Emergency Forum: No More War Crimes! Economic Development, Not Depopulation!

A Nov. 5 article titled “Israel Minister Suspended after Calling Nuking Gaza an Option” Politico reported that “Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu was suspended indefinitely after he said in an interview that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was ‘one of the possibilities,’ the government announced on Sunday.”

It would be supremely irresponsible to {not} take this threat seriously. Already, between 25,000 and 30,000 tons of bombs have been detonated by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza since October 7. This far exceeds the bomb tonnage dropped in the most lethal air raids of the Second World War, including Hamburg (4 raids, 9,000 tons) Dresden (4 raids, 3900 tons) and Tokyo (1,665 tons.) War crimes are afoot.

Türkiye’s Anadolou Agency reported October 12 that “The Israeli Air Force (IAF) said …that it has dropped ‘about 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets’ in Gaza since Saturday’s attack, which nearly matches the number of bombs the US used in Afghanistan in one year. The Washington Post, citing Marc Garlasco, a military adviser at the Dutch organization PAX for Peace, reported that Israel is ‘dropping in less than a week what the US was dropping in Afghanistan in a year, in a much smaller, much more densely populated area, where mistakes are going to be magnified.’” War crimes are afoot.

Has the 1930s era of publicly advocated and justified war crimes returned? Has the decision been made, contrary to ratified UN resolutions, to the 1993 Oslo Accords, to the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg code—as well as to the “mutually assured destruction” of thermonuclear weapons—to reintroduce mass murder in warfare as a “legitimate” practice?

“According to the Gazan Ministry of Health, as of Nov 7, 2023, 10,328 people in the Gaza Strip have been killed, including 4237 children, 2719 women, and 631 older people. In addition, 25,956 people have been injured and 2450 are missing, including 1350 children, mostly covered by some of the 262,000 damaged housing units. So far, 192 medical staff have been killed,”reported the Nov.17 edition of the British medical journal, The Lancet. These deaths—real people with real aspirations, not “collateral damage”—cannot be either necessary, right, or justified.

Consider a recent interview given to the BBC by senior British MP and Secretary of State for Defence Grant Shapps, when asked if he believes Israel is acting disproportionately in its military actions against Gaza: “I think it’s kind of forgotten that in war, very sadly, people lose their lives. When Britain bombed Dresden, 35,000 people apparently lost their lives. People die in war.” Then, recall the infamous statement reported by correspondent Peter Arnett on February 7, 1968, regarding the American bombing of the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre: “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a U.S. major said Wednesday….. regardless of civilian casualties, they must bomb and shell the once placid river city of 35,000 to rout the Viet Cong forces.” Same war crimes, different country, different decade, different people, different “unassailable righteous cause.” Are we all going to stand for this all over again?

When, in 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was pressured by hardliners within his own administration to launch a military invasion of Cuba “ in defense of America,” after the Soviet Union had placed ballistic missiles there—missiles which, unknown to Americans at the time, were armed with nuclear warheads—he refused, and saved the world from nuclear war, perhaps at the cost of his own life. Like Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated November 4,1995 by Israeli extremists that opposed Rabin’s “Oslo Accords”collaboration with Yassr Arafat for peace in Gaza and the West Bank, JFK had the courage to change America’s axioms. In his June 10, 1963 American University speech, he proposed this:”Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not except that view. Our problems are man-made – therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings.”