100 leading figures call for ending 'selective' deployment of global values

Over 100 intellectuals, professors, religious leaders, laureates and artists have come together to warn that the ongoing atrocities in Gaza pose a moral challenge for the entire world.

The public figures said the current situation in the occupied territory “exposed that our world suffers grave inconsistencies, a compounded moral crisis, an intractable values’ dilemma, and misleading media practices.” While warning of “the consequences to global peace and peoples’ interests when international conventions, legislation, international law, and international humanitarian law are selectively suspended or not enacted.”

This comes as Israel continues its genocidal bombing campaign on Gaza, which it launched on 7 October, and has refused to stop in spite of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) calling on it to ensure genocidal actions are not carried out by its forces.

The ceclaration affirmed that, “support for the military occupation, policies of oppression and persecution, campaigns of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and war crimes, through narratives that claim to stand for ethics, principles, and humanity are in fact a deceptive framing that employs a moral, principle-based, and humanitarian slogan as a tool for murder, suppression, and confiscation of rights.”

We reject the disregarding of heinous crimes against humanity that the people of Gaza are being subjected to which are akin to genocide and ethnic cleansing.

“The horrific aggression currently being committed against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip has eroded the trust of numerous peoples throughout the world regarding the sincerity of the international order, the work of the International Criminal Court, and in the efficacy of values, principles, conventions, and slogans in real life,” they added, while warning: “A world which makes a deliberate decision to employ its values, principles, and conventions in a selective manner, through which human lives, rights, freedoms, and dignity are unequal, is a prejudiced one that will plant the seeds of anger in generations that realise the gap between noble slogans and horrific practices.”

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The Global Declaration encouraged pioneers of philosophy, thought, culture, literature, and art, as well as leaders of religious and social communities to “embrace their principled and ethical role of ensuring people are granted their equal rights, justice, freedom, and human dignity in Palestine and around the world, and in standing firm against injustice, oppression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and racist policies.”

“The voice of the human conscience must bravely echo loud before it is too late, as crimes against humanity violate all of humanity, not merely its direct victims in Palestine whose right to life, safety, security, freedom, and dignity are currently being stripped.”

The Global Declaration, published on 15 January, has been signed by dignitaries from many countries around the world, including former state leaders, government officials and ministers, as well as winners of prominent international awards, Muslim jurists, church heads, intellectuals, writers and artists.

The Declaration was published in English, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Turkish and Bosnian/Serbo-Croatian.

To date, at least 26,422 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and 65,087 others injured as a result of Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health. A further  362 Palestinians have been killed, including 92 children, across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as a result of increased violence and oppression at the hands of occupation forces and illegal settlers, according to UN OCHA.