Articles
A Call to Western Intellectuals Subject: The Humanitarian Tragedy in Gaza Prof. Walid Abdulhay
Prof. Walid Abdulhay
A Call to Western Intellectuals
Subject: The Humanitarian Tragedy in Gaza
Prof. Walid Abdulhay
Ladies and Gentlemen,
For nearly two years, Israel has been committing a crime of genocide, documented by the International Court of Justice. The International Criminal Court has also established the responsibility of its Prime Minister and Defense Minister for this genocide. This is not separate from the fact that Israel received 154 condemnations from the United Nations General Assembly and 108 condemnations from the International Commission on Human Rights between 2006 and 2024, compared to 71 and 74 condemnations it adopted against the rest of the world, respectively.
We have learned from your thinkers and philosophers that you consider freedom and adherence to the rules of international law, especially human rights, to be the foundation of human development. However, the support of most of your countries for Israel, and the subservience of a significant percentage of your elites to Israeli pressure groups, has made anyone who admires your theoretical intellectual model question this schizophrenia in Western behavior. The other dichotomy is that your institutions take strict measures against any country whose behavior you condemn, especially if it is a developing country, but you do not go beyond “regret or quiet rebuke” when Israel commits any act that violates international values and norms.
This means that you do not establish international dialogue or cooperation, and you treat the writings of Socrates, Voltaire, Stuart Mill, and the literature of Shakespeare, etc., as mental exercises rather than practical behavior. This only reinforces the feeling among the rest of the world’s population that you are “delusional” about being the leaders of humanity, when in fact you are merely the leaders of material production.
Your suspicious silence about the killing, destruction, starvation, the spread of disease, and the relentless arrests taking place in Gaza is an indication of the beginning of the loss of any respect you have enjoyed until now. I call on you to stand together in support of this clearly oppressed people. I call on you to respect the decisions of the international institutions you pioneered, and to abandon the example of Shylock, who sought to repay his debt from the flesh of the indebted merchant, as Shakespeare said. I call on you to stand together to stop the genocide, lift the siege, and implement a ceasefire.
