from ancient myths. The Egyptian pharaoh ordered all newborn babies to be killed to reverse his oracle’s prediction that one Moses among the children would bring his doom. The CIA reportedly used the legend of the pharaoh’s cruelties as depicted in the Cecil B. DeMille movie to superimpose it on its bête noire, one Joseph Stalin. The precision targeting of the infant’s head in Gaza is documented with invaluable detail by Justice S. Muralidhar, chairperson of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The report was released late last month, and it observes among other atrocities the fact that Palestinian children were being strategically killed and maimed to fulfil the mythical promise of a Greater Israel. One Zionist officer who ordered the hail of bullets to mow down the little Hind Rajab in her mangled car, however, was blown up recently by a Hezbollah guerrilla. But that act of retribution hasn’t deterred the continued killing of Palestinians, overwhelmingly the children. Of the six million Jews that Adolf Hitler murdered, over a quarter were children. The Nazi rationale for the inhumanity lay in their penchant for a combination of logistics and racism. There just was no need, the tyrants concluded, to arrange for food for the unemployable children. The driving factor tipping the balance against the victims was their condemnation by the Nazis of being an inferior race. Like we hear ‘termite’ for Indian Muslims of late.
The slaughter in Gaza is a one-way street but the planned elimination of a people in their occupied lands to fulfil some oracle’s command has crucially not left a few young Israeli soldiers unsinged. In fact, some of the more horrific details of the ongoing bloodletting and torture has come from those who carried out their orders but were unprepared for the toll it would take on their conscience. Brutality and remorse are both human traits but in a perpetually adverse ratio. Shakespeare had observed them both.
A report released last month observes how Palestinian children were being strategically killed and maimed to fulfil the mythical promise of a Greater Israel.
“I have given suck and know/ How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me./ I would, while it was smiling in my face,/ Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums,/ And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you/ Have done to this.” Lady Macbeth’s cold-hearted rebuke to her unhelpful husband was telling him she would kill her own infant if its life posed an obstruction to the throne she sought for Macbeth. The latent violence sprang from a macabre human trait and its equally gory lore. She wanted the king, her trusting guest for the night, to be killed in cold blood to usurp his throne. Shakespeare didn’t conjure the plot. He shared what he knew as a common lore or a slice of history.
That Macbeth was getting cold feet betrayed a human element in the once valiant general. The chilling soliloquy in the dagger scene captures the would-be killer’s inner turmoil and guilt as he hallucinates a bloody weapon floating in the air, drawing him towards the murder of King Duncan. ‘Banquo’s ghost’, after Macbeth kills another friend, is an oft-used phrase to describe the re-enactment of the crime in the killer’s nightmares. Take Lady Macbeth’s trauma, which surfaces in her relentless washing of her hands to remove invisible bloodstains she didn’t expect.
Killing of fathers or brothers or one’s entire family has been lore and history in the path of gaining power, or, in some cases, in finding salvation. But none has been as powerless before the timeless threat as infants and children. Too readily they fall victim to the mysterious voice cited in pseudo-religious texts that seals their fate. At times, there are different precepts at play in choosing a male or a female victim. For the Jewish extremists killing both, regardless of the gender, has been kosher since they were both deemed to be the Amalek. While the Amalek were cousins of ancient Israelites, according to Jewish belief, they turned upon each other as sworn enemies. The current definition conjured by Benjamin Netanyahu damns the Palestinians as the Amalek. For other Zionists, Iranians can’t be far behind. Ignore the fact that their hatred is malleable and opportunistic. Until 1979, Iran and Israel were thick as thieves in a pact against Arab nationalism. In any case, is it possible that an Amalek ceases to be an Amalek if they sign the Abraham Accords?
The male child has featured in political challenges, and the female child is mostly targeted as a socially defined burden in its patriarchal milieu. The stories of Krishna and Moses, from the Hindu and Abrahamic lore target boys. Both were marked to be murdered in their infancy after the oracles of their respective rulers saw them as bringing doom to them as adults. The pharaoh’s mass murder of male babies sought to vacate the threat of a Moses. In the Indian tradition, King Kansa, the uncle of Krishna, his would-be killer throws a similar dragnet to eliminate male babies. Both were rescued from the river in reed baskets. A YouTube clip of a convicted killer in the Gujarat pogroms shows him gloating about putting a foetus to sword after ripping it from the mother’s womb. Similar exultations were heard in Iraq when IS was on the rampage to placate its own oracle.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, July 14th, 2026
