As many of you know at TRANSCEND Media Service, individual members of the Editorial Group write their opinion editorials. Unlike mainstream editorial practices whereby a group of editors on the board process the draft together, in tone, choice of words, etc., we at TRANSCEND honour intellectual independence of each member who signs up for particular dates, picks his or her topics of choice relevant to peace, or lack thereof.

In the face of the very real possibility of a world war wherein nuclear sable-rattling gets louder by the day, I have started to feel unbearably light and insignificant in seeking to uphold professional conventions of how to do things, what language and tone are appropriate in our articulations.

What has profoundly unsettled me these days is not simply the absence of peace as such, but that our world is already in “the early days of the Third World War”, as warned by Jeffrey Sachs, the staunchly anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist American Jewish scholar at Columbia University.

To be sure, I am not giving into my own creeping sense of despair.    For despair is not an option for anyone who engages in any type of activism – for peace, social justice, liberation, what have you.

Still, I start to feel the gravity of the climate of pervasive uncertainty and, yes, the ever-increasing grave risks to life on earth as we know it.

Beyond petroleum prices at our pumps and the expected $150.00 per barrel of the crude oil, (from the current price tag of $80.00), we need to be concerned about the gathering clouds of the US-Israel-generated clouds of a world war.

Yesterday it was 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza scores of whom were slaughtered and starved to death, or incinerated in their barren tents, daily.

Today it is the toxic black rain falling on the 12-million residents of Tehran under daily US-Israeli’s joint bombardments since 28 February.

Who amongst us can guarantee that we won’t wake up to the thermonuclear clouds at 5,000 degrees in centigrade?

Against this chilling scenario, perhaps even more seriously, as a member of a global intelligentsia, that is, professionals with a deep sense of moral obligations to the wider community of fellow humans worldwide, I start to question what I do as a matter of vocation: read, study, think, observe, write, and join any collective actions such as street protests, signing petitions, and speaking out.

I am not alone in feeling doubtful about my own craft and its impact or meaning.

Amidst the ongoing genocide of his fellow Palestinians in Gaza, a young Palestinian, a citizen of 1948 Israel, studying law for his undergraduate degree in law at a premier Israeli university, dropped out.   His scholar-turned-Knesset legislator father told me that it was a complete disconnect between law as an intellectual concept and a governing tool and the savage realities 7-million Palestinians live in........

© Eurasia Review