More than a few times since October 8, 2023, as I witnessed—day after day, month after month—the genocide in Gaza, I have tried to shake off the quaint feeling that I had seen all this many years before on the screen of a theater in suburban United States.

Inscrutably, I have been experiencing flashbacks from Superman II, a Hollywood movie which gives center stage to three evil Kryptonians—General Zod, Ursa and Non—who had landed on planet earth, in rural Ohio.

Having discovered that they possess superhuman powers far exceeding that of Earthlings, General Zod and his comrades decide to conquer Earth and rule over the Earthlings. To this end, they reach Metropolis—the seat of earthly power—and declare their intent to subdue the Earthlings. 

When the Metropolitans resist, the Kryptonians react by obliterating their city, block by block. The Metropolis is no match for the superhuman powers of the three Kryptonians.

As I watched the civilian infrastructure of Gaza being reduced to rubble, and hundreds of Gazans killed, wounded, or buried under the rubble of their homes—day after day, month after month, without end—by the Masters of Bombings (MOB), I began to recall the long-forgotten scenes of destruction visited upon Metropolis by the apparently invincible trio of Kryptonians.

It may be recalled that the MOB claims that its army is the most moral our world has ever seen. It is also very powerful, since it is funded and equipped by the leading vassals of the MOB, comprising chiefly of the USA, Germany, France and Britain, the most powerful countries of the Western world. In other words, the MOB has access to the most advanced technology of warfare.

The alien Kryptonians do not possess any weaponry. This is because their bodies as such are weapons of mass destruction. Among other things, they easily brush aside the weapons of earthlings; defying gravity they fly freely through space; they possess superhuman strength and auditory capabilities; and their eyes emit beams capable of incinerating entire city blocks.

The MOB are not aliens, neither do they possess the superhuman bodily powers of the Kryptonians; but they enjoy unhindered access to the bombing armamentaria, surveillance technologies, and the economic, political and diplomatic resources of their powerful Western vassals. In consequence, the MOB army ranks among the most powerful in the world.

Whenever the MOB deploy their most moral army against the civilians of Gaza and the West Bank—as well as civilians in neighboring countries—the disproportion in the power of the two sides is massive. Military experts agree that this disparity is far greater than the military gap between Kryptonians and Earthlings.

Some historians may also point to another similarity between the two genocides discussed in this essay. Both are relayed in real time to a global audience. While this is true, they forget that the genocide of Americans happened in a movie; there were no real American victims in this genocide. How lucky for Americans! 

While they have been among the leading masters of genocide over the past four centuries, the Americans have never been its victims. Although the MOB banned all media outlets from covering the real genocide they have been organizing in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and their drones and snipers continue to assassinate the Gazan journalists, ordinary Gazans have continued to record and transmit to the world their own genocide on their cellphones.

This is, therefore, the first real genocide that people around the world are watching in real time, on their cellphones.

Although the live-streamed Gazan genocide is entering its 420 th day—as of today, December 31, 2024—Western governments, true champions of human rights, have adamantly refused to take any action to stop this genocide. There is one inconvenient fact behind this deafening silence.

As vassals of the MOB, these Western governments are complicit in the genocide. Indeed, since October 7, 2023, the leading Western vassals have dramatically expanded and accelerated their supply of weaponry to the MOB. There is one exception to this silence among countries that champion human rights with all the violence at their disposal.

On November 7, 2024, some thirteen months after the MOB began its genocidal war on the civilians of Gaza, the Irish parliament voted to acknowledge that a “genocide is being perpetrated before our eyes by Israel in Gaza.”

In addition, on December 11, 2024, the Irish government announced its intention to intervene in two cases before the International Court of Justice concerning the MOB’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

What is the reason for this Irish exception? For several centuries, ending only in 1922, the Irish themselves were victims of genocide perpetrated by their English colonial rulers. I would like to think that the Irish government took this brave stand because the Irish people can feel the torment of the Palestinians in their bones.

However, the only people who offered material support to the primitive Gazans were a few other primitive peoples—some Yemenis, Lebanese Shi’ites, and Iraqi Shi’ites—who lobbed some neolithic stones and medieval firecrackers at the MOB military camps.

The apologists of the MOB categorize every act of Palestinian resistance—even children throwing stones at Israeli armor—as a violent pogrom, the same that Jews faced frequently in Europe.

The Earthlings in Superman II had better luck than the Palestinians. According to my best calculations, General Zod’s genocidal rampage in Metropolis was checked on the second or third day after it started. 

At first, Superman surrendered to General Zod because he thought this would stop the carnage of Earthlings. When the carnage continued, Superman, the most iconic American hero, escaped from prison, and used his super-human powers to save the Earthlings.

If you haven’t already guessed, these Earthlings are in fact Americans, and the planet on which they live is better known as the USA, the world’s greatest country. In the interests of fairness, I have to tell my readers that the MOB do not enjoy what they are doing in Gaza; the Palestinians have forced them to do this. 

Indeed, the MOB are outraged—even flummoxed—that the Palestinians still exist, some one hundred and seven years after European Jews, with Britain as their surrogate ‘mother country,’ began arriving in Palestine to claim it as their divine patrimony.

According to the script written by the MOB visionaries, the Palestinians should have melted away in the face of the formidable powers commanded by Britain, the Jewish diaspora and the Christian Zionists in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

However, the Palestinians chose not to follow the fate scripted for them by the MOB. Is there no end to Oriental irrationality? Irrationally, but courageously, the Palestinians chose to exist and resist; and this is what they have been doing for more than a hundred years now.

The question is, how much longer can they continue this insanity? How long can they exist and resist when the MOB—aided by their Western vassals—have persuaded nearly all the Arab governments to become their vassals, of course, lesser vassals, far lesser than their Western vassals.

I must now ask, Where is the Superman who will save the Palestinians? He has been arrested, killed, tortured, and imprisoned in prisons built for him in every country where he lives. So far, his efforts have been inadequate to the task he faces. He has been drugged into submission by the lure of oil profits; dazzled by Hollywood and Harvard, by Las Vegas and Soho; naively, he has entered into every trap laid for him by CIA, MI 16, DGSE and Mossad.

Nearly always, he has acted prematurely, without planning and forethought, before rectifying his own vulnerabilities, before understanding his adversary’s reach and power. He still lacks a deeper understanding of his own condition, his history, his soul.

However, he exists and continues to exist despite all the multi-layered efforts of MOB and their Western and Arab vassals to neutralize him. He continues to exist and resist despite his failures.

His adversaries understand this all too well: it turns out that even his failures continue to signal to the world that he exists. 

How, when and where will this Superman be ready to resist, subtly and successfully, with strategy and stratagem, with his body and soul, with conviction in his bones and cunning in his stride, with the power of faith and visions of beauty?

We know that after every failure, he resumes his struggle. He is moving forward even when the world does not notice, even when the world thinks that he has been defeated. If not today, tomorrow; if not in Cairo or Riyadh then in Dhaka and Jakarta; if not in Baghdad or Marrakesh then in Kano and Zanzibar.

He will not succeed until he first recreates the capacity to imagine and articulate his visions of a just, humane and better-guided world. Until then, he must strive to deepen his understanding of what that better world is for him and the rest of humanity.

واللہ اَعلَمُ بالصَّواب

Shahid Alam is professor emeritus of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of two books of poetry, not counting his books on political economy: Intimations of Ghalib (Orison Books, 2018) and Yardstick of Life (KDP, 2024). He may be reached at [email protected].