Discover more from Carl Beijer
You may have noticed that this blog was recently unavailable for a few days and that it is currently not at its usual URL, carlbeijer.com. I had hoped to wait until these technical problems were resolved to resume normal posting at the usual place, but my old domain registrar has warned me that it may take a few days to get this sorted, and I don’t think this can wait.
Israel has warned the United Nations that the Palestinians who live in northern Gaza have 24 hours to leave. This is genocide. It is impossible to evacuate over a million people in a day. Everyone knows this, including the UN, which said in a statement that “The United Nations considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” No one is even pretending that anything more than a tiny fraction of these people are combatants, and in fact half of them are children. What Israel is doing is in direct violation of international law and of the most basic moral intuitions that define human civilization. Even if one were to hold Palestinian civilians — some of the most powerless and impoverished people on earth — responsible for the course of this war, the catastrophe at hand would be several orders of magnitude beyond any semblance of proportional justice. This is genocide, and history will judge us for it.
The UN’s sudden relevance in this dark hour is a critical reminder of what we always forget until it is too late: we will only bring an end to war through the sovereignty of the international community. This means first and foremost enforcing a rule of law that sanctifies human life and places those of us who do not wish to fight beyond the reach of those who do. No one nation has the power or the moral authority to do this; it can only work if we subordinate national interests to the common good. I cannot shy from calling for a global socialist state right now because we see so clearly what is at stake. The world does not want this to happen. We should be able to stop it.