This week’s online meeting of the International Peace Coalition began with moderator Anastasia Battle observing that the Coalition has now met for 36 consecutive weeks without interruption. She announced that a major focus of the Coalition’s activity will be to build a mass mobilization to restore funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestine Refugees, which has been the target of undocumented allegations by the Likud regime in Israel and its neocon supporters in the U.S., U.K. and elsewhere.
Opening remarks were made to the meeting by Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche. She said that the most breathtaking and horrible development in Gaza has been Netanyahu’s rejection of the offer by Hamas for a release of hostages, and the announcement that the IDF will attack the town of Rafah. 1.5 million Palestinians who have been forcibly displaced from other parts of Gaza have been herded into a small area in Rafah, from which there is no escape. An IDF assault on these refugees will result in dreadful carnage. Zepp-LaRouche also commented on the efforts to disable UNRWA, noting that UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called it “irreplaceable” and that if you defund it, you “condemn the people who depend on it to death.”
Even in U.S. establishment circles, she said, there is some recognition that this can’t go on forever. She mentioned an article in Foreign Affairs titled “Israel’s Self-Destruction,” which concludes by saying that Israelis must reach out to Palestinians, and to each other (because of the highly factionalized situation in Israel.)
Zepp-LaRouche reminded the participants that although the Palestinian situation is most urgent, we must keep in mind that there is a danger of escalation to global war unless we can implement a new security and development architecture like the one she proposed in November of 2022. Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó recently warned of this exactly: If one more major conflict is added to the ones in Ukraine and Southwest Asia, it can mean global war. Zepp-LaRouche said that the most significant aspect of the celebrated Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin, which has already been viewed by at least 120 million people, is that Putin and Russia have at no point closed the door to cooperation with the West.
Greetings to the attendees were offered by South Africa’s ambassador to Mexico, who was thanked by the members of the Coalition for South Africa’s important contribution to the pursuit of justice for Palestine.
Former CIA analyst and Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) co-founder Ray McGovern presented an analysis of the Tucker Carlson interview. He reminded the participants that U.S. President Eisenhower had warned that the military-industrial complex will succeed in dominating American policy if Americans are uninformed. One man who succeeded in making a dent in the otherwise pervasive climate of enforced ignorance was Julian Assange. Tucker Carlson has now made an additional, important contribution.
A significant aspect of the interview was Putin’s reminder that there had been an agreement in early 2022, concluded in Istanbul, to end the Ukrainian war. The U.S. and U.K. intervened to throw those signed documents into the dustbin of history. What followed was the unnecessary killing of up to a half-million of the flower of Ukrainian youth.
