I was born in Poonch (Kashmir) and now I live in Norway. I oppose war and violence and am a firm believer in the peaceful co-existence of all nations and peoples. In my academic work I have tried to espouse the cause of the weak and the oppressed in a world dominated by power politics, misleading propaganda and violations of basic human rights. I also believe that all conscious members of society have a moral duty to stand for and further the cause of peace and human rights throughout the world.
Ninety-nine American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza over
the past year published an open letter to President Biden and Vice
President Harris on Thursday that detailed the horrors they witnessed
and called for an end to US military support for Israel.
The healthcare workers said they believe the true death toll in Gaza
is much higher than what Gaza’s Health Ministry is reporting, estimating
it to be over 118,908.
“This letter and the appendix show probative evidence that the human
toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the
United States,” the letter reads. “It is likely that the death toll from
this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of
Gaza’s population.”
The latest numbers from Gaza’s Health Ministry put the number of
Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza since October 7, 2023, at 41,788.
The ministry’s figures only count the bodies that are brought to
hospitals and morgues and don’t account for people missing and presumed
dead under the rubble.
The American healthcare workers said that everyone in Gaza is either
sick, injured, or both. “With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza
is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker,
every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every
man, woman, and child,” the letter says. Palestinians inspect
damages at Al Shifa Hospital after Israeli forces withdrew from the
hospital and the area around it following a two-week operation in Gaza
City on April 1, 2024. REUTERS/Dawoud Abu Alkas
They said that almost every child under five they encountered “had
both a cough and watery diarrhea.” Each signatory to the letter saw
wounds in children that showed they were being purposefully targeted by
the Israeli military.
“Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive
care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the
head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis,” the letter reads.
“It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children
throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is
accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military
authorities.”
Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an orthopedic and hand surgeon, was quoted in
the letter saying, “Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my
hand. The first of many.”
The healthcare workers said newborn babies were dying due to the
conditions caused by the Israeli siege and attacks on hospitals. Asma
Taha, a pediatric nurse practitioner, said, “Every day, I saw babies
die. They had been born healthy. Their mothers were so malnourished that
they could not breastfeed, and we lacked formula or clean water to feed
them, so they starved.”
The healthcare workers said their Palestinian colleagues were
targeted by Israeli forces and captured during Israeli raids on
hospitals. “Many of these colleagues of ours were taken by Israel during
the attacks. They all told us a slightly different version of the same
story: in captivity, they were barely fed, continuously physically and
psychologically abused, and finally dumped naked on the side of a road.
Many told us they were subjected to mock executions and other forms of
mistreatment and torture,” the letter reads.
Israel claims Hamas has used hospitals as “command centers,” but the
letter said that none of its signatories saw any sign of militant
activity. “The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks
inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely
clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant
activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities,” the
letter reads.
The letter concludes with a plea for Biden and Harris to end US
support for the genocidal war: “Every day that we continue supplying
weapons and munitions to Israel is another day that women are shredded
by our bombs and children are murdered with our bullets. President Biden
and Vice President Harris, we urge you: end this madness now!”
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy
administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a
U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million
dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
That was in 1961.
Today, with nuclear arsenals vastly larger and more powerful, scientists know that a nuclear exchange would cause “nuclear winter.”
And the nearly complete end of agriculture on the planet. Some
estimates put the survival rate of humans on Earth at 1 or 2 percent.
No longer 100 Holocausts.
More than 1,000 Holocausts.
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
If such a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any
retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a
category of now or never.
What if we did have the opportunity for hindsight? What if we could
somehow hover over this planet and see what had become a global
crematorium and unspeakable ordeal of human agony? Where, in words
attributed to both Nikita Khrushchev and Winston Churchill, “the living
would envy the dead.”
What might we Americans say about the actions and inaction of our leaders?
In 2023: The nine nuclear-armed countries spent $91
billion on their nuclear weapons. Most of that amount, $51 billion, was
the United States. And our country accounted for 80 percent of the
increase in nuclear weapons spending.
The United States is leading the way in the nuclear arms race. And
we’re encouraged to see that as a good thing. “Escalation dominance.”
But escalation doesn’t remain unipolar. As time goes on, “Do as we say, not as we do” isn’t convincing to other nations.
