Meanings of the flood

The word “flood” has catastrophic connotations with religious and mythological dimensions, connotations that are more distant than those carried by another word such as “flood”, as the linguistic derivation of “flood” comes from the triliteral root “to f” which means the envelopment of water and the comprehensiveness of submergence, while “flood” is a noun derived from the root “f y d” which indicates the existence of certain boundaries of water, despite its overflowing beyond them.

The narratives of ancient cultures speak of God’s wrath on the people of the earth, due to corruption and disobedience, and of the need for water to purify the earth and prepare it for uncorrupted generations. This is why the flood came, which, although it led to the destruction of a world, provided the opportunity for the birth of a new world, as mentioned in ancient cultures such as Hinduism, Greece, and the stories of Mesopotamia, and in the Bible and the Holy Qur’an.

In a speech by Mohammed Deif, the commander-in-chief of the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades - the military wing of Hamas - on October 7, 2023, he announced the launch of Operation “Flood of Al-Aqsa,” in a Palestinian response to “Israeli violations in the courtyards of Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the attacks of Israeli settlers on Palestinian citizens in Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the occupied interior,” according to the speech of the Hamas military commander.

This announcement reflects the religious dimensions mentioned in the phrase: “Israeli violations in the courtyards of Al-Aqsa” and the national dimensions mentioned in the phrase: “Israeli settlers’ attacks on Palestinian citizens.” The intention to link the “violations” to Israel was striking, in contrast to the emotional connection of “Al-Aqsa” to Palestine, just as “settlement” emerged as a clear Israeli characteristic, while “citizenship” is a purely Palestinian meaning, with suggestive implications indicating that the Israeli state of “settlement” is temporary, in contrast to the authentic Palestinian state of “citizenship.”

Here, the word “flood” – in “The Flood of Al-Aqsa” – seems to have general religious connotations, but adding it to the word “Al-Aqsa” gave it Islamic religious connotations, as Al-Aqsa represents in Islam “the first of the two Qiblahs and the third of the two Holy Sanctuaries”, exactly as adding the word “flood” to the proper noun “Noah” – in the historical name “Noah’s Flood” – loaded it with many religious contextual implications that the proper noun “Noah” refers to as a prophet among the prophets, with the connotation opening up to terrifying catastrophic dimensions.

While there are those who believe that “Noah’s Flood” was only in a specific region, there is a consensus that “Al-Aqsa Flood” has indeed spread throughout the earth, at the level of effects, results, and repercussions, and the reformulation of policies, concepts, ideas, religious interpretations, international relations, equations, and balances. There are even those who see the need to review historical narratives, in light of current events.

It is a flood because it went beyond the geographical borders of besieged Gaza, despite the fact that it is paying the highest price for this flood. It is a flood because it broke the landmarks, borders, standards, criteria, claims and slogans, and dropped many sayings on different sides. On the Israeli side, the moral and propaganda system and the positive stereotype that Israel built for itself over decades were lost, just as the flood swept away many features of the stereotype of the West and its value system.

The flood has re-formulated the definition of the conflict, which during the past decades had been attempted to be taken out of its religious and cultural contexts, between East and West, to its national dimensions as an Arab-Israeli conflict, and then shortened the acronym to a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, then an Israeli-Gazan conflict, and finally ended up being a conflict between democracy and modernity on the one hand and terrorism and fundamentalism on the other, before this flood came, which restored consideration to specific concepts and terms, through which it was intended to make resistance terrorism, and to export the occupation as a state belonging to the “free world.”

The flood revealed the religious roots of the conflict, and demonstrated the dominance of fundamentalist trends in Israeli society, at the government and Knesset levels, and the control of Zionist extremists over political and religious life in the occupying state. It swept away in its path the claims of “Israeli democracy,” “Israel, an oasis of prosperity and peace,” and “the invincible army,” and demonstrated Israel’s lack of survival factors without Western and American support.

The flood emphasized the fact that the goal of establishing the State of Israel is not to compensate the Jews for the historical injustices they suffered in Europe, but rather the goal is utilitarian and has nothing to do with values, as much as it has to do with the interests that justified phrases such as: “If Israel did not exist, America would have had to invent it,” according to statements by US President Joe Biden, who calls for a ceasefire and continues to supply Israel with weapons, in a strange contradiction.

In a poem entitled: Excerpts from Noah’s Speech after the Flood, by the Yemeni poet Abdul Aziz Al-Maqalih, it says: “Neither the ships of the sea nor the space can save you from the grip of fate, for the flood has overwhelmed us, and once upon a time.”

If the ship had “come to rest on Judi” after the end of “Noah’s Flood,” then it may have been too early to predict the “Judi” on which the world’s ship would come to rest today, in the post-“Al-Aqsa Flood” phase, the effects of which will undoubtedly extend for decades to come in the region and the world.

* Quoted from Al-Quds Al-Arabi