Between July 8 and10, Western military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) held a summit to mark the 75 years of its founding in 1949. Despite that’s its founding mission of confronting the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) has largely disappeared with the collapse of the USSR, the alliance still waxes strong as it finds new adversaries.
Its Washington summit, where it all began 75 years ago, was high on intense sabre-rattling and extreme belligerence especially directed at its current and foremost strategic adversary, the Russian Federation. It claimed Russia’s military operation against Ukraine was an aimless and provocative wandering of an aggressor, despite an unwritten rule among great powers, that none shall seek or aim to foster a puppet state within the neighbourhood of the other.
The former Soviet Union learnt this rule the hard way when it secretly deployed nuclear capable missiles in Cuba, just about 70 kilometres to the USA in the 1960s. Washington set out its right to bring the world to ruins if the missiles were not withdrawn, and even the pledge that Cuba was a sovereign nation, with rights according to international law to choose its own partners and host whatever it wishes on its territory, was a non-starter that Washington would not countenance. More than five decades later, Washington and her military alliance members, claimed that Ukraine, located in the strategic neighbourhood of the Russia Federation could join the alliance and host its arsenals, pointing directly and menacingly at Moscow, without consequences.
In its summit declaration, it declared that “every nation has the right to choose its own security arrangement….” And also “reaffirm our commitment to NATO’s open door policy in line with articles 10 of the Washington Treaty.”
However, the conflict in Ukraine was the fulcrum of the alliance 75th anniversary. The “Washington Summit Declaration”, mentioned Ukraine 51 times, reaffirming “our unwavering solidarity with Ukraine” giving muscle to its earlier pledge to help Ukraine inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.
But NATO, the western military alliance with claims to commitment to values of human rights, democracy and sovereign rights of peoples to live in dignity, has not one word to the brutal genocide that Israel enforces in Gaza, a Palestinian enclave of 2.3 million people.
Nearly 40,000 Palestinians, mostly children, women and elderly have been brutally massacred, with no single building, a worship place, school, hospital, market left standing. Yet the Palestinian people have no formal army, air force or navy which makes them the most defenceless people on the face of the earth. Unborn babies ripped off their mother’s womb by Israeli relentless bombing, young men summarily executed in their hospital beds, the carnage in Gaza largely executed with weapons furnished by the Washington-led NATO alliance members could not find a word in their summit declaration of 38 point plus six-point annex devoted exclusively to Ukraine.
Neither a call for restraint, ceasefire or even a humanitarian lull in the ongoing onslaught against the Palestinians could be found in NATO’s Summit declaration. NATO, an alliance of selective humanism is utterly bereft of humanity and its audacity to invoke universal human values is a violent, bloody lie. The 32 Euro-Atlantic nations boast endlessly of cultivating mankind’s most cherished universal values of human rights and democracy but could maintain silence in the face of the world’s most brutal onslaught against a defenceless people, makes its complicity even more louder.
With impunity and arrogance, NATO summiteers’ wagered fingers at China, calling Beijing a “decisive enabler of Russia’s war” in Ukraine, despite that not a single ammunition or any piece of military equipment has been found in the battle field with a trace to Beijing.
On the other hand, it is rather NATO and its foremost cheer leader, the United States that is the “decisive enabler” of Israel’s war of genocide in Gaza, against a defenceless people without any formal military.
NATO’s selective humanity that blinds the alliance to the ongoing carnage in Gaza leaves it naked in the market place of global public opinion. How does Ukraine have the right to defend itself but a people displaced from their home for more than six decades, have no right to lay claim to any piece of their former homeland as home, where they can live in peace and pursue their national aspiration.
In weapons supplies, political and diplomatic support, economic life-lines, NATO is Israel’s most decisive enabler and therefore NATO is compellingly complicit in the crimes in Gaza.
Despite that it did not occur in a vacuum, the attack on Israel by the armed resistant wing of the Palestinian group HAMAS, on October 7th was widely condemned.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel prime minister who has built a career as “Mr. Security” for guaranteeing security to Israelis even as that has come at the expense of massive crackdown on Palestinians, launched a brutal vendetta, driven by rage. Having declared his intention to eradicate HAMAS, the Israeli regime unleashed an unprecedented military campaign that is less of a war but a callous murdering spree. The United States of America and her allies in NATO, turning logic and common sense on its head, called the Israeli actions, defensive and Washington has repeatedly claimed Israel’s right to defend herself. Israel with the strongest army in the region threw its entire military might against a people who have no standing army. As an urban guerrilla, the HAMAS resistance force has no more effective or viable military strategy than to hide within the civilian population and around civilian infrastructure. And it is common sense that the HAMAS fighters would not need permission from the civilian population to either hide among them or use civilian infrastructure.
Israel has been totally indiscriminate in the mass killing of Palestinians and it is obvious that all 2.3 million Gaza residents would not have been HAMAS supporters. If Israel only aims to eradicate HAMAS, its actions so far have been to eradicate the entire Palestinians and it has no less a supporter in the horrendous enterprise than the United States and its allies.
At the 75th anniversary summit, the 32 nation military behemoth which has doled out over $300 billion to Ukraine in combined military, economic and humanitarian aid could not muster a single word for the most defenceless people in the world, currently under the most brutal military assault perpetrated by one of the world’s most armed state.
Non-Euro-Atlantic peoples and nations in the world do not need any further to take serious the empty slogans of democracy, human rights and universal values by the West. The United Kingdom (UK), complicit in the historical travails of the Palestinians along with other members of the Western alliance has maintained a deafening silence on the ongoing tragedies of the Palestinian people.
The NATO 75th anniversary summit in Washington has shown the true colour, the true face of the West that their civilization and values, far from been universal is an exclusionist, ideologically narrow and race-tinted world view.
For now, Israel is on the loose and totally unhinged, murdering Palestinians in their numbers with approval from those who urged one of the world’s strongest armies to “defend itself” against the world’s most defenceless people. It’s, anniversary summit in Washington is another reminder of the root of all the world troubles, reaffirming eloquently that it’s NATO against the world.
•Onunaiju contributes from Abuja.
