I woke up with a song in my head this morning. I think I must’ve made it up because I’ve never heard it before. Here are the lyrics:
There’s nothing this world can do to you
When you are in your grave...
The lyrics were in stark contrast to the tune, which was jaunty and uplifting. I have no idea what it was about. I’ve been thinking about WWIII. I’m not the only one. I expect the vast majority of people on Earth are worried about the future right now, wondering what will happen next.
Human beings are amazing. We can do the most extraordinary things. We can splice genes. We can send men and women into space. We can live outside the Earth’s atmosphere for months on end. We can explore the vastness of the oceans. We can peer into the depths of time and space. We can split the atom. We can control nature. The only thing we can’t control is ourselves.
This is what is so frustrating. How many people were involved in the decision to bomb the nuclear facilities in Iran? A dozen maybe. Trump. A couple of his advisors. The Director of the CIA. The Director of National Intelligence. The Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces. Netanyahu. Maybe one or two other members of the Israeli cabinet. I can’t think of anyone else. And yet these few deranged old monsters have put the whole world at risk, all eight billion of us.
The idea that we live in anything resembling a democracy is a joke. The American people voted for Trump on the basis that he promised not to get them involved in any more Middle Eastern wars. He promised that regime change was no longer on the cards. And yet, here he is, threatening regime change. Just like in Afghanistan. Just like in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
A quick reminder: it took 20 years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with the Taliban; Iraq is ruled by its Shi’ite majority and is now allied to Iran; Libya is a failed state overrun by war lords; Syria’s ruled by terrorists. How did those exercises in nation building go towards making the world a safer place, I wonder?
Meanwhile, according to a recent report, the population of Gaza has dropped from 2.2 million to 1.85 million, meaning that as many as 377,000 people may have gone missing. The figure is disputed, of course, but is consistent with a Lancet report of July 2024 which suggested a death toll of 186,000 at that time. According to Wikipedia, the current estimate for the population of Gaza is 2.1 million, a six percent drop, which amounts to around 132,000 dead.
However you look at it, the death toll in Gaza is likely to be far greater than the currently published figure of approaching 56,000, with 131,000 wounded. Tens of thousands of people may lie under the rubble, rotting away, bodies smashed to a bloody pulp. I suspect this could in part explain Israel’s attack upon Iran. It has to keep escalating the war in order to buy time to cover its tracks. The entire leadership of Israel is under investigation for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Whenever I bring this subject up at Splice Today, I get asked the same question. Why doesn’t Hamas free the hostages? The war would finish immediately if they did. This is true. But it’s also true that the war would finish immediately if Israel withdrew from the occupied territories and gave permission for an international peacekeeping force to take their place. They won’t do this because that would allow the rest of the world access to the scene of the crime, would permit us all to bear witness to the horrors that’ve been inflicted upon the Palestinian people for the last 20 months.
This isn’t to speak of the psychological harm. Every human being is a world unto themselves. Try to imagine, if you can, what it must feel like to be a child growing up amidst such scenes of desolation, not knowing if today will be your last, with little or nothing to eat, with no clean water to bathe in or to drink, knowing nothing but death and destruction, with no home, no safety or security, no school, no playtime, no family. Over 39,000 children have lost one or both parents. There are more child amputees than anywhere else on the planet: perhaps the greatest number of child amputees per head of population than there have ever been in the entire history of the world. Many of them had their limbs removed without anaesthetic, due to the ongoing blockade which allows virtually no medicine to enter.
Such trauma, on an almost unimaginable scale. And if you find it hard to picture what it might feel like as a child, imagine yourself as a parent, unable to provide for your child, to find them a safe place to live or security or a roof over their head, unable, even, to feed them, not knowing if any of them will be alive tomorrow. The sight of distraught fathers running through the rubble, carrying the limp, lifeless remains of their offspring, haunts my Twitter feed; the sight of mother’s wailing over tiny bodies wrapped in shrouds; the sight of charred cadavers with blackened skin and unrecognisable features. I can’t bear to look any more. Do you remember the 40 beheaded babies of October 7th, 2023? That was a lie, but it was used to justify the thousands of beheaded children that have resulted from this obscenity ever since.
I refuse to call it a war. It’s not a war. Wars involve armies facing off against each other on the battlefield. But there’s no army in Gaza: only the IDF killing women and children, refugees huddled in their tents, or families lined up waiting for aid. The Palestinians have no army, no tanks, no heavy weaponry, no air force, no navy, no command and control, no supply chain, no logistics, no satellite surveillance, no targeting systems, no AI: nothing but small arms and tunnels, and their own fragile bodies, facing off against the fourth most powerful army in the world.
America was in on this crime, right from the beginning. It has supplied the ordnance and the munitions, the funding and the intelligence, the backup to ethnic cleansing and genocide. Now it’s allowed itself to be dragged into a wider war, taking on Iran, which is allied to China, Russia, North Korea and Pakistan, all nuclear-armed states.
What is certain is that Iran will respond. They are bound to, both legally and morally. They’re within their rights under International Law, which specifies self-defence as the exception to the general prohibition on the use of force. Iran was attacked and now has the right to defend itself.
The great irony is that we’re repeatedly being told that Israel “has the right to defend itself,” even while it is launching pre-emptive strikes against its neighbors. Another term for “pre-emptive strike” is “unprovoked attack.’ If Russia invades its neighbors it’s called an unprovoked attack. If Israel invades its neighbors it’s called a pre-emptive strike. But whatever name you give to it, it amounts to the Crime of Aggression under International Law, “the supreme international crime,” as defined by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, “differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The United States has now joined Israel in its reckless abandon of all international norms, attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, making the world a much more dangerous place.
What’s also very likely is that Iran will pitch headlong towards the creation of a nuclear bomb. Why shouldn’t it? It’s obvious that the only thing that will allow a country to protect itself is the possession of nuclear weapons. The Iranians have no reason to want to talk, having been duped at the last talks, which appear to have been used as cover even as the attack was being planned. As the Iranian foreign minister said over the weekend, the attack was “an outrageous, grave and unprecedented violation of the fundamental principles of the charter of the United Nations and International Law.” The victim isn’t only Iran’s nuclear program but also what remains of the so-called international rules-based order. It’s become abundantly clear—if it wasn’t already—that the only rule in the rules-based order is that the US and Israel can do what they like.