At a UN Security Council meeting on the situation in Gaza on Friday, Jan. 3, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, Medical Practitioner at Medical Aid for Palestinians, said of the medical workers in Gaza, “They tell us that they are targets because they’re healthcare workers—that wearing scrubs and white coats is like wearing a target on their backs. I never thought that international law or human rights institutions would allow 2 million people to be locked in a cage and systematically massacred…. I speak to you today in disbelief that all of our repeated, firsthand and utterly damning testimonies have still not moved the world to meaningful action.”
The same point was made at a meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) on Jan. 3 by Dr. Nidal Jboor, who said that his organization, Doctors Against Genocide, was the first to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide—a medical genocide—and that if U.S. citizens don’t stop tolerating the mass slaughter of children in their name, a treason to the U.S. itself, we put the fate of the U.S. itself at risk.
The fate of pediatrician and head of Kamal Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who refused to abandon his patients as the Israeli army evacuated and destroyed his hospital, is disturbingly uncertain. Abu Safiya is being labeled a terrorist by the Israeli government, and he remains in Israeli custody with a very high likelihood of being tortured and perhaps suffering a fate similar to many other Palestinian prisoners who have been “disappeared.”
And what is the fate of the person who ignores, who tolerates and is therefore complicit in, such an unnatural state of affairs among human beings?
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, founder of the Schiller Institute and of the International Peace Coalition, has called on all sentient people to not close their eyes to what these doctors have reported—but to act to force it to stop.
At the Jan. 3 IPC meeting, she located the Gaza genocide in the broader strategic context: “I think that is why we absolutely have to move this, but not stop there: Because think about Sudan, think about Yemen, think about Haiti. There is genocide, and it’s part of this system, which is why we need to have a new security and development architecture which puts a completely new system on the table. I think 2025 is the year when we either will manage to do that, or we will see that the world may be blown up. So, this is a very strong motivation to move with everything we can.”
The Schiller Institute will have a statement out on this issue in the next 24 hours. Pair that with the letter of Doctors Against Genocide, “Not Another Child, Not Another Hospital,” which calls on healthcare workers and leaders to issue statements against the attacks on healthcare and children in Gaza, and mobilize.
This is not a time to pretend that we can continue with business as usual; not only have thousands of innocent people brutally lost their lives, but if we don’t respond to stop such a horror occurring in broad daylight before the eyes of the world, we, too, are dead, though our bodies may keep on living.
The genocide occurring in Gaza is but the most distilled and blatant manifestation of the ongoing collapse of a very dangerous imperial world order. In her introduction to the IPC meeting, Zepp-LaRouche said, “[W]e are reaching a point of decision where in this year which just started a few days ago, in all likelihood, a breakpoint will come. Either a terrible catastrophe in the form that one of the two regional war crises could develop into a global war—that danger is very real; but it could also be that a New Paradigm emerges and that our mobilization succeeds to catapult humanity into a more humane way of relating to each other among the nations of the world. Both options are very close.”
The truth of her statement can be seen in recent developments.
Two violent incidents occurred in the U.S. on New Years Day, in New Orleans and Las Vegas, which one expert correctly identified as the consequence of decades of imperial and morally indefensible war fighting—the violence comes back home to the United States. Industry in the U.S. and Europe, Germany most notably, are in a free fall; a Jan. 1 report by Handelsblatt Research Institute states that “the German economy is in the midst of its biggest crisis in post-war history.” The outgoing Biden administration seems to be doing everything possible to set up a war scenario for the incoming President Trump, as it opens the sluices of new weapons sales and donations to Israel and Ukraine.
On the other hand, however, the vast majority of nations of the world are pursuing development, freedom from the conditions of colonialism. Nine nations officially became partners of the BRICS on Jan. 1, a partnership which a Global Times editorial points out “avoids zero-sum games between major powers and offers a more inclusive paradigm for international relations. It is this inclusivity that has prompted many countries from the Global South to rush to apply for membership in the BRICS family. … Through the BRICS platform, the Global South can free itself from the traditional geopolitical pressure of ‘taking sides’ and pursue greater autonomy in a multipolar world.”
People of the West have a choice to make: Do we continue to endure the hardships of collapse of the imperial world order, to “bear those ills we have,” even to the point of nuclear annihilation? Or do we throw off the system and join the new paradigm?
It would be so easy for the United States to stop acting like a world hegemon and to, instead, cooperate with other nations for development. “I think it is a promising situation,” Helga Zepp-LaRouche remarked to the IPC meeting. “I think if we can convince the West, the European countries and the United States, they should and must stop the confrontation with the Global South, which has become the Global Majority, and cooperate in a New Paradigm, reconstructing the war-torn regions, that that is the only way we can really secure peace. We call upon all people in the world to join hands with us to make the year 2025 early on, the year of such a change.”
The Schiller Institute report “Development Drive Means Billions of New Jobs, No Refugees, No War” provides the roadmap to do just that.
