‘EYELESS IN GAZA’ 2024 – I first wrote this back in April 2024 . And shared it again in October 2024 … and now, again, in the summer of 2025!
In 1936, the very night that the Spanish Civil War broke out, Aldous Huxley published a novel entitled ‘Eyeless in Gaza’. It’s the story of a man, disillusioned with the immorality of the modern world, searching for a more meaningful life. He embarks on a quest that leads him, eventually, to spiritual enlightenment.
One sentence from the book stands out for me today: “Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as”.
Fast forward to 2024: Zionism has always been a hellish creed. It’s obvious by now, that Zionists are totally unable to change their behaviour towards ‘the other’, the Palestinian.
But there is more to come in Huxley’s ‘Gaza’: “As though you could use violent, unjust means and achieve peace and justice! Means determine ends”. Violence has been at the heart of Zionist ideology from its inception. A violence brought to perfection in the Gazan massacres of 2024 … and on-going in 2025.
And then, finally, Huxley, back in 1936, describing today’s rulers and the Main Stream Media: “Those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder”. On 23 February 2024 the Whitehall/Westminster legal expert, Professor Dan Sarooshi K.C., a specialist in public international law, gave a great performance in the Hague, supporting Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, by arguing that only by negotiating via the UN Security Council (SC) can the future of Palestine be resolved. He championed Security Council decisions that Israel always ignores. A SC where the USA-UK will always veto decisions that fail to support Israel.
Just as Anthony Beavis, Huxley’s protagonist, came of age in the spiritual and moral vacuum left by World War 1, I suggest that we are still trying to figure out how to deal with that vacuum.
World War 2 was another stage of WW1, Part II, if you like.
The USA/NATO/UK/EU Ukrainian proxy war on Russia, that started, by the way in 2014 (and escalated on 24.02.22) is Part III of that age-long European conflict.
Beavis even embraced the violence of a revolutionary life style in Mexico, for a while, that left him with both a shattered leg and soul.
I fear for our shattered soul as Brits.
I fear for the shattered soul of Europe.
No one knows why Huxley chose Gaza as the title of his novel. Beavis never visited that part of Palestine. But the Biblical Israelite archetypal super-hero Samson certainly did.
Samson was captured by the Philistines, his eyes burned out and then taken to Gaza where he was forced to work at grinding grain in a mill.
The title of Huxley’s book as taken from a phrase in John Milton’s ‘Samson Agonistes’. (‘Agonistes’ is a person engaged in a struggle or conflict). Milton is regarded as one of the greatest English poets, second only to Shakespeare. His ‘Paradise Lost’ is the most famous epic poem in the English language.
The modern-day Zionist dream of a homeland in Biblical Palestine has become, by 2024, the nightmare that many believed it always was. Modern ‘Israel’ is today’s ‘Paradise Lost’, although the original paradise was only an illusion. Milton even wrote a sequel called ‘Paradise Regained’.
Israel’s army of occupation – Israel Occupation Forces (IOF), wrongly described as ‘Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) is currently busy cleansing Gaza and the West Bank, of Palestinians, in a desperate and violent attempt to regain its fantasy paradise on earth.
Milton’s key phrase goes like this:
‘Promise was that I Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver! Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves, Himself in bonds under Philistian yoke’.
Samson was a prisoner of the Philistines.
Palestinians today are prisoners of Zionist Israel. The Israelite super-hero, Samson, was blind. Today’s Zionist would-be-super-hero Netanyahu is, in a very real sense, ‘eyeless in Gaza’:
Blind to the reality facing him and his regime.
In fact, Zionism is ‘eyeless in Gaza’.
Samson was “blind among enemies, O worse than chains”, writes Milton.
Zionism/Israel in 2025 is still prisoner to a reality far more dangerous than physical chains, because its chains are spiritual/existential.
Israel has blinded itself.
Milton’s words are over three and a half centuries old, but they could have been written for Israel and its Western patrons today.
Thou art become (O worst imprisonment!) The Dungeon of thy self; thy soul (Which men enjoying sight oft without cause complain) Imprisoned now indeed, In real darkness of the body dwells, Shut up from outward light To incorporate with gloomy night For inward light alas Puts forth no visual beam”.
“The dungeon of thy self; thy soul!”
Sad words.
Frightening words.
What better symbol of this ‘dungeon’ than Israel’s current ‘security wall’? Even a child knows that there’s always two sides to every wall. Who really is the prisoner? Who really is free? Maybe Israel’s wall should be re-named Israel’s ‘Insecurity Wall’!
Enforced by the Jewish spiritual elite way back in Babylon 2,500 years ago, a ghetto mentality still lies at the heart of Zionism.
Today’s Zionist ghetto in Palestine is crowned with an iron dome.
Milton himself went blind. Physically blind. But for Milton, Samson’s blindness was symbolic as well as physical. Samson was spiritually blind. He suffered from an inner blindness, because he ‘saw himself (pardon the pun) as a divine messenger, although this is never confirmed in Milton’s ‘Gaza’: something wasn’t quite right with the Israelite super-hero’s spiritual vision. Blind to the voice of reason, he was always prone to act hastily.
Maybe Samson is Netanyahu’s patron saint?
