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The bombs that exploded in Iran are but echoes of bombs that fell on Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. It reveals a deeper malaise. It proves that science, by itself, cannot be a measure of human progress. The weapons of war are but science for domination.
By MOGAMAT REDERWAAN CRAAYENSTEIN
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight in January 2025. Their accompanying report identified key factors which bring humanity closer than ever to a catastrophe that could end human civilisation.
Climate change, nuclear war, the potential of biological science, and various emerging technologies. Added to this is the spread of misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories that blur the line between truth and falsehood and make it very hard to have any rational discussion and honest debate.
Even a single move of the clock towards midnight is an indication of extreme danger.
Nuclear war could destroy humanity. What is also at stake is, as in the case of Palestine, the future of the international order that aims to prevent the elimination of man by man through the use of nuclear weapons.
Herein lies the double standard at the heart of contemporary international relations. A country with nuclear weapons, that refuses to be part of the global atomic monitoring architecture and uses its undeclared atomic arsenal to pummel its neighbours into submission, attacks a country without nuclear weapons and is the most inspected atomic programme in history. One hundred and ninety-one countries have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel, India and Pakistan are not part of the NPT. North Korea withdrew in 2003.
This is the graveyard of the nuclear non-proliferation architecture and legislation. Israel is the principal exception to the NPT of 1968, which aims to prevent the spread of atomic weapons and promotes the use of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Once Israel is brought to comply with the NPT, then all the other states can be forced to comply.
There is the possibility of an atomic war anytime in the battle between Russia and Ukraine. Russia is facing an alliance of Western powers.
Israel is attacking Iran because the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Trump could not force Iran to comply with the irrational, illegal and illegitimate demands of Israel regarding Iranian nuclear capacity. It appears that some real estate lawyers and developers have a particular difficulty in negotiating international conflicts.
It is impossible to have a sensible discussion about anything that involves Israel. It commits a televised genocide, and the UN Security Council does not stop it. It has nuclear weapons and refuses to subject its nuclear programme to IAEA inspection, yet it accuses Iran of violating the NPT and Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), also known as the Iran nuclear deal.
Yet Israel’s nuclear weapons programme is the principal threat to peace in the Middle East. The fear that Iran could develop nuclear weapons is grounded in the fact of the undeclared, yet well-known, Israeli nuclear weapons programme.
The NPT is suffering the fate of international law, international humanitarian law, covenants, conventions, and international human rights law. Israel is the undertaker of all these disasters.
Israel’s behaviour in bombing Iran shows that it sees itself as an exception to international laws, covenants and conventions that relate to anything and everything. If Israel is being singled out, then it is because of its doings. Israel uses four-letter swearwords when it comes to the architecture of international norms. It is a rogue state.
In the region, Israel believes that it can get away with attacking any of its neighbours. It fears no retaliation from any of the Arab states or regional allies of the Palestinians because it has regional nuclear weapons hegemony.
It is odd that whilst Iran does not have nuclear weapons and has called for a Middle East free from nuclear weapons, it is singled out as the actor in bad faith.
The double standard to which Israel is held in comparison with Iran is grounded in the geopolitical fact that Israel does what the USA and its allies would have to do themselves, but do not have the means. They arm Israel, give it economic, military and diplomatic support to do what they would otherwise have to do themselves.
One cannot talk about the attack by a nuclear-armed Israel on a non-nuclear-armed Iran without taking account of the broader political, military and geostrategic context of the Middle East.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran marked a significant shift in the Middle East’s geopolitics. It caused a major setback for the architecture of American control, which was based on Tel Aviv, Tehran and Riyadh. Iran and Saudi Arabia provided the oil, and Israel provided the muscle to defend the flow of oil. In this way, America controlled the destiny of the world. The Islamic Revolution upset that racket.
There was a 1980 coup in Turkey. The CIA did not directly sponsor the coup, but the USA knew the officers involved very well. After all, these people were trained in the USA since 1950. The USA agreed with this coup because it prevented the Islamic Revolution from spreading northwards through the Iranian and Kurdish areas to Turkey.
The eight-year war started by Iraq was to prevent the spread of the Islamic Revolution to the west, towards Syria and Saudi Arabia.
The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was significantly motivated by a fear that the Islamic Revolution could spread to the Muslim-majority southern republics of the USSR.
The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979 led to significant changes in the exercise of imperial power by the United States and the Soviet Union. That pressure has continued unabated for 40 years from the USA and its allies. Today, Russia is a close enough ally of Iran.
After 9/11 in 2001, US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, devised a plan to attack seven Muslim-majority countries in a five-year period: Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Libya and Sudan. Look at the map of the Middle East and see. It might have taken longer than five years, but each of these countries has been attacked and destabilised. Only Iran still stands, and it does not bow or comply.
It might be helpful to note that had the Islamic Revolution not taken place in Iran in 1979, Palestine would have been wiped off the map a long time ago. Iran made the liberation of Palestine a core foreign policy issue. It was not only talking about it but also helped Palestinians to build their capacity to free themselves. A precondition for wiping Palestine off the map is the destruction of Iran.
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The arc of history is long and bends towards justice. That arc does not bend by itself. I read somewhere that when one sees something that is wrong, one must change it with one’s hand (take action); if one cannot do that, then speak out against it. If that cannot be done, then pray in one’s heart against it. However, the latter is the weakest response.