China is now expanding its nuclear arsenal. That escalation does not
exist in a vacuum. Official Washington pretends that Chinese policies
are shifting without regard to the U.S. pursuit of “escalation
dominance.” But that’s a disingenuous pretense. What the great critic of
Vietnam War escalation during the 1960s, Sen. William Fulbright, called
“the arrogance of power.”
Of course there’s plenty to deplore about Russia’s approach to
nuclear weapons. Irresponsible threats about using “tactical” ones in
Ukraine have come from Moscow. There’s now public discussion — by
Russian military and political elites — of putting nuclear weapons in
space.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling
such ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control
agreements. Among crucial steps, it’s long past time to restore three
treaties that the United States abrogated — ABM, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, and Open Skies.
On the non-proliferation front, opportunities are being spurned by
Washington. For instance, as former CIA analyst Melvin Goodman wrote in
September: “Iran’s Ayatollah has indicated a readiness to open
discussions with the United States on nuclear matters, but the Biden administration has turned a deaf ear to such a possibility.”
That deaf ear greatly pleases Israel, the only nuclear-weapons state
in the Middle East. On Sept. 22, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
said unequivocally that Israel’s pager attack in Lebanon was “a form of terrorism.” The United States keeps arming Israel, but won’t negotiate with Iran.
The U.S. government has a responsibility to follow up on every lead,
and respond to every overture. Without communication, we vastly increase
the risk of devastation.
We can too easily forget what’s truly at stake.
We should face the realities of the U.S. government’s role in fueling
ominous trends, in part by dismantling key arms-control agreements.
Despite diametrical differences in ideologies, in values, in ideals
and systems — programs for extermination are in place at a magnitude
dwarfing what occurred during the first half of the 1940s.
Today, Congress and the White House are in the grip of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” In a toxic mix with the arrogance of power. Propelling a new and more dangerous Cold War.
And so, at the State Department, the leadership talks about a
“rules-based order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the
rules, we break the rules.”
Meanwhile, the Doomsday Clock set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is now just 90 seconds away from apocalyptic midnight.
Six decades ago, the Doomsday Clock was a full 12 minutes away.
And President Lyndon Johnson was willing to approach Moscow with the
kind of wisdom that is now absent at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Here’s what Johnson said at the end of his extensive summit meeting with
Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin in June 1967 in Glassboro, New Jersey:
“We have made further progress in an effort to improve our understanding
of each other’s thinking on a number of questions.”
Two decades later, President Ronald Reagan — formerly a supreme cold
warrior — stood next to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and said: “We decided to talk to each other instead of about each other.”
But such attitudes would be heresy today.
As each day brings escalation toward a global nuclear inferno,
standard-issue legislators on both sides of the aisle keep boosting the
Pentagon budget. Huge new appropriations for nuclear weapons are voted
under the euphemism of “modernization.”
And here’s a sad irony: The few members of Congress willing to
urgently warn about the danger of nuclear war often stoke that danger
with calls for “victory” in the Ukraine war. Instead, what’s urgently
needed is a sober push for actual diplomacy to end it.
The United States should not use the Ukraine war as a rationale for
pursuing a mutually destructive set of policies toward Russia. It’s an
approach that maintains and worsens the daily reality on the knife-edge
of nuclear war.
We don’t know how far negotiations with Russia could get on an array
of pivotal issues. But refusing to negotiate is a catastrophic path.
Continuation of the war in Ukraine markedly increases the likelihood
of spinning out from a regional to a Europe-wide to a nuclear war. Yet,
calls for vigorously pursuing diplomacy to end the Ukraine war are
dismissed out of hand as serving Vladimir Putin’s interests.
The world has gotten even closer to the precipice of a military clash
between the nuclear superpowers, with a push to greenlight NATO-backed
Ukrainian attacks heading deeper into Russia.
At the State Department, the leadership talks about a “rules-based
order,” which all too often actually means: “We make the rules, we break
the rules.”
Consider what President John Kennedy had to say, eight months after the Cuban Missile Crisis, in his historic speech at
American University: “Above all, while defending our own vital
interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an
adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.
To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only
of the bankruptcy of our policy, or of a collective death wish for the
world.”
