By GILBERTO LOPES*
The United States is well aware that it is violating the United Nations Charter and international law.
Genocide as policy
“Genocide as Colonial Suppression” is the title of the devastating report by Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. It was presented to the General Assembly on October 28.
The following day, the General Assembly would once again discuss genocide when it began the debate on the impact of the blockade that the United States has maintained against Cuba for more than six decades. It was the 32nd time that the issue had been voted on.
For Cuba's Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodríguez, the United States' economic, financial and commercial blockade against his country qualifies as another genocide.
The United States is well aware that it is violating the United Nations Charter and international law with these measures, which, according to the Cuban government, have resulted in losses of 5,0568 billion between March 2023 and February 2024 alone.
The destruction of the enemy
George Kennan (1904-2005), a notable American diplomat, was a prolific writer. In “Around the Cragged Hill”, a book about his personal views on philosophy and politics, he deals with various aspects of the world he lived in. Among them, the relationship between foreign policy and the military.
He discusses the idea of total destruction of the enemy, the military's objective of war. Kennan argues that destruction alone is not in keeping with this idea. He thinks that the objective of war should be something else. It is not about causing maximum destruction of the enemy, but about changing his policies, his way of thinking.
If that is the aim, then it is not a question of causing maximum damage, but of causing minimum damage. “We all live in the same world; and if the aim of war is not genocide (and who can conceive of that being the aim, the West?, he asks), then the purpose of any military conflict is not so much to destroy the enemy militarily, but to change his attitude.”
The West after Kennan (or Human Misery as Politics)
Kennan was the architect of the policy of containment of the Soviet Union, in a famous article – “The Sources of Soviet Conducts” – published in July 1947, under the pseudonym “X”.
This was certainly his greatest success as a diplomat. He was much less fortunate later, when he began to reconsider his views on the USSR, NATO, Ukraine and the Baltic countries' relationship with Russia. In his book, he laments that he was rarely heard, despite the many recognitions he received.
The “West” is not willing to listen to Kennan’s recommendations. His view of the “West” and genocide seems naive today.
“Genocide must be considered an essential and decisive component of Israel’s goal of completely colonizing Palestinian land, expelling as many Palestinians as possible”… “in a process of territorial expansion and ethnic cleansing lasting decades and with the aim of annihilating the Palestinian presence in Palestine,” Albanese states in his report on the situation in Gaza.
One cannot read the report (at least I cannot) without a mixture of feelings that end up being summed up in a deep indignation against the levels of human misery that the Israeli government has reached and that Albanese's report exposes with lucidity and courage.
“…Israel’s overall conduct after October 7 caused severe psychological harm to all Palestinians, both the direct victims and those who witnessed it from exile.
“The overall objective is to humiliate and degrade the Palestinians as a whole.”
“Prisoners are stripped naked and cruelly tortured en masse; the bodies of adults and children are piled up and left to decompose in the street; survivors are forced to eat animal feed and grass and drink seawater or even sewage; thousands of people are mutilated, including small children who are left without limbs before they can even crawl; homes are destroyed and private lives are violated; and there is absolutely nothing to return to.”
This is not a recent policy, but a systematic one. “The disturbing frequency and cruelty of the killings of people whose status is known to be civilians is indicative of the systematic nature of an intent to destroy. Six-year-old Hind Rajab was shot 355 times after he spent hours begging for help; Muhammed Bhar, who had Down syndrome, died from a dog attack; Atta Ibrahim Al-Muqaid, a deaf elderly man, was executed in his home, and his killer and other soldiers later bragged about it on social media; several premature babies were deliberately abandoned in the intensive care unit of Al-Nasr Hospital, where they died a slow death and their remains decomposed…”
Stories that are hard to imagine. We are far from Kennan’s dream, or from a war of self-defense, an anti-terrorist struggle with which the Israeli government seeks to justify genocide. “It is well established that Israel cannot invoke self-defense against the population under its occupation. The occupying power must protect, not attack, the occupied people,” the report says.
