Issam Younis
Al-Jazeera / July 24, 2024
The post-war global system set up to protect great powers’ interests has predictably failed. It is time for a new one.
The current state of the world is the tragic manifestation of history repeating itself, echoing the famous line, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
In 1919, at the end of World War I, the victorious powers – Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan – convened for the Paris Peace Conference, which produced the Treaty of Versailles and established the League of Nations, heralding a new era of international relations.
The latter’s primary objective, as outlined in its 26-article covenant, was to promote peace, prevent the recurrence of global conflict, and ensure collective security through negotiation and diplomacy.
The League of Nations operated through an executive council initially consisting of representatives of the four victors: Britain, France, Italy and Japan. Germany, which was defeated in the war, joined as a permanent member in 1926 but withdrew alongside Japan in 1933.
The League of Nations failed spectacularly in achieving its foundational goals, ultimately declaring its own demise on April 20, 1946. It proved incapable of resolving international issues or enforcing its authority over nations. For instance, it could not stop Japan from invading China’s Manchuria region in 1931 or prevent Italy from attacking Ethiopia in 1935. Most significantly, it could not avert the outbreak of World War II. It was too weak to contain growing and conflicting colonial interests.
Another set of victors in another world war held another assembly – this time in San Francisco on June 25-26, 1945. Here, they articulated their interests and enshrined them in practical and institutional terms once again, aiming to prevent a repeat of the horrors of World War II, which claimed the lives of 40 million civilians and 20 million military personnel, almost half of them in the Soviet Union.
Their goal was to ensure international peace and security and to foster cooperation among nations. The delegates adopted the United Nations Charter, establishing new rules for governing the post-war world.
The irony was that the same “civilized” victors who championed freedom and humanity in charting the new world order in San Francisco, were themselves occupying at that time half of the world, wreaking havoc in Algeria, India, Vietnam, Palestine and many other places. They made the charter from its inception a tool of new colonialism, protecting and defending their interests with extreme arrogance.
They demanded that other nations respect the charter according to their will, turning it into a selective yardstick imposed on peoples, liberation movements and states to measure their conduct in defending their interests, existence, sovereignty and rights.
Subsequently, the great powers would label at will smaller nations or popular movements as rogue entities and threats to peace and security or as upholders of these values. Then they would either send them to hell or heaven, to face military and “humanitarian” interventions and economic sanctions, or “stability” and “international cooperation”.
The ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip and the rest of the Palestinian territory reveals these existing flaws. At the time of writing this article, the number of martyrs killed by Israeli occupation forces in the Gaza Strip exceeded 38,000 Palestinians, more than half of them children and women. There were more than 80,000 injured.
Entire families have been obliterated by Israeli bombs. About 80 percent of the Gaza Strip’s neighbourhoods and homes have been destroyed, and nine out of 10 people in the Gaza Strip have been displaced from their homes more than once. We have reached a point where we measure time in corpses of children.
An article published by the prestigious medical journal The Lancet estimates that the actual death toll in Gaza could reach 186,000. These are deaths directly caused by the Israeli occupation forces’ use of indiscriminate bombing and shelling or indirectly through starvation, blocking supplies of medicine, destroying medical facilities, sewage plants, and drinking water stations and ensuring conditions for the spread of disease. This number constitutes 8 percent of the Strip’s population. This would be equivalent to the death of 27,000,000 Americans, 5,400,000 Britons, or 6,600,000 Germans.
This mass death is happening under the watchful eye of the “civilized” world, the victors of World War II who pledged never to repeat genocide or wars – those who dominate the UN Security Council.
It is imperative to stop burying our heads in the sand and to call things by their true names. At best, this is a conspiracy of dreadful silence, which in itself gives Israel a licence to kill; at worst, it is active participation and complicity through the continuous supply of weapons used by the occupying state to exterminate civilians.
All of this is happening with the justification of “Israel’s right to defend itself”. This is nothing short of an assassination of the truth. As philosopher Ahmed Barqawi says, those who assassinate the truth know it is the truth but deny it, distort it, or fabricate a contradictory, non-existent “truth”. The most dangerous aspect of this assassination of the truth is that it enables genocide and all other crimes committed in Palestine.
That the West is enabling genocide is unsurprising given the role its white supremacy has played in genocides across the world, including in Rwanda, Bosnia and against Jews across Europe. This sentiment of white superiority has fueled the most egregious violations of international law and the most heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Panama, Cuba and elsewhere.
In Palestine, too, white supremacy is leading the charge. Many in the Western world follow the writings of British-American historian Bernard Lewis, who saw the world divided between the “superior” Judeo-Christian culture that supposedly produces civilisation and rationality and the inferior one, the Eastern-Islamic one, which allegedly produces terrorism, destruction and backwardness.
This false dichotomy strips the people of the Islamic world and the East – old and young, men and women – of all human attributes, and reduces them to a “human surplus” and a “human burden”. This perspective explains the Western countries’ barbaric and complicit behaviour in the ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people.
Beyond exposing white supremacy, what is happening in Gaza also signals the degradation of a civilization that claims to uphold humanity, justice and reason. The failure to apply rules of justice and accountability confirms not only Western double standards and hypocrisy but also the decline of the order established by the World War II victors, as it is failing to stop bloodshed, genocide, injustice and exploitation in Palestine and the rest of the world.
Indeed, the post-World War II order, governed by narrow national interests, the monopolisation of decision-making, and the subjugation of smaller nations, has maintained neither security nor peace. Instead, it has contributed to the spread of wars, crimes, famine, poverty and racism to an unprecedented extent in human history, bringing the world to the brink of a global war that could leave massive devastation and death in its wake.
This declining system has prevented countries with significant civilizational weight and notable contributions to stability, peace and international cooperation, such as India, Egypt and Brazil, from becoming permanent members and playing a leading role in international affairs.
This declining system has deprived the diverse and changing world of its right to strive for a fairer, more balanced, and more reasonable order, governed by equitable relations that establish peace and international cooperation based on rejecting wars, occupations and exploitation, and respecting human dignity, human rights and justice.
This state of affairs has brought us to a dangerous crossroads: We either seek justice for all or succumb to the law of the jungle; we either establish cooperation based on equality, respect for sovereignty and the right to self-determination or fall for racial and cultural supremacy, injustice and exploitation.
Just as the League of Nations failed, the United Nations is also failing. The current situation necessitates a change in the global system to a more just one that accommodates everyone, treats nations as equals, maintains global peace and enhances international cooperation. It should seek to unite diverse cultures that enrich human life and existence, not divide us into good and evil cultures and encourage false existential conflicts.
Issam Younis – General Director of the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza
