{"id":296484,"date":"2025-06-02T12:00:37","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T11:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=296484"},"modified":"2025-05-31T05:38:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-31T04:38:56","slug":"united-humanity-a-future-beyond-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/06\/united-humanity-a-future-beyond-war\/","title":{"rendered":"United Humanity: A Future beyond War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>28 May 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0The slaughter goes on, usually in the name of war, which reduces human life to, at best, a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians \u2013 dead children \u2013 are collateral damage, which means they\u2019re nothing at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How can we be more than just spectators as we learn, every day, more stunning details about the hell going on across the planet? How can the human race stand up collectively to the cancer of war? Humanity, in the name of nationalism, has essentially organized itself against itself: We\u2019ve declared one another \u201cthe enemy,\u201d which means that only some of us are human. The others are simply in the way.<\/p>\n

And nowhere, as we all know, is the news more hellish and shocking than the stories that emerge daily from Gaza, which continues to undergo, in full view on social media . . . genocide. It looks like this, according to CNN<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Alaa al-Najjar left her ten children at home on Friday when she went to work in the emergency room at the Nasser Medical Complex in southern Gaza.<\/p>\n

\u201cHours later, the bodies of seven children \u2013 most of them badly burned \u2013 arrived at the hospital, according to the Ministry of Health in Gaza. They were Dr. Najjar\u2019s own children, killed in an Israeli airstrike on her family\u2019s home. . . . The bodies of two more of her children \u2013 a 7-month-old and a 12-year-old who authorities presume to be dead \u2013 remain missing.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnly one of her ten children, 11-year-old Adam, survived. Dr. Najjar\u2019s husband Hamdi, himself a doctor, was also badly injured in the strike.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the context in which another piece of news emerges, an opposite event, a beam of light which, oh God, I pray represents the dawn of humanity\u2019s future: Veterans For Peace, along with 28 co-sponsoring organizations, has launched a 40-day fast calling for an end to Israel\u2019s genocidal war on, and starvation of, Gaza. Some of the participants gather daily in front of the United Nations headquarters in New York, aligning themselves \u2013 in all their vulnerable humanity \u2013 with the organization\u2019s founding purpose.<\/p>\n

A letter the fasters wrote to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres concludes: \u201cUppermost in our minds with this request to meet with you at your earliest convenience is the UN founding goal to save \u2018succeeding generations from the scourge of war.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

I quote these words not with a sense of \u201cyeah, yeah\u201d abstraction but rather because the writers are people like you and me, stepping out of their daily lives and into a determination to be part of, and help create, a world beyond war \u2013 beginning with an Israeli ceasefire and the salvation of Palestine, but hardly stopping there.<\/p>\n

To put it another way: The words attempt to link individuals with a global institution. What I hear in these words is the call for a collective, planetary effort to transcend war. This effort must include every single human on this planet, including you and me, and demands our participation and sacrifice, not simply our shrug of hope. I hear a call for the United Nations to reinvent itself as United Humanity. And thus the future emerges.<\/p>\n

One of the participants in the fast is my old friend Kathy Kelly. I talked to her on day six of the fast. Participants are limiting themselves to consuming 250 calories a day, she noted, which is about the amount Palestinians have available to them. Several hundred people are participating in the fast in New York, with more people, around 600 in total, throughout and beyond the United States. If you\u2019re interested in joining the effort, visit the websites of either Veterans for Peace<\/a> or Friends of Sabeel North America<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The fast is very much a public event, Kathy told me. On Memorial Day, for instance, a few days into the fast, they ceremonially honored not just veterans but some of the victims of the current genocide, bringing the al-Najjar family into public grief by reading the names of the children who were killed.<\/p>\n

Kathy gave me a list of their names and ages. I feel like they belong here: Yahya: 12 years old; Rakan: 10 years old;; Eve: 9 years old; Jubran: 8 years old; Ruslan: 7 years old\u2019 Reval: 5 years old; Sadin: 3 years old; Luqman: 2 years old; Sidra: 6 months old. Adam, age 11, the sole surviving child, was critically injured.<\/p>\n

Yeah, this is war. Its details matter. And as an American, I am complicit in the hell this country\u2019s militarism has wreaked throughout my lifetime: the collateral damage, the environmental damage, it has bequeathed Planet Earth, followed by nothing more than an indifferent, strategic shrug.<\/p>\n

So I feel compelled to return for a moment to Alaa al-Najjar, the doctor and mom who recently lost nine of her ten children, with her husband and last surviving child seriously injured. Her niece told CNN that \u201cDr. Alaa broke down when she showed the last bottle of breast milk she had expressed for her infant daughter, Sidra, whose body remains missing.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe told me today that her chest aches so much as she was breastfeeding, every day at work, Dr. Alaa pumped milk to provide for Sidra, and today she showed me the last bottle she prepared for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDr. Alaa can barely speak. If you could see her face, you would understand her pain. She is only praying for her son and husband to recover.\u201d<\/p>\n

And also, this: According to a fellow doctor at the hospital, Alaa al-Najjar has \u201ccontinued to work despite losing her children, while periodically checking on the condition of her husband and Adam.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is peace \u2013 this is love \u2013 standing in the aftermath of war, refusing to give up. I see hope for the future here. I see humanity\u2019s role model.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

28 May 2025\u00a0–\u00a0The slaughter goes on in the name of war, which reduces human life to a strategic abstraction. Dead civilians and children are collateral damage, which means they\u2019re nothing at all. How can we be more than just spectators as we learn stunning details about the hell across the planet?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":77939,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[307,688,126,481,75],"class_list":["post-296484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-humanity","tag-peace-journalism","tag-violence","tag-warfare","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296485,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296484\/revisions\/296485"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}