The ubiquitous calls for a ceasefire in Palestine miss the mark.  What is required is the fulfillment of the promises hastily made at Nuremberg following the second war to end all wars as victors vengeance disguised as justice took its toll and a promise was made: “Never Again!”  A promise which immediately proved impossible to keep as the most prominent of the Nazi’s victims, those whose vengeance was extracted at Nuremberg, almost immediately became the victimizers, exalting in the memories of the fate of ancient Jericho and seeking to duplicate it in Palestine. 

What is needed is accountability and implementation of the rules of law established as res gestae at Nuremberg.  Mass murder seeking genocide and ethnic cleansing, crimes of lesse humanidad, must be punished and the appropriate punishment was established at Nuremberg.  Mass murderers, whether few or many, must be held to account, whether directly involved, as in the case of Israel (and other countries), or indirectly as in the NATO countries that supply and resupply Israel with the means to engage in the mass slaughter of innocents in clear violation of International Law, of Humanitarian Law, of the laws regulating what is prohibited in armed conflicts or during occupations, even if the occupation is three quarters of a century old. 

A cease fire is not enough.

The Palestinian State already recognized by civilized countries, one within the borders established by the United Nations in 1948, or at least those existing before the “Six Day War”, must be universally recognized and protected, and such Palestinian State must be sovereign and independent, free to ally itself with whomever it will, but subject to the res gestae that purportedly governs us all.   

And the Palestinian dead and maimed during the past quarter century deserve the same memorialization as do the victims of Nazi concentration camps, gas chambers and crematoriums, as do the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  And the Palestinian State and the descendants of the Palestinian dead and maimed deserve reparations in the hundreds of billions of dollars from Israel and those NATO countries that enable Israeli crimes of lesse humanidad. 

It is time to take the promises made following the second war to end all wars seriously, and to shun all those that refuse to do so in every way possible.  The BDS movement is not enough.  Remember, as the justices at Nuremberg proclaimed (albeit hypocritically, no allied personnel engaged in comparable crimes were judged): “following orders is no defense”, and as they should have added, “voting to elect those who facilitate crimes of lesse humanidad, anywhere, is no better”.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2023; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen).  Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales.  He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review, available at Substack.com, a commentator on Radio Guasca FM, and an occasional contributor to the regional magazine, el Observador.  He has academic degrees in political science (the Citadel), law (St. John’s University), international legal studies (New York University) and translation and linguistic studies (the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies).  However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta and cosmogony.  He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.