Few wars are good, but seldom were wars driven by such overtly satanic intent as the ones in the Ukraine and Gaza. Few indeed were wars that promised to be such world-changing events and rearrangement of geopolitics as these.
The war in Ukraine was initiated by the denial of valid Russian concerns of an existential nature by a plan to push the borders and the armies of an aggressive NATO right up against Russia’s western border, from which three devastating wars against Russia had been launched in the past. Russia merely wanted Ukraine to remain a non-aligned buffer between itself and NATO to prevent history from repeating itself. But neocon forces in the US and Europe, egged on by the neoliberals, wanted this war. They hoped this would weaken Vladimir Putin by making him unpopular and result in regime change in Russia. This would make it possible to break this huge country into smaller and more manageable parts so that its massive resources could be opened up to unimpeded loot by Western oligarchs, as was the case during Yeltsin’s years.
Conditions to initiate war in Gaza were created to unleash the final nightmare in the long-running Zionist dream of ethnically cleansing biblical Israel of all its Palestinians, or of exterminating them. This project was to start from Gaza.
What was common to both these wars was a US connection with them. Both could be brought to a halt, depending on how Mr Biden used his telephone.
One of these wars would have ended if Biden had NOT used the telephone to make the call which he did, and the other one could have ended had he made the right call, which he did not.
The war in Ukraine began when Russia attacked Ukraine in Feb 2022. But by early April 2022, the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators were sitting across the table in Istanbul. They had almost hammered out an agreement based on which hostilities could be ended. That was when Biden called UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, to fly out to Istanbul and sabotage these peace talks. Had this call NOT been made, the conflict in Ukraine would have ended.
In the case of Gaza, had Biden picked up the phone and told Netanyahu that unless he ended the Israeli assault on Gaza forthwith, the US would withdraw all its support from Israel, this war would have ended. But he did NOT make this call.
The US policy on Gaza has been like that of a mentally sick behemoth that did not know what it was doing, nor knew what it wanted.
The crux of their Gaza policy has been that it would keep supplying Israel with bombs and bullets with which to kill Gazans, so that Israel did not run out of these, while it wanted the Gazans to be supplied with food to keep them sufficiently alive so that Israel would not run out of targets either.
So the US has been vetoing all calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. A ceasefire would deprive the Israelis of targets, and this would hurt their feelings. But the US has supported calls for temporary ceasefires, because these would allow the Israelis the time to recoup their strength to carry on the killing with renewed gusto, and for Gazans to stay barely alive so that the Israelis had enough tangible targets on whom to use American bombs and bullets.
Similar ambivalence seems to have informed the US policy with food aid for the Gazans. Thousands of trucks full of food aid have been lined up on the Gaza border for months, but Israel has denied them entry. The US has not thought it worthwhile to use its influence on Israel to allow these truck convoys to enter Gaza, but has been able to wring out a concession from them to airdrop food, which barely meets a fraction of the need of the starving population. And then it has floated the gimmick of a floating pier to bring in supplies for Gaza by sea! Again, the policy seems to be to keep these people alive, but only just. At all events, restoring them to full strength has not been a part of this policy.
The US has been backing the Israeli justification for its war on Gaza, i.e. that “Israel had the right to defend itself”! So far about 40000 Gazans have been killed with about another 10 to 15000 considered to be buried under the rubble, about a 100000 are severely wounded or crippled, and 1.5 million displaced. What neither Israel nor the US have said is, how many more dead Gazans will it take for Israel to feel that it stands sufficiently “defended”?
When King Leopold ll of Belgium owned the Congo, his usual punishment for the locals rebelling against his wickedly brutal rule was to chop off one hand of each rebel. All these many thousands of amputees would therefore become dependent on their families for their upkeep. The overall effect of this was that those maintaining the amputees were subtracted from the pool of potential rebels. And this weakened the rebellions. One therefore cannot but help thinking that the Israelis have taken a page from King Leopold’s book, so that their indiscriminate bombings were leaving hundreds dead, and thousands crippled. And it would take two able-bodied Gazans to look after each one that was crippled, and this would severely shrink the numbers from which Hamas could draw rebels to fight the Israelis.
At long last, on March 25, 2024, the US finally let a UNSC resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza pass by abstaining to vote on it. Immediately as this resolution carried, the US representative on the Security Council, mindful that this must have hurt Israeli feelings, lost no time declaring that this resolution was “non-binding”. That this was the most telling blow the leader of the civilized world could strike on behalf of humanity, is a sad commentary on how far the US had fallen from where it once stood in international esteem.
And then, on May 6, Israel attacked Rifah, the “safe zone” into which it had pushed 1.5 million Gazans so that they could be “saved” there. Before they attacked Rifah they asked over a million wounded, crippled, starving and dying Palestinians, whom they had first herded south for safety, to now pack up their flimsy tents and migrate north in search of the same non-existent safety.
Israel attacked Rifah despite being warned or beseeched by every country in the world not to take this extreme step to escalate the massacre. This was too much even for the Americans. So they embargoed the supply to Israel of bombs weighing 2000 pounds or more. Obviously, Palestinians starved to half their weight would be better killed with lighter bombs. At least that would make more economic sense.
Just at the time of posting this piece, the US floating pier became operational. It did not take long to see that the purpose behind it was more diabolical than humanitarian. This pier opened a way for Israeli hostage rescue. In the course of this operation, the Israelis managed to rescue four hostages, kill three, massacre 274 Gazans, and leave another 700 wounded!
However that be, the war in Gaza is bound to be a turning point in world history at many levels. One of these is that the West will no longer be able to pull out the “Judeo-Christian values” mantra to stake any claim to a higher moral pedestal with the same ease, as they have been doing for the past 500 years. From now on, whenever they stake this claim, they will also be staking a claim to monumental hypocrisy in the same breath.
However, it would not do to close this piece without paying tribute to the American students who are protesting against the genocide in Gaza in their tens of thousands, at hundreds of US campuses, and bearing brutal police crackdowns every day. They are the ones in whom the real soul of the US is reflected, not in their government’s policies.
But irrespective of world opinion, there is no end of genocide in Gaza in sight because Hamas stands undefeated. Israel has no option left but to extend the war into southern Lebanon. This promises an even greater defeat of Israel at the hands of Hezbollah. Israel will be victorious in this fight only if it uses tactical nuclear weapons. Because it cannot afford to be defeated, it would be reasonable to assume that it will use these weapons. What this will mean for the world at large, is anyone’s guess.
saeedakhtarmalik85@gmail.com