That crucial insight from Kennedy is currently in the dumpsters at the White House and on Capitol Hill.
And where is this all headed?
Ellsberg tried to alert members of Congress. Five years ago, in a letter that
was hand-delivered to every office of Senate and House members, he
wrote: “I am concerned that the public, most members of Congress, and
possibly even high members of the Executive branch have remained in the
dark, or in a state of denial, about the implications of rigorous
studies by environmental scientists over the last dozen years.” Those
studies “confirm that using even a large fraction of the existing U.S. or Russian
nuclear weapons that are on high alert would bring about nuclear
winter, leading to global famine and near extinction of humanity.”
In the quest for sanity and survival, isn’t it time for
reconstruction of the nuclear arms-control infrastructure? Yes, the
Russian war against Ukraine violates international law and “norms,” as
did U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But real diplomacy with Russia is
in the interests of global security.
And some great options don’t depend on what happens at the negotiation table.
Many experts say that the most important initial step our country
could take to reduce the chances of nuclear war would be a shutdown of
all ICBMs.
The word “deterrence” is often heard. But the land-based part of the
triad is actually the opposite of deterrence — it’s an invitation to be
attacked. That’s the reality of the 400 intercontinental ballistic
missiles that are on hair-trigger alert in five western states
Uniquely, ICBMs invite a counterforce attack. And they allow a
president just minutes to determine whether what’s incoming is actually a
set of missiles — or, as in the past, a flock of geese or a drill
message that’s mistaken for the real thing.
The former Secretary of Defense William Perry wrote that ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” and “they could even trigger an accidental nuclear war.”
And yet, so far, we can’t get anywhere with Congress in order to shut
down ICBMs. “Oh no,” we’re told, “that would be unilateral
disarmament.”
Imagine that you’re standing in a pool of gasoline, with your
adversary. You’re lighting matches, and your adversary is lighting
matches. If you stop lighting matches, that could be condemned as
“unilateral disarmament.” It would also be a sane step to reduce the
danger — whether or not the other side follows suit.
The ongoing refusal to shut down the ICBMs is akin to insisting that
our side must keep lighting matches while standing in gasoline.
The chances of ICBMs starting a nuclear conflagration have increased
with sky-high tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers.
Mistaking a false alarm for a nuclear-missile attack becomes more likely
amid the stresses, fatigue and paranoia that come with the protracted
war in Ukraine and extending war into Russia.
Their unique vulnerability as land-based strategic weapons puts ICBMs
in the unique category of “use them or lose them.” So, as Perry
explained, “If our sensors indicate that enemy missiles are en route to
the United States, the president would have to consider launching ICBMs
before the enemy missiles could destroy them. Once they are launched,
they cannot be recalled. The president would have less than 30 minutes
to make that terrible decision.”
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force. Former ICBM
launch officer Bruce Blair and Gen. James Cartwright, former vice chair
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in 2016: “By scrapping the
vulnerable land-based missile force, any need for launching on warning
disappears.”
The United States should dismantle its entire ICBM force.
In July, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a letter signed
by more than 700 scientists. They not only called for cancelation of
the Sentinel program for a new version of ICBMs — they also called for
getting rid of the entire land-based arsenal.
Meanwhile, the current dispute in Congress about ICBMs has focused on
whether it would be cheaper to build the cost-overrunning Sentinel
system or upgrade the existing Minuteman III missiles. But either way,
the matches keep being lit for a global holocaust.
During his Nobel Peace Prize speech, Martin Luther King Jr. declared:
“I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must
spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear
destruction.”
I want to close with some words from Ellsberg’s book “The Doomsday
Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner,” summing up the
preparations for nuclear war. He wrote:
“No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as
immoral, or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came
about, and how and why it has persisted for over half a century is a
chronicle of human madness. Whether Americans, Russians and other humans
can rise to the challenge of reversing these policies and eliminating
the danger of near-term extinction caused by their own inventions and
proclivities remains to be seen. I choose to join with others in acting as if that is still possible.”
This article is adapted from the keynote speech that the author
gave at the annual conference of the Center for Arms Control and
Non-Proliferation in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 24, 2024.
THE Labour government has ordered 100 spy flights over Gaza to aid
Israeli intelligence, an investigation by Declassified UK revealed
today.
