The situation on the ground in Southwest Asia has dramatically worsened over the past few days. The Israeli forces have escalated their operations, bombing innocent Palestinian children and civilians under the protective umbrella provided by the US and the West as a whole. At the same time, fighting between Israel and Hezbollah intensified, with Israeli airstrikes deeper into southern Lebanon, and counter-attacks from the Hezbollah, while the US carried out a third air attack on alleged Iran-backed militia bases in Syria. If and when the conflict spreads to Iran, it will be too late to talk of a ceasefire, and perhaps even too late to stop a Global War.

The deliberate targeting of schools and hospitals by the Israelis on top of the ban on deliveries of fuel, food and vital medicine for weeks, has led to an outpouring of protest worldwide and the desperation of international aid agencies struggling to save lives. With 12,000 Palestinians reported dead, nearly half of them are children. UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres, who is certainly not one to be provocative, pointed out to Reuters on November 8, 2023 that “every year, the highest number of killings of children by any of the actors in all the conflicts that we witness is the maximum in the hundreds. We have in a few days in Gaza thousands and thousands of children killed”. While condemning the atrocious actions by the Palestinian Hamas Movement, he warned of the need to distinguish Hamas from the Palestinian people. If not, “I think it’s humanity itself that will lose its meaning”, he said.

Meanwhile, the ground and air assaults on Gaza’s hospitals have led the agencies charged with caring for the starving and the injured to cry out in despair. UNICEF stated on November 10 that the lives of the one million children in Gaza were “hanging by a thread…. Over the past 24-hours, medical care at Al-Rantisi and Al-Nasr children’s hospitals has reportedly almost ceased, with only a small generator powering the intensive care and neonatal intensive care units”.

The International Committee for the Red Cross announced on the same day that Gaza’s healthcare system “is over-stretched, running on thin supplies and increasingly unsafe”. It “has reached a point of no return risking the lives of thousands of wounded, sick and displaced people.”

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the UN Security Council on November 9 that “the health system is on its knees, with no medicine, no fuel”. Since the siege, only 600 trucks with aid have been allowed in, compared to 10,000 there would have been in the past. UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk spoke to reporters after visiting Egypt’s Rafah border crossing on November 8, stating: “In Rafah, I have witnessed the gates to a living nightmare.”

As heart-wrenching and stomach-turning as such a reality is, it is essential to avoid being carried away by one’s emotions, as the point was made at the most recent online discussion of the International Peace Coalition, which was co-founded by the Schiller Institute. It was scheduled to take place on November 10, which was the 264th birthday of Friedrich Schiller. Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in her remarks to the many peace activists participating, stressed that in such situations, it was important to step back, and reflect on a workable solution to the crisis and the means to bring it about. For that, one must rise to act on the level of the Sublime, as portrayed by Schiller in all his writings. “We need to recognise the humanity of all human beings in the world, and to act decisively,” she stressed.

Calls From Washington For A Ceasefire In Gaza
Clearly, the Joe Biden Administration is the one government in the world (outside of Netanyahu’s) that could move the most decisively to ensure a ceasefire in Gaza and put an end to the carnage. The Biden Administration has repeatedly refused to do so, completely blowing the cover off Western values and morality.

In the US at large, however, opposition to the policy is growing, notably including “non establishment” Jewish-American organisations. They have launched a Week of Action, using civil disobedience to demand a halt to Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza.

Within the administration as well, there is a lot of disagreement, although senior officials do not admit it openly. As CNN described it on November 8: “Angst, unease and outrage are spreading through corners of the Biden administration as Israeli forces show no signs of letting up their relentless attacks inside Gaza and the civilian death toll in the besieged enclave – already in the thousands – continues to climb.”

This is reflected in an open letter circulating among employees of the State Department’s US Agency for International Development (USAID), calling on the government to declare an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, which has gathered over 1,000 signatures. It states: “We believe that further catastrophic loss of human life can only be avoided if the US Government calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of Israeli hostages, and the restoration of water, food, fuel and electricity to the people of Gaza by the State of Israel… In the longer term, we call on the US Government to join the international community and Human Rights organisations in holding all parties, including the State of Israel, to international law, which includes ending Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and settlements on occupied land.”

From the US Congress, over 100 staffers stopped work on November 8 to hold a vigil for the 10,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza, and demand that, as reported by Common Dreams, “their bosses listen to constituents and support an immediate Gaza ceasefire”. Previously, an open letter dated October 19 and signed by hundreds of Muslim and Jewish congressional staffers had urged lawmakers to demand a ceasefire in Gaza.

From among their “bosses”, a resolution with the same demand has been co-sponsored by 17 Democrats in the House of Representatives, and 13 Senators have called for a “cessation of hostilities”. That is a very small percentage, but their number is expected to increase, as pressure from the voters grows.

As for the majority of Congressmen, after Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American Representative, severely criticised Benjamin Netanyahu’s war on Gaza. However, she was censured for “promoting false narratives”!

This article was first published in Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) Strategic Alert weekly newsletter (Volume 37, No. 46) on November 16, 2023.

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das