Needless to say, there are acts of violence aplenty in Milton’s Samson. It’s a drama that praises violence. It’s a play turned-on by violence. Elated by a violence that highlights the revenge and destruction of Israel’s enemies. A violence that leads to Samson’s unavoidable suicide, as he sets in motion a brutal massacre of Philistine civilians who were in the building feasting with him. In an act of religious terror, Samson died in order to wreak vengeance on his God’s enemies.
So ‘horrid a spectacle’, to quote Milton, God’s original ‘shock and awe’. A ‘place of horror’.
Milton’s seventeenth century spectacular drama of holy violence and revenge is exactly what we are witnessing today in Gaza, but this is no theatrical drama, although military men delight in referring to it as a ‘theatre of war’.
The play’s final 250 lines is all about death: ‘Mercy of Heav’n, what hideous noise was that! Horribly loud, unlike the firmer shout ... Noise call you it, or universal groan, As if the whole inhabitation perished? Blood, death, and dreadful deeds are in that noise, Ruin, destruction at the utmost point … Of ruin indeed methought I heard the noise … The desolation of a hostile city”.
But it isn’t just the present-day Zionists who are ‘eyeless in Gaza’.
Our collective Western leaders are just as blind.
Blind to the horrors of Gaza and equally blind to the unfolding nightmare that is modern Israel.
Something more than ‘politics’ is going on here.
Something other than the fear of standing-up to the power of the Zionist lobby in the West, or the fading imperial might of the USA.
‘Our’ leaders are suffering from something far more serious than moral cowardice.
They are suffering from a serious illness of the soul.
I’ve struggled to put my finger on it. And when I begin to sense what the ailment might be, I’m not enough of a poet to put it into words. And then I remember what I did in 1970, unhappy as I was with the training I was receiving at the end of my first year in Theological College (Seminary).
I knew little about T S Eliot (TSE) in those days, but a few words of his spoke to me powerfully, as I began my training in the priesthood. I nailed them on the main door of the college and was duly informed that I would not be allowed to return the following autumn!
Little did I imagine that over half-a-century later ‘those words’ would apply to ‘our’ political and media establishment in the West. TSE is one of the poets I grew up with, and I will forever be grateful to him for articulating what I feel about our current crisis in the West.
For me TSE’s words have become sacred words.
The ‘Hollow Men’ a modern litany.
These are the words:
‘We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw’.
Even now I shudder when I read them and continue to absorb them.
Words as potent and relevant today as they were almost a century ago. 1925! There we go again – we in the West are still coming-to-terms with the trauma of the Great War. The war-to-end-all wars!
But other words from the ‘Hollow Men’ have also come-into-their-own, as I cope with the Gazan eyes that look out on us in 2025. Eyes that are looking at us even if our leaders are unable and afraid to look the Palestinians in-the-eye:
‘The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach’.
Unable to speak the truth, our hollow men and women are trapped in an in-between world, a sort of limbo, where they are impotent to do anything of real value. What they have done is help to reduce Gaza to ‘a ‘dead land’, a wasteland, while failing to respond to
‘The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star’.
TSE, of course, wasn’t referring to the ‘fading’ Star of David, nor was he referring to Gaza when he talked about the cactus or ‘prickly pear’ that many Palestinian children now suck as the only source of water and nourishment. Nor was he thinking of Samson when he mentioned the ‘broken jaw’:
Then Samson said, “With the jawbone of a donkey, I’ve piled them in heaps! With the jawbone of a donkey, I’ve killed a thousand men!” (Judges 15:16).
Samson’s jawbone was far from being broken, no more than Israel and the USA’s weapons of war are broken today. And yet!
And yet, it is the piles upon piles upon piles upon piles of broken and dead bodies in Gaza today, that bear witness to how spiritually and morally broken Israel and the West have become in 2024.
Hollow!
Our hollow men and women are just that. Hollow. For “the kingdom … death’s twilight kingdom”, belongs to them. They will continue to ‘grope together’ and whisper meaninglessly in the coming years. Our children and grand-children’s future rests on this hollowness, and there’s nothing much we can do about it.
But wait a minute, maybe there is something we can do.
We are not totally impotent.
We can educate ourselves about a traditional nursery rhyme, although TSE’s bush is no mulberry bush. It’s very prickly. It has thorns:
“Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear “…
It’s a bush for grown-ups. But our grown-up politicians are like-children. They have no idea how to tackle it. They keep on going round-and round-and-round-and-round in what has become a meaningless ritual.
We must take every opportunity to witness to the fact that our politicians, our leaders, are like little children, playing in the school yard. We must not be afraid to mock their empty rituals. We must not back-off from challenging them to grow-up.
Generations of Brits depend on that maturity.
Equally, generations of Palestinians depend on it as well.
I end with TSE’s “supplication of a dead man’s hand”.
TSE was well aware that ‘supplication’ is a religious word. It’s not ‘begging’ but a humble plea or prayer that God will answer your supplication or request.
As our leaders in the west dance the dance of the prickly pear, make no mistake: ignore the dead man’s humble request and that ubiquitous star flying over Gaza will, eventually, disappear as well.
For, “voices are in the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star”.
My hope, in the summer of 2025, is this: that while our eyeless politicians dance their nursery rhyme, they may start to listen to those “distant, solemn voices.”
The Fugitive Stag 