The Israeli army has made Gaza uninhabitable for human beings. “When the dust settles in Gaza, the full extent of the horror that the Palestinians have experienced will be known,” says Albanese. So it seems only fair that another general should force the citizens of Israel to see the destruction caused by his army in Palestine. Just as, some 60 years ago, another general forced the German people to see what his army had done to the Jews.
Increasingly to the right
No one can say that they did not know what was happening. And that this was already announced after the results of the elections of November 1, 2022 and the formation of the new Israeli government, the most extremist, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, accused of genocide by the International Criminal Court.
A UN report published on September 20 denounced what it described as an “unparalleled exodus in recent years” in the West Bank, where Israeli settlers were violently evicting Palestinians from their land. In an editorial on October 5, the newspaper Haaretz denounced that in the West Bank “the government of Nathanyahu was violating the law”.
The aim of expanding the settlements, considered illegal under international law and also under Israeli law, is part of a political priority of the current government, which aims at the permanent occupation of the West Bank or its annexation.
Allied with the ultra-Orthodox and religious nationalism, two men represent with particular cruelty the extremist orientation of the new government.
Living in Givat Haavot, a settlement nestled in the heart of Hebron, Itamar Ben Gvir, the minister of national security, “is an unrepentant activist who multiplies provocations by parading through the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem and appearing alongside Jewish self-defense militias,” says Alain Dieckhoff, research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France’s leading scientific research institution.
The other is Bezalel Smotrich, leader of the Religious Zionist Party. “His life is totally identified with Jewish colonization,” says Dieckhoff. Appointed finance minister, with specific responsibilities in the civil administration of the West Bank, he has been responsible for promoting the expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian lands.
rogue states
After the results of the last election, US President Joe Biden called Netanyahu to tell him that his commitment to Israel was “unquestionable”. “Congratulations, my friend,” he said.
As we have already noted, the day after the presentation of Albanese's report on Palestine, the General Assembly discussed the consequences of the US blockade of Cuba.
For the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), the United States' sanctions policy impedes Cuban development and harms the well-being of its population. CELAC rejected the application of laws and measures contrary to international law adopted by Washington, such as the Helms-Burton Act, including its extraterritorial effects, as well as the increasing persecution of Cuba's international financial transactions.
The permanent representative of the Mexican delegation to the UN, Héctor Vasconcelos, and the Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mauro Vieira, spoke out against the embargo. Vieira called on the United States to remove Cuba from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism and to promote a constructive dialogue based on mutual respect and non-interference.
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez has called the economic blockade a genocide. From October 18 to 23, Cuba suffered a nationwide blackout. Hospitals operated under emergency conditions, schools and universities suspended classes, and the economy ground to a halt.
The main cause of the failure of the national electrical system was the lack of fuel that affected generation, associated with the precarious state of the plants. “Both are direct consequences of the extreme economic warfare measures applied by the US government since 2019,” specifically designed to prevent the supply of fuel and parts for its plants,” added the Cuban foreign minister.
The International Criminal Court has recognized Israel’s scorched earth policy in Gaza as genocide. A crime that, according to Cuba’s foreign minister, is also committed by the United States with its blockade policy against his country. On October 30, the General Assembly condemned this violation of the UN Charter by the United States, by a vote of 187 to two. None of this will be respected by the current US administration, nor by the one that will replace it next January. Neither the genocide in Gaza will cease, nor the occupation of the West Bank, nor will there be respect for international law.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the two countries – the US and Israel – voted together – and alone – against condemning the US blockade, disregarding the unanimous will of the world.
*Gilberto Lopes is a journalist, PhD in Society and Cultural Studies from the Universidad de Costa Rica (UCR). Author, among other books, of Political crisis of the modern world (uruk).
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
To read the first article in the series click on https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/a-desordem-do-mundo/
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