Editor’s Note: EIR first published this as an editorial in Vol. 31, No. 45, November 19, 2004, page 72.
Note to readers: Yasser Arafat, Palestine Liberation Organization chairman and subsequently first President of the Palestinian Authority, had died one day earlier.
—The editors, Aug. 3, 2024.
The death of Chairman Arafat defines a crucial turning-point in current world history. The world at large is challenged, at this ominous moment, to face the implications for the planet as a whole, of failing to take the occasion of his passing as the moment at which the world at large must act, even for the most selfish motives of many among nations, to set into motion, at last, a peace of the kind which would set the departed Chairman’s soul at rest. It must be an action for peace which begins where the unpunished murder of Israel’s Prime Minister Rabin unleashed a new wave of horrors, the wrath of the fabled Erinyes, throughout the region, and beyond.
Now, the so-called Middle East as a whole, which were more wisely named Southwest Asia, is at the verge of a great horror now spreading from the sheer, brutish insanity of sending U.S. Marines and others, to waste their lives for no just reason in the inexcusable conflagration in Iraq’s Fallujah. Matters in a region of currently escalating asymmetric warfare, which includes both Egypt and Sudan, immediately, and reaches beyond Syria into Turkey and the Caucasus and adjoining places as a whole, have reached the critical moment at which any present escalation of the conflict within any part of that region unleashes an incalculable escalation of murderous chaos throughout all parts of that region, and also far beyond.
All of the tension and related dangers throughout the region center upon the long-tortured nerve-endings of the long Arab-Israeli conflict. Now, since President George W. Bush, Jr.’s launching of the fraudulently motivated recent and continuing warfare in Iraq, the present, added threat against Iran, and the level of tension throughout the entirety of Southwest Asia and beyond, no nation of that region, including the state of Israel, could outlive the growing, spreading holocaust which failure to bring about Israeli-Palestine peace would now promptly unleash. It is past time that the great precedent of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia be now, promptly invoked by all relevant nations, including those of Europe and the U.S.A., to nail a killer like Sharon to the table of constructive movement for peace with the Palestinians. It could occur, if the combined nations of the U.S.A. and Europe would take any necessary action to bring about both those negotiations, and their assured prospects of early success.
Let it be recognized, as even many right-wing Jews do know this, that the hard core of the right-wing Protestant Zionists of the U.S.A. are the worst sort of anti-Semites. These include anti-Semites who intend, without blushing, to bring about the foreseeable slaughter of Jews who do not convert to their peculiar Gnostic variety of “Christianity.” No longer must that lunatic fringe of the U.S. right wing be permitted to impose its perverts’ intention as reflected policies of the U.S. government.
At this moment of Chairman Arafat’s passing, the hope for peace, and guilt for failure to bring about peace, rests entirely upon the shoulders of the incumbent U.S. President George W. Bush, Jr. The credit, or blame now lies with him, above all other persons. For once, at last, he must face up to the true responsibilities of his office.
Nothing—absolutely nothing!—must stand in the way of bringing the process of peace to a kind of agreement modelled upon the Peace of Westphalia.
Let it be written on a monument to Chairman Arafat: “Brave heart, now rest in peace.” Let it be remembered from the signing of the Westphalia treaty, that there is no cure for deep hatred, but a brave act of love.
