A ceasefire is imperative

Israel’s refusal to call a halt to the assault on Gaza despite a UN Security Council resolution for an immediate ceasefire does not behove a country that has benefited from the UN from the get-go. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have not understood the extent to which he and his country have lost support in the international community. The resolution, adopted by 14 of the member-countries on March 25, saw the 15th member, the United States, abstaining for the first time on a vote against Israel, showing how far its principal benefactor has moved from its own position on October 7 last year when the hostilities began with Hamas’ violent attacks inside Israel and Netanyahu’s pledge to retaliate and finish off Hamas. It is significant that the resolution was tabled by the 10 non-permanent members of the Security Council and that none of the Permanent 5 used their veto. This moment of Israel’s complete isolation did not happen overnight. Over the last two or three months, the US and some other western nations, notably France, have been pushing Israel for a ceasefire, and have been warning Netanyahu against a planned assault on Rafah, a small area on the Egyptian border to which a million Palestinians from Gaza have fled. Western nations are under pressure from their own anti-war publics. And in all of the global south, India is possibly the only country in which a Hindutva-radicalised section of the public wants Israel to continue to wage war on the Palestinians of Gaza even as thousands of civilians have been killed. President Joe Biden, who is running for re-election later this year, has realised that he will lose committed Democrats who have been vocal against the war. An abstention is certainly not the same as a vote for the ceasefire, but the message from the US is clear. 

Israel’s relentless retaliation has killed more than 30,000 people, most of them children and women. A UN report submitted to the Human Rights Council earlier this week found that Israel, by the “overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted”, has crossed the threshold on five of the seven indicators of genocide. Israel has rejected the report as it has the call for ceasefire, too, but it damages itself in the process. The universal recognition of the Holocaust as the defining moment of the last century at which criminal cruelty towards fellow humans reached a zenith under Nazism, changed the way in which people defined universal human rights and liberties. Only Israel can ensure that its war on Gaza does not become a similar defining moment of cruelty of man against fellow human beings in the 21st century.