The intelligence-gathering flights began in December under the previous government.
Eleven flights took place in Labour’s first week in power, and during
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s first full month in office in August,
the Royal Air Force (RAF) flew 42 flights over Gaza.
Declassified UK found that the flights were departing from Britain’s air base in Cyprus.
The flights may have gathered up to 500 hours of footage of Gaza,
Declassified UK said, though it is unclear exactly where the British
intelligence is going and what it comprises.
Earlier this month, Liberal Democrat MP Mike Martin, a former British
army officer who served in Afghanistan, asked the military whether “UK
intelligence is passed to Israel for the purposes of military
targeting.”
Labour’s armed forces minister Luke Pollard responded by saying the
surveillance flights were “solely tasked to support hostage rescue.”
Britain’s intelligence support to Israel is not limited to aerial missions.
An Israeli official disclosed to the New York Times that a secret
British reconnaissance team was deployed to Israel early on in its
attack on Gaza.
The British team gives “added value” to its intelligence operations,
he said, adding that Britain is providing intelligence that “Israel
cannot collect on its own.”
There is no evidence the new Labour government has brought this spy team home from Israel.
A Ministry of Defence spokesperson told Declassified that Britain
is not a participant in the war in Gaza, adding: “Our mandate is
narrowly defined to focus on securing the release of the hostages only,
including British nationals, with the RAF routinely conducting unarmed
flights since December 2023 for this sole purpose.”
The president previously said he wouldn’t support strikes on nuclear facilities
by Dave DeCamp, Antiwar. com, October 3, 2024
President Biden said Thursday that the US and Israel were discussing
the possibility of striking Iran’s oil facilities in retaliation for the
Iranian missile barrage that targeted Israel on Tuesday, which was a
response to multiple Israeli escalations.
When asked by a reporter if he would support Israeli strikes on
Iranian oil sites, Biden said, “We’re discussing that. I think that
would be a little… anyway.” The comments sent oil prices spiking.
Striking Iran’s oil facilities is supported by the ultra-hawkish Sen.
Lindsey Graham (R-SC). “These oil refineries need to be hit and hit
hard because that is the source of cash for the regime to perpetrate
their terror,” Graham said in a statement on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, Biden said he wouldn’t support Israeli strikes on
Iranian nuclear sites, but the US is vowing to ensure Tehran faces
“severe consequences.” Israeli officials have told Axios that they plan
to hit Iran hard and believe their attack could lead to a major regional
war.
Options being considered besides striking oil facilities are
targeting Iran’s air defenses or carrying out a targeted assassination
inside Iran. Israeli officials have said that if Iran responds to their
next attack, then any option is on the table, including strikes on
nuclear facilities.
Israel is coordinating its plans to attack Iran with the US because
it wants the US to come to its defense in the event of another
significant Iranian attack. If Israel wants to carry out a significant
strike inside Iran, it may also need support from the US military.
Iran fired about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the
Israeli assassination of Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran
and the Israeli killing of Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah
and Abbas Nilforoushan, an IRGC commander who was killed alongside
Nasrallah.
Today, Iran launched a massive missile attack against Israel, which
Tehran billed as a response to Israel’s recent assassinations of leaders
of the IRGC, Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel now appears to be mulling a
retaliation in turn that could push the sides into all-out war.
When Israel and Iran narrowly avoided a full-blown conflict in April, I warned
that we shouldn’t let Biden’s help in averting escalation overshadow
his broader, strategic failure to prevent such a dangerous moment from
ever arising. Had the U.S. used its considerable leverage with Israel to
end its war in Gaza, the region would not have found itself on the edge
of a disastrous war in April; six months later, the Middle East is back
at the brink of disaster.
Iran has made it clear that it does not want a regional conflict;
Tehran doesn’t seem to believe it can afford such a war. But Netanyahu
clearly thinks it’s in his interest to ramp up conflict right now, as
Washington stands frozen — a month out from an election and with a lame
duck president who seems incapable of telling Israel “no,” no matter the
costs for American security.
One must hope that somehow, further escalation is avoided. But the
risk of just such an outcome is enormous, and if the U.S. finds itself
in a new forever war in the Middle East, the buck will stop with Biden.
