The United States on Wednesday [Oct. 18] vetoed a UN Security Council resolution that would have called for “humanitarian pauses” to deliver lifesaving aid to millions in Gaza.
“Speaking [earlier] at the Russian Energy Week plenary, Putin said: “We understand that the bitterness is immense on both sides, but regardless of its levels, every effort should be made to minimize or reduce to zero the losses among civilians…. You cannot solve the problem in its entirety without addressing fundamental political issues, the main one being the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem,” he said.
However, the solution lies on a still higher plain. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche has insisted, only a new security and development architecture on a worldwide scale, which takes the interests of every nation into consideration, will work to solve these kinds of multi-generational conflicts. It will never be solved within a given region, or the currently failed framework, but only by changing the actual context within which the problem exists—in this case a dying oligarchical system, of which geopolitical conflicts in the so-called Middle East are merely an effect”.1
Fundamental to this new or replacement framework that is being discussed among those interested in reaching a level of rapprochement among nations is the necessary acknowledgment of the value of human life. Part and parcel to the deference and legal guarantees afforded to the status of a sovereign nation is its right to seek the safety, security, and well-being of its citizens. A concomitant pledge by all nations to permit all countries with declared national borders to pursue the highest goals for the advancement of its people living within its territory must be regarded as a sacred trust respected and adhered to by every signatory.
That is what is being advocated by calls for a “new security and development architecture on a worldwide scale”. Until there is a universal acceptance of the sacrosanct principle that every person alive deserves to be treated with dignity and accorded the benefit of the doubt regarding their sovereignty as a human being—until they abdicate that status by a record of lawless behavior—how can a collective society be expected to conform to righteous ideals if it lacks a foundational commitment to honor the principles of liberty and justice outlined by tenants found within the sacred scriptures of all the world’s religions?
Moral law shared universally among nations no matter what the religious traditions are, have common foundational interests directed at preserving civil order between diverse peoples. Society establishes legal systems to maintain civil order in society. Those systems consistently rest on the moral authority of revealed scripture, understood to be God’s law handed down through His prophets/messengers. Any legal system that is accepted as legitimate by the public must exhibit certain universal characteristics. Preeminent among those is the evidence that justice is being administered and applied equally to all citizens under the law.
It may be argued that in the world view of Islam where Sharia Law governs the Muslim countries, there exists an incompatibility with Judeo/Christian values extant in the Western world. Comparing the legal systems predicated on Islamic Law and that which survives here in the West founded on Roman and English Common Law exceeds the scope of this article.
What can be cited for the record is the unequivocal departure (by Hamas) from universal morals and ethical standards which are necessarily enforced if a civilized society is to maintain the stability of law and order required to ensure the advancement of humankind.
However, what are we to think of the unrestrained bombing strikes over Gaza that followed in retaliation by Israel?
In an admission by the son of a Hamas founder made on Fox News, Mosab Hassan Yousef claims that the mainstream news is afraid to call (Hamas) a movement driven by genocidal religious fanaticism:
“…Hamas is a religious movement and they are a raging religious movement against Israel. The mainstream media cannot say this, because they are afraid to ignite a religious war. And what I say, it already is. They want to annihilate the Jewish people because they are Jewish people”.2
What is even more taboo and buried by the popular press of the West is the historical fact that Hamas was in reality a creation of Israel along with its involvement with British intelligence operations.
… “And now I was being told that Israel had a hand in the creation of Hamas. The intent, my host told me, was to create a political divide within the Palestinian political leadership, and to dilute the power and influence of Yassar Arafat’s Fatah organization. In this, they had apparently succeeded. But the violent response of Hamas to the Oslo Accords [of 1993] had caused Israel to rethink this relationship, and soon Israel was in open war with its creation.
