US Vetoes Ceasefire: Israel Asserts the Ultimate Right To Extinguish a People

From Afghanistan to Gaza: The Absurdity of American “Moral Clarity”

The US has vetoed a draft resolution at the UN Security Council calling for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza.

The US, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, is the sole nation to vote against a ceasefire in Palestine. The UK abstained in the vote.

This means that the resolution has failed. In reply, the US declared: that an unconditional ceasefire’ is unrealistic and two-state solution is needed.

The US representative told the Security Council that “no country could or should tolerate what Hamas did on 7 October”.
“If any of our own countries had been attacked in this way, we would all expect this council to reaffirm our rights to protect our citizens,” he says.

He adds that the most unrealistic part of the resolution is its call for an “unconditional ceasefire”.

He says this would “simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on 7 October”.

“This resolution essentially says that Israel should just tolerate this, that it should allow this terror to go unchecked.”
He calls this stance “a recipe for disaster, for Israel, for the Palestinians, and for the entire region.”

The US representative then reiterated what President Joe Biden has previously said on the matter, that a two-state solution is the only way to achieve lasting peace.

This staggering hypocrisy oozes from an America that splattered Afghan villages with high explosives for 20 futile years. Even as the Taliban’s resurgence exposes the utter futility of that blood-soaked escapade, Washington preaches at others about “rights to self-defence.”

Perhaps the architects of America’s trillion-dollar Afghan debacle might exhibit some humility before demanding more human sacrifice at the altar of this slaughter. But humility requires wisdom – a quality conspicuously absent among those for whom Muslim lives remain cheap and expendable.

The staggering scale of waste and slaughter across Afghanistan elicits no retrospection – no reckoning with the vanity of attempting to bomb a people into acceptance of foreign domination or Western conceptions of order.

What lessons were learned by America destroying tens of thousands of Afghan lives and livelihoods, ripping bodies apart in the name of advancing civilizational values it failed to uphold even at home. Yet still, its appointed representatives sermonise of “restraint” and “de-escalation” while gazing callously upon Gaza’s charnel house – an urban cage violated by aerial munitions paid for by U.S. largesse.

Perhaps if the graves of Afghanistan held over 100 thousand American corpses rather than Afghan ones, the preaching would not flow so freely. But the underlying supremacist assumption remains unchanged since the days of “little brown brothers” in the Philippines: indigenous lives extinguished are simply of lesser worth, their voices unworthy of even basic hearing.

So let Washington indulge its smug sermons while its Israeli client razes hospitals and smothers civilians in rubble. But in demanding “more death for Gaza,” it forfeits all claims to moral stewardship among civilized peoples.

The US veto and UK abstention amounts to a passive nod of approval as women, children, and other innocents are corralled into an ever-tightening vice of violence. Israel’s talk of “surgical strikes” would be darkly laughable were bodies not piling so high that even the most cynical mask slips to reveal raw compulsions of dominance through destruction.

Among those detained today in the Beit Lahiya identified so far: 3 elderly including Khalil, Rafiq, and Mohammad Al-Kahlout (65, 60, 57); UNRWA school director Darwish Al-Gharbawi, 48; UN employee Ahmad Akram Labad, 56; & two children 15-year-olds, Mohammad and Yousuf. pic.twitter.com/Z7UNlqs424

— Lema (@Lemapal) December 7, 2023

All the demagoguery about Hamas cannot sanitise the reality – this is the methodical strangulation of nearly two million civilians. It is collective punishment outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, enforced through ruthless siege warfare and air assaults on one of earth’s most densely packed urban terrains. The result can only be catastrophe rippling outward in trauma, radicalisation, and further conflict. Israel’s actions serve no plausible aim beyond obliterating the civic foundations of Palestinian life altogether.

Yet self-declared bastions of Western civilization avert their gaze, mouthing bromides about “restraint” and “de-escalation” while hospitals run out of basic supplies and warnings sound of imminent societal collapse. America subsidises the weapons raining fire from the skies even as it pleads impotence – the epitome of the white supremacist assumption that Palestinian lives simply matter less.

Gaza’s health system is on its knees, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Friday, calling for a ceasefire “now”.

“The situation is becoming more and more terrible by the day… literally beyond imaginable,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva.

“Children and people begging and crying for water, we are at a stage where the most common, most basic supplies are no longer accessible.”

“Civilization is on the verge of collapse,” he warned.

Israeli soldiers, supported by airstrikes, engaged Hamas fighters on Thursday in Khan Younis, the largest city in south Gaza. It has become the epicentre of the war, along with neighbouring Jabaliya.

Gaza’s death toll rose to 17,177 people on Thursday, 70% of whom are women and children, according to Palestinian authorities.

This is not “war” in any recognisable sense. It is domination so absolute that not even basic appeals to humanity can impede its progress. If the proud democracies arrayed behind Israel retain any shred of moral clarity or courage, they must cease all military aid that facilitates these atrocities.

Israel is not defending its “right to exist” but rather asserting the right to deny such existence to another people. The time for unwavering solidarity in the face of such institutionalised oppression has long since passed.

Gaza’s charnel house – an urban cage now trampled by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War, Conquest and Death have already taken obscene toll, and Famine fast approaches on their heels. Soon Pestilence too shall emerge to ravage a population deprived of rudimentary healthcare by blockade and bombardment.

The voices that might awaken political leaders from their moral slumber have been choked into silence. But the cause of justice for Gaza must not fade; it falls once more to people of conscience to take to the streets and renew resistance against the silencing tide.

Mere decades ago, global outcry helped dismantle apartheid in one land; the time has come to end this new Nakba which need not be named to be recognised in the trampled dignity of a people facing erasure. Politicians have shown for too long they lack the courage required; only unrelenting public pressure focused globally can shake the status quo and interrupt the death spiral.

It is time for a new generation to pick up freedom’s torch where it has fallen amidst Gaza’s rubble. The past has shown the power of moral clarity mobilised against injustice; it must be so again until the siege lifts and the bombs cease to fall.