We are blindly and irresponsibly hurtling towards war in Europe and around the world. The dramatic scenarios that are taking shape would require a general reflection and an effort of political coolness on the part of the national leadership aimed at defusing an arms race which unfortunately appears to be anything but theoretical.
The Polish Prime Minister Tusk said it (“The scenario of a European war is real”), the recent European Council established it, which concluded with a call to arms to the countries of the Union to strengthen the cash allocations and supply them again and again of weapons in the arsenals, in view of a head-on clash with Russia in Europe.
From America, Trump promises, if he is president, to cut off all support in arms and money to the allies of the Old Continent. “Make do,” is his mantra. Europeans take note. And they obey.
War propaganda, widely supported by compliant analysts and commentators, leverages the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine to sweep any possibility of negotiation off the table. It pushes for more military aid to Zelenski's country, which no longer has any chance of winning this war – serious analysts more or less explicitly agree on this point – but can at most trust in a diplomatic solution that freezes the territorial gains acquired by Russia from 2014 to today (primarily Crimea) in exchange for the international guarantee on defense against further Russian encroachment into the territory governed by Kiev.
Unfortunately, no one wants to offer that guarantee and the decision was made to include Ukraine in the EU (as if Hungary and other similar democracies that regularly cause the mechanisms of common solidarity to seize up). There is even a prospect of Ukraine joining NATO, which is precisely the eventuality that Putin decided to avoid by initiating the aggression of February 24, 2022.
Diplomacy is silent and weapons sing, in a bloodbath (half a million victims on both fronts) which has caused the destruction of infrastructure and civilian settlements in eastern Ukraine. And millions of refugees.
The arms manufacturers are celebrating, as they make monstrous profits that are destined to increase thanks to the Gaza war front. Even in the Middle East the word remains on arms. The United States is demonstrating its political and diplomatic weakness towards its historic ally.
Netanyahu is completely deaf to Biden's jarring jeremiads, who for months have been calling for civilian lives to be spared. We are over thirty thousand dead in the Strip and it is difficult to believe that they are all ferocious Hamas militants… It is no longer even necessary to retrace the stages that in 75 years have led to the ineradicable gangrene of the war between Israel and the Palestinians.
It is useless to distribute blame and merit, History speaks clearly to anyone who wants to question it. Today the only thing that matters is to stop the massacre, which increasingly resembles a genocide, and to remove the levers of power from the hands of the Israeli ruling class – a mix of armed Zionism, religious intransigence and biblical spirit of revenge.
I observe with horror that a people who suffered the planned extermination of the Shoah are partly (not all Israelis are with Netanyahu, on the contrary) insensitive to the atrocious suffering inflicted by the Israeli army on huge masses of civilians, mostly children.
Perhaps a Palestinian child killed by Tsahal bombs is worth less than a Jewish child massacred in the kibbutzim by Hamas butchers? I can't give myself an explanation, that's it.
With Netanyau, a peaceful resolution of the conflict is politically impossible. We are well beyond the biblical “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” and the fanatical claim of the Israeli government to eradicate Hamas at the root, destroying it man after man, is clearly unrealistic.
Hamas is a bunch of criminals who lead a just liberation struggle by making innocent and defenseless Palestinian civilians pay. The leaders of Hamas direct the resistance in the safety of Qatar and the militias that Israel massacres by bombing the hospitals where they have cowardly taken refuge, hospitals however which also host thousands and thousands of civilians. Even if they were swept away, they would be reborn in the hands and hearts of young Palestinian males who survived the war in the Strip.
It is not difficult to understand, an inhabitant of Gaza (40% are under 16 years old) will not forget and will find a way to arm themselves and resume the armed struggle against the Jews (they do not make a difference between Jews and Israelis, I do) and the bloodbath will continue for decades to come. By inflaming not only the Gaza Strip (destined to become a garrisoned Israeli protectorate, suggests Tel Aviv Defense Minister Gallant) into an enclave garrisoned by an inter-Arab force. Which is equivalent to saying: you are the police but the owners of Gaza (and what remains of the population) will be us Israelis.
My conscience rebels. I open the door to my refrigerator which is overflowing with food of all kinds and I feel ashamed. I think of the children of Gaza, the women and the elderly who have never taken up a weapon against Israel nor do they know a single Hamas militant. They are dying of hunger and thirst, of untreated diseases due to lack of hospital facilities (almost all razed to the ground) and of medicines. Isn't this genocide?
Netanyahu will go all the way and perhaps open a second war front in the North, attacking Southern Lebanon, the stronghold of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. It would be the perfect spark to trigger the general conflagration.
It must be stopped before it is too late, before the population of Gaza is exterminated or reduced to a state of irredeemable slavery. As? To begin with, by ceasing to supply Israel with weapons and money, which America has so far refused to do.
Biden is fearful, a hesitant king who would like to keep everything together: the status of US global policeman and respect for minorities, without losing Israel's sympathy. Thus he risks losing the domestic support of university students and Islamic minorities and of the more liberal part of the democratic party. Handing America over to the deranged and sovereignist leadership of Donald Trump.
At this rate the November elections will turn into an ordeal and whoever emerges victorious will have to administer a world on the brink of war or already with their boots in the trenches. May God help us.
#Europe #blindly #running #war
