We all now face a crisis in which the vengeful rage of two forces—Hamas’ callous Gaza authority and Israel’s duplicitous and corrupt Likud coalition government—has led from the murder of more than 1,000 Israeli citizens, to massive slaughter of innocent civilians in Gaza, intolerable to peoples all over the world, and to the growing threat of regional, then perhaps world war.
Each side furiously claims the right to unlimited bloody revenge for a long cycle of attacks. But the overwhelming superiority of the Israeli power—including nuclear weapons—and its claims of the right of “disproportionate” killing of civilian populations to defeat an armed force, have produced war crimes, the unashamed violation of every law of war, before the suffering eyes and hearts of the entire world.
Now a second such horrible conflict threatens to ignite with Hezbollah in Lebanon, and if so, may become an uncontainable regional war.
This must be stopped. The nations of the surrounding region, though their leaders are infuriated by the slaughter of innocents, have remained restrained and called over and over for ceasefire, exchange of prisoners, separation of the combatants. More importantly, hundreds of thousands, even millions, have awoken and taken public actions for peace in countries all over the world. Leaders of these actions must coordinate, and that is being done, week by week, by the International Peace Coalition initiated by Helga Zepp-LaRouche of the Schiller Institute, whose global meetings for peace are growing larger week by week. China’s call for an international peace conference, which it is willing to sponsor, is the potential larger framework for a solution.
They must have economic development to offer of the territories of Palestine and Israel and of the region around them: This is provided in the Oasis Plan proposed first by Lyndon LaRouche more than four decades ago, and still the valid outline of rapid power, water, transport, health ad educational development. Among the many states, organizations or leading figures of agencies now calling for ceasefire, an economic development strategy for peace is the unique element being proposed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s Schiller Institute. Its Oct. 23 petition to world leaders lays it out.
And they must move the United States, above all, to the side of demanding “ceasefire now.” Without that, there is no real hope Israel will be restrained. So let us act together with the International Peace Coalition and the Schiller Institute to do it.
