The 172nd consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) began with remarks by Dennis Small, IPC co-moderator and Ibero-American Editor for the Executive Intelligence Review. Small emphasized that U.S. President Donald Trump, despite his bluster, is not the “master of his fate.” At this point, with the closure of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, the world is headed for an enormous economic shock, which Trump is powerless to prevent. He has failed to thwart the BRICS and the shift toward a multipolar world, as the world could see at the recent BRICS conference in New Delhi, India. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink Trump has announced that the United States has stationed weapons in space, and Under Secretary of Defense Elbridge Colby said that the United States is discussing the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons. Trump still hopes to intimidate the rest of the world by these actions.
Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, reported that genocide, like war, has been used as “the continuation of politics by other means.” He cited historical examples where the perpetrators of genocides were able to achieve their policy goals. Since opposition to genocide was codified in 1948, there was a deterrent of sorts, but the impunity with which Israel is carrying out its genocide in Gaza threatens to take us back to the world as it was before the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). In the case of the Palestinians, both Hamas and the Israeli regime- initiated violence in order to accomplish specific objectives, and both have been successful, but at a price. Hamas drew global attention to the plight of the Palestinians, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. The Israeli regime hopes to provoke another Intifada in the West Bank, which would serve as a pretext for another genocide there, to hasten the ethnic cleansing and annexation.
Harley Schlanger, President of The LaRouche Organization, praised Bartov’s presentation and his recent book, Israel: What Went Wrong?. Schlanger discussed the topic of Israel’s postponed constitution, which was superseded in 2018 by the “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” which effectively institutionalized apartheid, as is described in Bartov’s book. Schlanger proposed that rather than focusing on disincentives such as sanctions to change Israeli behavior, the world should promote positive incentives such as Lyndon LaRouche’s Oasis Plan, which would benefit both sides of the conflict.
Jonathan Kuttab is a Palestinian-American Christian who is Executive Director of the Friends of Sabeel North America, and also Co-Founder of Nonviolence International. He expressed his appreciation for the ongoing IPC meetings, and praised the diverse and global nature of their participants. He then moved on to the topic of genocide denial in the case of Gaza. He said that the most difficult thing to prove in legal proceedings of genocide was intent, but Israel has made its intent extremely easy to demonstrate and document. Westerners who deny the genocide are doing so to hide their own culpability. Israel’s impunity threatens to normalize genocide, a return, as Prof. Bartov warns, to the world as it was before the Genocide Convention. What is particularly shocking, he added, are the attacks on the international courts and on international law itself.
The Eyes of the World Have Been Opened
In response, Bartov dismissed the “two-state solution,” charging that “the idea of two separate states with a wall between them is a fantasy.” He praised an organization called “A Land for All,” which promotes a plan that envisions two sovereign states—Israel and Palestine—within a single shared homeland, linked by open borders and shared institutions rather than strict separation. He said that it was difficult for many people to come to terms with the fact that Israel, which presented itself to the world as a refuge for victims of the Holocaust, could now be perpetrating a holocaust of its own, but because Israel “overplayed its hand” and pushed its impunity too far, the eyes of the world have been opened.
Dennis Small addressed the issue of denial, saying that people are unwilling to face the truth because they have no solution;, and consequently, reality is too painful. He said that the worst damage is to those who tolerate the genocide, more so than to the actual victims. He contrasted the benevolent image of man found in China’s Confucianism with the bestial image found in Thomas Hobbes and his “war of each against all.” He also reminded the participants that Zionism was in large part a project of the British Empire.
Beatriz Bissio is an Associate Professor at the Post-Graduate Program of Comparative History, at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She described her previous career as a journalist with a publication called Third World Notebooks, during which she extensively covered Palestinian issues and interviewed the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat. She then moved to the subject of the recent BRICS conference, which was by no means guaranteed to succeed, particularly because of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s friendly relations with Israel. Despite this, the meeting was a major success.