… It later came out that this internecine conflict between Palestinians had been orchestrated by Israel to split the Palestinian political body, weakening it while providing Israel with the opportunity to improve relations with Fatah under the grounds that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Over the course of the next decade and a half, I watched as Israel leveraged its control over Fatah, and its animosity toward Hamas, into a cycle of never-ending violence which always ended up with the Palestinian cause making more compromises which resulted in more lost territory—and more lost lives”.3
Until such time that our institutions tasked with superintending peaceful co-existence in international relations, including U.S. government intelligence agencies and their 5-eyes counterparts in the British Commonwealth are willing and capable of removing/disavowing policies that deliberately foment divisiveness and incite hatred and violence between political or religious sub-groups, (for geopolitical connivance reasons), it is indeed a long shot that a lasting peace in the Middle East can be mediated anytime soon.
The elephant in the room is this. Just as a person can forfeit their sovereignty, autonomy, and agency over their own lives when they become a lawbreaker, thus becoming vulnerable to incarceration, this parallels what can happen to a collective body of inhabitants living in a country that is branded as an outlaw regime.
When a complicit media compounds a narrative that convicts a specific government or its leadership as a pariah regime, then the target authorities within that regime can be stripped of the agency needed to claim their legitimate authority and right to sovereignty. The whole of the population can then become guilty by association. Eventually, as has happened in Gaza, the whole district becomes likened to a ghetto impounded within an open-air prison.
This is precisely the primary aim of backing extremist movements by Western geo-strategists. In the case of the Palestinian situation, the malefactors within Hamas have largely incriminated all their kin as Jew-haters. This plays into the serpentine logic lying behind the agenda of those who plotted the creation of the Hamas fissure sewn among the Palestinians in the first place. It is used to sew discord and undercut the unity of the Palestinians which (by now) should have coalesced into a united front that forced an imperative recognition by the international community that its claim to sovereign statehood was and remains legitimate.
As long as Hamas preaches and practices Islamist jihadist terrorist tactics that confirm its identity as an illicit and inhuman contrivance, the eventuality of a two-state solution—[a] “creation of a sovereign Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem” —remains an impossibility. An impartial analysis could readily deduce that the prevention of such an outcome was the main objective of the Zionist fabricators behind the Hamas formation from the get-go.
What is now stopping the far-right, Zionist kingpin Netanyahu from expunging the whole lot of them (Palestinians) in Israel’s defense? At the very least, what has already become a fait accompli is that law-abiding factions with the Palestinian people have been stained by a broad brush of evil doing by the Jihadists. In an act of premeditation, this can then be used to exonerate the egregious retaliation that Israel has embarked upon in its bombing campaign of civilian infrastructure and buildings.*
The lynchpin here is that in all the accords reached over the decades overseen by U.N. auspices, Palestine remains an amorphous entity. That is, the Gaza Strip of land, the Westbank, Jericho, and East Jerusalem exist as Arab-residential territories within the landmass of Israel and have never, since the formation of the State of Israel after WW II, received the status of “sovereignty”. To this day, the ambiguous nature of the Palestinian people—living in an interminable grey zone—dwelling on premises unrecognized as sovereign enclaves, but which nevertheless lie within the borders of the sovereign nation-state of Israel are thus vulnerable to arbitrary rules dictated by a foreign, occupying government that has proven inimical to the best interests of its Palestinian inhabitants.
This situation is aggravated by the clash of interests that exists in the political divisions among the Palestinian people themselves. Hamas controls Gaza, while the PLO Fatah governs the area of the Westbank. The Fatah can negotiate with Israel and conceivably come to terms conducive to peaceful co-existence; Hamas persists as a legacy of cruel obstinacy preventing such negotiations from ever being reached between Arabs and Jews.
