Pro-Palestinian protestors gather outside of the New York Times building to protest the newspaper’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza on 11 December, 2023 in New York City (AFP)
Antonio Guterres, secretary general of the United Nations, is an unlikely revolutionary.
But the 73-year-old former Portuguese prime minister is on a mission to achieve the sort of change that Che Guevara only dreamt of: overturning the US-led world order.
Guterres did not mention US President Joe Biden by name in his electrifying opening speech at the Doha Forum last weekend. But he did not need to as he expressed his revulsion at the consequences of the US decision to veto last week’s ceasefire resolution.
“I urged the Security Council to press to avert a humanitarian catastrophe and I reiterated my appeal for a humanitarian ceasefire to be declared.” Translation: “If a genocide occurs in Gaza it’s on you, Joe Biden.”
Some are starting to call the US president “Genocide Joe“.
With at least 18,400 Palestinians already dead – more than twice the number who died in Srebrenica 28 years ago – this is not idle talk.
I am not a lawyer, but in October 800 experts in international law and conflict studies signed a public statement warning of the possibility of genocide being perpetrated by Israeli forces against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
They provided powerful evidence of the scale and virulence of Israeli attacks while adding that “language used by Israeli political and military figures appears to reproduce rhetoric and tropes associated with genocide and incitement to genocide.”
The situation has gotten even worse since.
Aiding and abetting genocide
If an international court confirms that provisional judgement, then President Biden will be found guilty of aiding and abetting a genocide, an infinitely more terrible crime than anything that has been levelled at Donald Trump.
No wonder Biden’s nerve cracked this week. He issued a belated warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Israel was losing support over what he very belatedly called Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing in Gaza.
Indiscriminate bombing is a war crime. One which has been carried out with wholehearted US support – and a constantly replenished supply of US munitions. It was impossible to miss the sense of disgust bordering on hostility towards the United States at the Doha Forum.
Even the foreign minister of normally loyal Jordan, Ayman Safadi, remarked that he was “extremely disappointed” by the US veto. He complained that Israel “feels it can get away with murder. One country is defying the whole world, and the whole world is unable to do anything about it”.
It’s the US which has given Israel the impunity Safadi talked of.
Everybody I spoke to in Doha agreed that the Americans can no longer be trusted to take the mediating role in handling peace talks, though there was no agreement of what or who would replace the US.
