by EIR staff
Sept. 18—The 172nd consecutive weekly meeting of the International Peace Coalition (IPC) began with remarks by Dennis Small, IPC co-moderator and Ibero-American Editor for the Executive Intelligence Review. Small emphasized that U.S. President Donald Trump, despite his bluster, is not the “master of his fate.” At this point, with the closure of both the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the world is headed for an enormous economic shock, which Trump is powerless to prevent. He has failed to thwart the BRICS and the shift toward a multipolar world, as the world could see at the recent BRICS conference in New Delhi, India. Trump has announced that the United States has stationed weapons in space, and that the U.S. is discussing the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons, because he still hopes to intimidate the rest of the world.
Omer Bartov, Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University, reported that genocide, like war, has been used as “the continuation of politics by other means.” He cited historical examples where the perpetrators of genocides were able to achieve their policy goals. Since opposition to genocide was codified in 1948, there was a deterrent of sorts, but the impunity with which Israel is carrying out its genocide in Gaza threatens to take us back to the world as it was before the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). In the case of the Palestinians, both Hamas and the Israeli regime-initiated violence in order to accomplish specific objectives, and both have been successful, but at a price. Hamas drew global attention to the plight of the Palestinians, at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. The Israeli regime hopes to provoke another Intifada in the West Bank, which would serve as a pretext for another genocide there, to hasten the ethnic cleansing and annexation.
Harley Schlanger, President of The LaRouche Organization, praised Bartov’s presentation and his recent book, Israel: What Went Wrong? Schlanger discussed the topic of Israel’s postponed constitution, which was superseded in 2018 by the “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People,” which effectively institutionalized apartheid, as is described in Bartov’s book. Schlanger proposed that rather than focusing on disincentives such as sanctions to change Israeli behavior, the world should promote positive incentives such as Lyndon LaRouche’s Oasis Plan, which would benefit both sides of the conflict.
Jonathan Kuttab is a Palestinian-American Christian who is Executive Director of the Friends of Sabeel North America, and also Co-Founder of Nonviolence International. He expressed his appreciation for the ongoing IPC meetings, and praised the diverse and global nature of their participants. He then moved on to the topic of genocide denial in the case of Gaza. He said that the most difficult thing to prove in legal proceedings of genocide was intent, but Israel has made its intent extremely easy to demonstrate and document. Westerners who deny the genocide are doing so to hide their own culpability. Israel’s impunity threatens to normalize genocide, a return, as Prof. Bartov warns, to the world as it was before the Genocide Convention. What is particularly shocking is the attacks on the international courts and on international law itself.
In response, Bartov debunked the “two-state solution,” charging that “the idea of two separate states with a wall between them is a fantasy.” He praised an organization called “A Land for All,” which promotes a plan which envisions two sovereign states—Israel and Palestine—within a single shared homeland, linked by open borders and shared institutions rather than strict separation. He said that it was difficult for many people to come to terms with the fact that Israel, which presented itself to the world as a refuge for victims of the Holocaust, could now be perpetrating a holocaust of its own, but because Israel “overplayed its hand” and pushed its impunity too far, the eyes of the world have been opened.
Dennis Small addressed the issue of denial, saying that people are unwilling to face the truth because they have no solution, and consequently reality is too painful. He said that the worst damage is to those who tolerate the genocide, more so than to the actual victims. He contrasted the benevolent image of man found in China’s Confucianism with the bestial image found in Thomas Hobbes and his “war of each against all.” He also reminded the participants that Zionism was in large part a project of the British Empire.
Beatriz Bissio is an Associate Professor at the Post-Graduate Program of Comparative History, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She described her previous career as a journalist with a publication called Third World Notebooks, during which she extensively covered Palestinian issues and interviewed the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization Yasser Arafat. She then moved to the subject of the recent BRICS conference, which was by no means guaranteed to succeed, particularly because of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s friendly relations with Israel. Despite this, the meeting was a major success. The meeting between Modi and China’s President Xi Jinping was particularly important, producing the memorable comment, “We are partners, and not rivals.” The conference on the whole, while not unanimous on all controversial issues, was characterized by “diplomacy, dialogue and the patient construction of consensus.” She said that this conference allows her to be optimistic, despite the cruel realities which are addressed in the IPC’s series of meetings, and cited the 1955 Bandung Conference, a landmark meeting of 29 Asian and African nations which laid the foundation for the BRICS, who are the “inheritors of Bandung.”
Discussion
In response to a questioner who asked why the Arab states do not come to the aid of the Palestinians, Kuttab said that the Arab nations are not democracies and they are not responsive to the wishes of their populations, plus they are afraid of the Israelis. Schlanger came in to point out that Iran is an exception, which is the reason that a war was launched against it.
A German woman said that Germany had a special responsibility to oppose today’s genocide in Gaza, since it was guilty of genocide itself under the Nazis. She thanked Schlanger for bringing up the British role, and also called attention to the importance of the controversy surrounding the American rap star Macklemore, who came under attack for supporting Palestine on stage. She described his official statement as “beautiful.”
Ulf Sandmark, head of the Schiller Institute in Sweden, gave a report on the situation there, and the interventions being carried out by his organization, which are helping to build an anti-war coalition among the opposition parties.
Small returned to the topic of the Anglo-American desperation to preserve their “unipolar world,” including the intention to use nuclear weapons. He described Israel as a “stick of dynamite” that could be detonated and discarded, also in the pursuit of the unipolar dream.
A journalist asked Kuttab to explain the “slavish devotion” of American politicians to the Israeli regime. He described it as something intended to serve broader interests, and said that these politicians would happily “throw Israel under the bus” if it seemed advantageous. But, he said, there is a shift in the United States, especially among young people, and Jewish people who no longer feel comfortable with what Israel is doing. He predicted that the U.S. will eventually remove the “umbrella of impunity,” and Israel must come to terms with that.
Schlanger returned to the importance of the IPC process to help people get “outside the axiomatic structure of their thinking,” to overcome the brainwashing to which they are subjected in the legacy media. He described the day’s meeting as a thorough discussion which “takes up these questions at the root.”