And who benefits from this chronic schism? Those who argue that a single-state solution is the only answer. In other words, peace will come, according to Zionist protagonists, only when the Palestinian territories are nationalized and annexed by the secular state of Israel. Based on past actions and clear signals sent by the Netanyahu coalition, it is apparent this is the ultimate aim of the Likud-run government. It devolves into the extirpation of the Palestinians on what is claimed to be land meant for the Jewish people alone…
In a tweet in Hebrew, Netanyahu made very clear the ideological pillars of the new administration. “The Jewish people have an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel,” he wrote. “The government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of Israel,” he added, including the occupied West Bank.4
And yet to complicate the matter further, denominations are fracturing the Jewish people too. Others within the traditional religious orthodoxy distinguish their Jewishness from the political (Zionist) elements that seek predominance in all of Jewry. They distance themselves and their followers from a philosophy that denies the rights of the Palestinians to seek a sovereign state separate from Israel. This includes their acceptance that portions of land within the confines of Greater Israel are by right, belonging to the original occupants of those territories, namely the Palestinian Arabs.
When you have, as in the case of relations between Hamas and the Israelis an attitude where each regards the other as “animals” or “sub-humans”, which attitude justifies acts of retaliation that are by definition—again codified within the U.N. Charter of human rights—as war crimes; all nations adhering to the principles so enshrined in those enumerated articles should and must insist on adherence to international law that proscribes such heinous, vengeful carnage, holding the political leadership of the belligerent parties to standards of decency and dignity expected among civilized human beings.
The allowance by the U.S. under the current administration to give a pass to Netanyahu’s government to pursue a path that leads to the removal and eventual genocidal extermination of the Palestinian population within the Gaza Strip is a dereliction to honoring the explicit articles contained within the U.N. Charter and subsequent Resolutions acceded to by member nations.
About the U.N. and its role in mediating an end to violence in the contested territories, a re-commitment to earlier resolutions agreed to by the separate sides has been cited as a way forward to achieve a brokered truce and eventual path to a permanent peace accord.
Specifically, a document containing a petition to uphold Resolution 242, which was signed after the 1967 war establishing the principles that were to guide the negotiations for an Arab-Israeli peace settlement. In addition to that effort, a later 1993 Declaration of Principles, referred to as the Oslo Accords, finally agreed to by the PLO should serve as a current administrative context to arbitrate an end to the hostilities underway.
The problem is that there are elements or what are better termed extremist factions within both sides that are averse to accepting peaceful relations with their sworn enemy. Hamas is not the same as the PLO. Netanyahu and his Zionist supporters exist in a political spectrum that is nowhere as moderate nor tolerant as some of their predecessors who managed to forge earlier compromises that have allowed for the fragile co-existence between the Palestinian people and their Jewish neighbors.
There are peace-seeking moderates within the polity of each of these Middle Eastern adversarial communities. As is wont to happen repeatedly, a vocal minority co-opts the peace process and steers the majority into tolerating fanaticism that only feeds divisiveness and animosity. Left to themselves, Hamas and the Zionist wing of the State of Israel will try to eradicate the other.
This is where the major powers must step in and intercede. The extremism that sponsors terrorism and invokes violence as a legitimate tactic for achieving peace must be disavowed by whatever diplomatic channels are available to U.S. (United Sovereigns under God.)
Unfortunately, the avenues for diplomacy and its principal ambassadors have come under fire lately for rank amateurism, especially since the Biden collective moved into the Whitehouse. Biden’s team has been roundly criticized for their inability to sustain open dialogue with Putin and the Russians concerning the crisis in Ukraine. As far as intervention and a clearly stated policy decision or resolution coming out of the Security Council at the United Nations, there has been a failure by the Council to make its first public intervention in the Israel-Gaza crisis. (to date.)
The facts are, understandably, passions will boil over in the face of the outrage and calumny that Hamas terrorists instigated by their slaughter of innocent civilians. That does not countenance an even worse and disproportionate retaliation as we have witnessed being prosecuted by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) indiscriminately bombing civilian residential infrastructure in Gaza.
Notes:
*And by the way, has been used in part to justify decades of apartheid policies maintained by Israeli governments formed and backed by British, imperial controlling interests.
scottritterextra.com/p/why-i-no-longer-stand-with-israel