How to Get Aid to Victims of a Genocide
David Swanson / World BEYOND War
Remarks to Global Peace Summit’s Round Table Conference, October 3, 2024
(October 3, 2024) — One obvious step would be for the US government to restore funding of UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency). For five reasons.
- It’s pocket change compared to what the US is spending on militarism — not trillions or hundreds of billions but merely $100 million or so — (Note that the US military spent over $200 million on a public relations stunt of pretending it could build a port to deliver aid by sship to people its weapons and assistance were denying aid by land or air).
- Various Israeli officials have explicitly stated that they are trying to starve people.
- The excuse for cutting off the funding a year ago was one of numerous pieces of Israeli propaganda that ought not to have been grounds for cutting off anything if true and as far as anyone knows was made up like so much of the rest of it.
- UNRWA immediately fired the people accused and later fired more besides.
- All the other countries that had obeyed the sick Israeli-US demand have since restored funding.
But funding relief to people being bombed and shot and blockaded is of little value if it can’t get to them and if they’re still being killed. Months ago we saw stories of aid being dropped into the sea, resulting in drownings of desperate people trying to retrieve it — not to mention aid packages directly killing them by landing on them.
It’s also of little value if our governments engulf the world in a wider war.
What’s need is of course to stop sending the weapons. It seems very boring to keep saying that day after day forever and ever but that doesn’t make it untrue.
Beyond ceasing to send weapons we need a major shift of much more than a mere hundred million or two into actual aid from mass-murder aid or so-called military aid. We need hundreds of billions of dollars so redirected.
We need to try to persuade people to stop protesting having their money sent to supposedly help Israel and Ukraine rather than helping them in their country. This is not just selfish but doubly ridiculous because the money is not helping anyone as currently spent, and because it is so much money that it could be spent usefully and help everyone and leave piles behind we’d have a hard time figuring out what to do with.
Of course the Gaza aid flotilla and other efforts of people to send aid ought to be permitted to proceed, and governments ought to stop complying with US demands to uphold genocide.
Bigoted hatred toward refugees from the wars our governments create ought to be driven out of our governments, but people’s desire to remain where they are rather than be ethnically cleansed ought to be respected.
What’s needed globally is for the governments of the world to find the courage and decency to use the General Assembly to block weapons, sanction those shipping weapons, expel Israel from the United Nations which Israel condemns despite the immunity the UN grants to Israel, and send unarmed peacekeepers.
What’s needed where I am in the United States is to drop the charade of claiming to be acting by planning a vote in the Senate for weeks hence, after a US election, on whether to halt illegal arms shipments, and instead act now in both houses of Congress and the White House to uphold the rule of law before it is too late for humanity, not to mention the hapless Democrats October Surprising their sociopathic selves with World War III.
And we should be physically surrounding every government not embargoing arms and every complicit media outlet and every International Criminal Court not issuing those arrest warrants until those things happen.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include his latest: NATO What You Need to Know with Medea Benjamin. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and US Peace Prize recipient. Longer bio and photos and videos here. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook, and sign up for: Activist alerts or Articles.
