Anti-war

For the past month, the news in Israel/Palestine has been filled with reports of more and more people killed, the vast majority of them Palestinians. As much of Israeli society is swept up in the fever of the most recent war on Gaza, there are those voices that refuse to accept a present, or future, filled with violence, occupation, fear and hostility. One of those voices belongs to Udi Segal, a 19-year-old Israeli from Kibbutz Tuval, who was sent to jail on Monday for refusing to enlist in the Israeli military.

One of the main reasons that so many millions of basically good and decent people at first volunteered, and then complied with being conscripted, to take part in one of the greatest mass abominations in human history, known as the First World War, was ignorance.

World history is filled with empires, e.g. the Roman and Byzantine empires, the European colonial empires, various ancient Iranian empires, the Arab Caliphate and Ottoman Empire, the Soviet Union to name a few. These historic empires have one thing in common: they no longer exist. As the lifecycle of empire wanes, rather than being a benefit to the home country, sustaining empire becomes more expensive than it is worth.

I just read a piece by the antiwar activist and writer David Swanson who I usually find to be quite right-on. But his recent piece left me scratching my head. What was Swanson smoking when he wrote “The Palestinian Right and the American Left”?

On Friday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered in front of the building which houses Canada’s state media, the CBC. An article in the CBC of the same day explains why the people of Halifax were disgusted; its subtitle quotes United States president Barack Obama: “’No nation should accept rockets fired into its borders,’ Obama says of Israel’s ground push.”

Wars of aggression are ripping the planet apart from one end to the other. Nuclear weapons are on the table. A politically self-anointed elite believe they are about to squash the last few remaining independent states. When their New World Order reaches lockdown, freedom will have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

Israel is waging a war, and it has been ever since European Jews entered Palestine and began a campaign to denationalize Mandate Palestine. The continuing siege, occupation, dispossession, and annexation of Palestine are crystal clear examples of the state of war.

In this latest assault on Gaza, Israel had by Thursday already killed 69 Palestinians including 22 children and 13 women, plus 469 wounded including 166 children and 85 women, and 70 houses destroyed.

Celebrations will be coming up to “celebrate” the Fourth of July across the USA the fourth day of this month with bands playing, militarism glorified and implicitly the imperialism never mentioned at such parades. What’s wrong with this picture? Everything!

The United Nations is far from perfect, but it’s real and suggests an embryonic solution to most of the planet’s worst problems.