This White House has repeatedly chosen to keep the U.S. on the precipice
of war, rather than restrain Israel’s military as its expanding wars
killed more and more civilians in Gaza and now Lebanon. The Biden
administration has helped bring about this extraordinarily dangerous
moment by providing Israel with the weapons, political protection,
diplomatic support, and money it requires to pursue the exact escalation
that the Biden administration professes it does not want.
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Biden’s strategy has been to put enormous effort into deterring Iran
and its partners from retaliating against Israel, while doing virtually
nothing to discourage Israel from escalating in the first place. This
lopsided approach has in fact been a recipe for escalation, repeatedly
proving to Netanyahu that Washington has no intention of bringing
pressure to bear on Israel, no matter its actions.
If Biden enables further escalation from Israel, this could very well
lead to a direct U.S.-Iran military confrontation that would be
profoundly destabilizing in the region. The consequences for U.S.
national security of such a war are hard to quantify — but it’s easy to
imagine consequences on par with the disastrous military adventurism
that George W. Bush’s administration pursued in the Middle East.
If U.S. service members find themselves in the line of fire in an
expanding Iran-Israel conflict, it will be a direct result of this
administration’s failure to use U.S. leverage to pursue America’s most
core security interest here — avoiding war.
Joe Biden came into office promising to end the era of forever wars
and the quixotic, costly efforts to transform the Middle East. Now,
Biden appears to have fallen into the trap of thinking that U.S.
military force will transform the region for good. It is stunning that
Washington appears not to have learned this lesson yet.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the United
General Assembly and shows maps of the Middle East on September 27,
2023.
(Photo: Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Images)
Israel’s violent extremists now in control
of its government believe that Israel has the Biblical license, indeed a
religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.
When Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the podium at the U.N. General Assembly last week, dozens of governments walked out
of the chamber. The global opprobrium of Netanyahu and his government
is due to Israel’s depraved violence against its Arab neighbors.
Netanyahu purveys a fundamentalist ideology that has turned Israel into the most violent nation in the world.
Israel’s fundamentalist credo holds that Palestinians have no right
whatsoever to their own nation. The Israeli Knesset recently passed a declaration rejecting a Palestinian State in what the Knesset calls The Land of Israel, meaning the land west of the Jordan River.
The Knesset of Israel firmly opposes the establishment of a
Palestinian state west of Jordan. The establishment of a Palestinian
state in the heart of the Land of Israel will pose an existential danger
to the State of Israel and its citizens, perpetuate the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.
To call the land west of the Jordan the “heart of the Land of Israel”
is breathtaking. Israel is one part of the land west of the Jordan, not
the entire land. The International Court of Justice has recently ruled
that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian lands (those outside of
Israel’s borders as of June 4, 1967, before the June 1967 war) is
plainly illegal. The U.N. General Assembly has recently voted overwhelmingly to back the ICJ ruling and called on Israel to withdraw from Palestinian territories within one year.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power.
It is worth recalling that when the British empire promised a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine
in 1917, the Palestinian Arabs constituted around 90% of the
population. At the time of the 1947 U.N. partition plan, the Palestinian
Arab population was approximately 67% of the population, though the
partition plan proposed to give the Arabs only 44% of the land. Now
Israel asserts the claim to 100% of the land.
There are many sources of this Israeli brazenness, the most important
being the backing of Israel by U.S. military power. Without the U.S.
military backing, Israel could not possibly rule over an Apartheid
regime in which Palestinian Arabs constitute nearly one half of the
population yet hold none of the political power. Future generations will
look back in amazement at the success of the Israel Lobby in
manipulating the U.S. military to the severe detriment of U.S. national
security and global peace.
Yet in addition to the U.S. military, there is another source of
Israel’s profound injustice to the Palestinian people, and that is the
religious fundamentalism purveyed fanatics such as the self-proclaimed fascist
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s Minister of Finance, and Minister of
National Defense Itamar Ben-Gvir. These fanatics hold fast to the
biblical Book of Joshua, according to which God promised the Israelites
the land “from the Negev wilderness in the south to the Lebanon
mountains in the north, from the Euphrates River in the east to the
Mediterranean Sea in the west.” (Joshua 1:4).