I also read that there are perpetrators, victims and bystanders. In this case, the perpetrators are clear. The victims are clear. The question is, what type of bystanders are we? Indifference is not an option. For Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that his reading of the prophets of Jerusalem is that to be indifferent to evil is worse than evil itself. Israel is the embodiment of evil. We must stand up for justice, even if it is against our interests. Even the interests of the Muslim sectarians are acknowledged. Stand up for justice even if it is against your aqidah. Some of these sectarians would rather choose Israel than a Muslim who has a different aqidah.
By bearing witness against the evil of Israel, the routines of its rogue status, we make the world a better and more beautiful place.
Let the so-called promise of God to the Jewish people not be an alibi for our conscience. Israel is bombing Iran today because the world has failed to stop its genocide aimed at wiping Palestine off the map. Israel is waging another war because the world has not stood up for peace. Good and evil that are as clear as day and night are blurred in the eyes of permanent members of the UN Security Council. In the world in which we live, Thrasymachus is correct. Might is right. Greed and hatred are strident in the world today.
We have seen that this attack on Iran is not a surprise. It is but an instantiation of a moral collapse in the form of Zionism and imperialism. To speak of peace, compassion, love, and justice is often seen as a sign of weakness. The bombs that exploded in Iran are but echoes of bombs that fell on Palestine, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. It reveals a deeper malaise. It proves that science, by itself, cannot be a measure of human progress. The weapons of war are but science for domination. Our parliaments are not arenas for public debate but theatres of hypocrisy. The interfaith community that includes Zionists is an excuse for bad faith, causing prophets of Jerusalem to turn in their graves.
Among Muslims, we have sectarians who celebrate the bombing of Iran more than the Zionists in Tel Aviv. To the Sunni sectarian and the Zionist warmongers, we remind them that somewhere we read that every human being is sacred and to kill one innocent person is to destroy the whole of humanity. This is the depth of this moral and spiritual collapse.
We no longer hold on to sanctity but accept what we can get away with. Might is right. Power replaces love and compassion.
What can a Palestinian mother in Gaza think when her whole family is on their last breaths, having been blown to bits in a refugee and displaced person’s tent? What faith could that mother have for the civilised world? Would it have been incorrect for that mother to express her disgust at all of us who are not doing enough to end the genocide? And I heard that mother whisper that she hopes that the martyrdom of herself and her family will speak on a day when they cannot speak for themselves. I also heard her whisper that although she is disgusted at the so-called civilised world, she wants justice not only for herself and her family but for everyone, everywhere. For all a Palestinian she had earned that justice is indivisible. An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. That is why Israel is getting away with bombing Iran. They bomb Iran because they are getting away with bombing Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Fighter jets, tanks, missiles and drones cannot save Israel. The killing of people in every neighbouring country will only buy Israel time. The individuals who pull the trigger often exhibit spiritual and moral darkness. Israeli Zionists are indifferent to the crimes that they commit against others. Their souls are in the pits of hell.
Our task as solidarity activists is to rescue the human beings who are caught in the pits of hell in our time.
We have to let a sense of sanctity into our everyday lives. Human beings are great not when we exercise brute force, but when we are kind, compassionate, and loving to those who are different from us in class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and national origin. Oh yes, the Muslim sectarians should be kind to those from different mathabs and aqidahs as well. Man either behaves in the best of manner, consistent with being in the image of God, or man is in the image of an animal. I heard the son say, ‘Who let the dogs out?’ I also heard, ‘Who let the Zionists out/.’
When will the voices of people on the receiving end of beastly Zionist warfare reach the hearts of people in power? The world is either an altar for the service of God and the oppressed, or it is an altar for Satan and brute force. There is no halfway house. Integrity requires that we either oppose Israel and its allies who are using brute force to impose a racist, Zionist and imperialist agenda or we are indifferent and complicit with them.
By speaking out today, we can prevent Zionism and imperialism from becoming the blasphemies, shirk and kufr of our time. The Zionists and their imperialist enablers have shown that they are the great evils of our time. Let us take a stand as best we can to show that we can be great, too. We can be witnesses for truth, right, compassion, equality and love. There will be resistance to the Zionists and imperialists, and without resistance, nothing changes. We who stand afar can help by dreaming and building a world where evil, corruption and brute force are not given centre-stage. We should not spend our time celebrating trivial sectarian interests.
The world does not exist so that greed, evil and corruption can run wild. We either save ourselves and the world by taking a stand, or we join in self-destruction by being indifferent.
To be human is to live with both vertical and horizontal responsibilities. Israel is showing that it has severed the sanctity of its vertical accountability. Its horizontal responsibilities are bloody and evil.
We have a choice to make. Like we made choices during the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa. Rabbi Heschel said, ‘Some are guilty, but all are responsible.’ We can see the guilt of the Zionists and imperialists. However, we are responsible for helping to end their rapacious and murderous behaviours.
Even though they have sacrificed their humanity at the altar of greed and power, we have to keep track of the debris of their humanity. We must not do to them what they are doing to others. Every human being is created in the image of God. Every life is sacred. The killing of one innocent person is the killing of all of humanity. An injustice anywhere poses an existential threat to justice everywhere.
The Doomsday Clock is at 89 seconds to midnight. Let us work to undo the moral and spiritual collapse that underpins the horrors of Zionism and imperialism with an urgency that the attacks on people and countries demand. We have no time to waste. But let us also work as if there is no Doomsday Clock. We can leave the world in a better state than today. That is something our children deserve.
Today is more than the genocide in Palestine or the attacks on Iran. It is about the question of what it means to be human in a time of genocide and Zionist and imperialist war.
