The disgusting decision by the U.S., Britain, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Switzerland to suspend their funding of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), which is the major supplier of assistance to the besieged people of the Gaza Strip, and the confirmation from IDF sources that Hamas tunnels are being flooded with water, combined, paint a picture of murder and forced displacement.
The “domicide” in Gaza—the destruction of places to live—strikingly documented in visual form by The Guardian, speaks of a vision for Gaza that includes few Palestinians, if any.
The worldwide anger and condemnation of Israel’s military policy, which the International Court of Justice overwhelmingly found to be plausibly genocidal, will not abate.
This is not an issue that will disappear, that can be pushed under the rug, that can be waited out.
A federal judge in California, forced to dismiss a case against Biden and two of his cabinet officials on separation-of-powers grounds, lamented, “There are rare cases in which the preferred outcome is inaccessible to the Court. This is one of those cases.” The judge concludes: “The Court is bound by precedent and the division of our coordinate branches of government to abstain from exercising jurisdiction in this matter. Yet, as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel’s conduct amounts to genocide. This Court implores Defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Earlier, the order says: “Both the uncontroverted testimony of the Plaintiffs and the expert opinion proffered at the hearing on these motions as well as statements made by various officers of the Israeli government indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.” While acknowledging “this Court’s obligation to remain within the metes and bounds of its jurisdictional scope,” the judge insisted that, “It is every individual’s obligation to confront the current siege in Gaza.”
Regional press, including in Saudi Arabia, are spreading the word about pro-ceasefire actions in the United States, Israel’s greatest enabler. Reporting on the tie-breaking vote by the Mayor of Chicago in favor of a call for ceasefire helps the world better understand the divergence of views within the United States and the isolation of the Beltway view.
Meanwhile, the whole world is changing. China has become the first nation to accept an ambassador from the Taliban government of Afghanistan. The United Arab Emirates has just inaugurated a new dollar-free financial platform, by paying China using a digital version of the U.A.E. dirham.
The nations of NATO can and must join in the transformation sweeping the world, in which a new paradigm of politics and economics is bringing the potential to escape the world of empires and oligarchies, putting away such childish things forever.
A very visible demonstration of this potential is seen in the enormous rallies of farmers across Europe, including some 1,300 in Brussels to challenge the European Union bureaucrats who have been steadily ramping up anti-farmer, anti-food policies. Some concessions have already been won, but the farmers, dedicated through their livelihood to producing, to creating food to sustain human beings, are not satisfied with halfway measures.
Nothing short of a repudiation of Malthusian anti-growth “green” policies will be enough!
Will the insight into physical economy that the farmers are providing the people of their nations through their actions, play a role in catalyzing an economic renaissance of increasing productivity? A renaissance of growing levels of increasingly concentrated energy brought to bear, through the synthetic environment created by advanced infrastructure, upon the potential power of labor?
Such a mission can unite the nations of the so-called Global North and Global South, the nations of the “developed” and “developing” sectors.
The conditions are ripe for abandoning failed axioms. How will you act to catalyze the development of a method for replacing them?