At the U.N. last week,
Netanyahu once again staked Israel’s claim to the land on Biblical
grounds: “When I spoke here last year, I said we face the same timeless
choice that Moses put before the people of Israel thousands of years
ago, as we were about to enter the Promised Land. Moses told us that our
actions would determine whether we bequeath to future generations a
blessing or a curse.”
What Netanyahu did not tell his fellow leaders (most of whom had in
any event vacated the hall), was that Moses laid out a genocidal path to
the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 31):
[The LORD] will destroy these nations before you, and you shall
dispossess them. Joshua is the one who will cross ahead of you, just as
the LORD has spoken. “The LORD will do to them just as He did to Sihon
and Og, the kings of the Amorites, and to their land, when He destroyed
them. “The LORD will deliver them up before you, and you shall do to
them according to all the commandments which I have commanded you.”
Israel’s violent extremists believe that Israel has the Biblical
license, indeed a religious mandate, to destroy the Palestinian people.
Their Biblical hero is Joshua, the Israelite commander who succeeded
Moses, and who led the Israelites’ genocidal conquests. (Netanyahu has
also referred to the Amalekites, another case of a God-ordained genocide
of foes of the Israelites, in a clear “dog-whistle” to his
fundamentalist followers.) Here is the Biblical account of Joshua’s
conquest of Hebron (Joshua 10):
Then Joshua and all Israel with him went up from Eglon to Hebron, and
they fought against it. They captured it and struck it and its king and
all its cities and all the persons who were in it with the
edge of the sword. He left no survivor, according to all that he had
done to Eglon. And he utterly destroyed it and every person who was in it.
There is a deep irony to this genocidal account. It almost surely is
not historically accurate. There is no evidence that the Jewish kingdoms
arose from genocides. Most likely they arose from local Canaanite
communities adopting early forms of Judaism. Jewish fundamentalists
adhere to a 6th century BCE text that is most likely a mythical
reconstruction of purported events several centuries earlier, and a form
of political bravado that was common in ancient Near Eastern politics.
The problem is 21st century Israeli politicians, illegal settlers, and
other fundamentalists who propose to live by—and kill by—6th century BCE
political propaganda.
Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step
with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law.
Israel is duty bound to the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions, not
to the Book of Joshua. According to the recent ICJ ruling and UN General
Assembly resolution backing it up, Israel must withdraw in the coming
twelve months from the occupied Palestinian lands. According to
international law, Israel’s borders are those of June 4, 1967, not the Euphrates to the Mediterranean Sea.
Israel’s violent fundamentalists are some 2,600 years out of step
with today’s acceptable forms of statecraft and international law.
The ICJ ruling and U.N. General Assembly vote is not a ruling against the state of Israel per se.
It is a ruling only against extremism, indeed against extremism and
malevolence on both sides of the divide. There are two peoples, each
with roughly half the overall population (and with no shortage of
internal social, political, and ideological divisions within the two
communities). International law calls for two states, living side by
side, in peace.
The best solution, which we should strive for and hope for sooner
rather than later, is that the two states, and the two peoples, get
along, and actually draw strength from each other. Until then, however,
the practical solution will be peacekeepers and fortified borders to
protect each side from the animosity of the other, but with each having
the chance to prosper. The utterly intolerable and illegal situation is
the status quo, in which Israel rules brutally over the Palestinian people.
Hopefully, there will soon be a State of Palestine, sovereign and
independent, whether the Knesset wants it or not. This is not Israel’s
choice, but the mandate of the world community and of international law.
The sooner the State of Palestine is welcomed as member state of the
U.N., with the security of both Israel and Palestine backed by U.N.
peacekeepers, the sooner will peace come to the region.
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Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor and Director of the Center
for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, where he directed
The Earth Institute from 2002 until 2016. He is also President of the UN
Sustainable Development Solutions Network and a commissioner of the UN
Broadband Commission for Development. He has been advisor to three
United Nations Secretaries-General, and currently serves as an SDG
Advocate under Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Sachs is the author,
most recently, of “A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism”
(2020). Other books include: “Building the New American Economy: Smart,
Fair, and Sustainable” (2017) and “The Age of Sustainable Development,”
(2015) with Ban Ki-moon.
