The Key to Freeing South-West Asia from the Stranglehold of Geopolitics

“Peace through Development for Israel and Palestine and all of South-West Asia”, centered on the Oasis Plan, was the theme of the highly successful online conference organized by the Schiller Institute on April 13, with speakers from five different continents. The first panel, reported on in last week’s issue, focused on the political and diplomatic aspects of the crisis (cf. SAS 16/24). The second panel took up the physical foundation for economic development, to show how a durable peace can be achieved through use of the most advanced technology and engineering methods to green the deserts of Southwest Asia.

The keynote speaker was Schiller Institute Science Advisor Jason Ross, who began with a quote from Albert Einstein: “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility….” He went on to develop three fundamental concepts which helped set the stage for what became a captivating panel dialogue:

1) Man, endowed with the power of creativity, is fundamentally good. And through human creativity, has the power to improve nature through scientific discovery and development of new technologies. He cited Lyndon LaRouche’s 1995 paper “What Is God, that Man Is in His Image,” where LaRouche says: “Each person is given the intellectual potential which no animal has, the power not only to imagine states of nature which have never before existed in the universe, but, under certain restrictions, to impose those ideas efficiently upon the universe generally.”

2) The “green,” environmentalist ideology is fundamentally evil, by its assertion that anything man does to transform nature is inherently bad.

3) The Oasis Plan, as the basis for peace through economic development, is rooted conceptually in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which brought the bloody Thirty Years’ War in Europe to an end. That treaty was crafted to create a lasting peace by promoting the “benefit of the other,” and foregoing all revenge. Ross, who used many illustrations throughout his address, showed a map of how border disputes in 17th-Century Europe were far more complicated than that of Palestine and Israel today.

The other experts on the panel included Dr. Pierre Berthelot, Associate Researcher at IPSE, director of the journal Orients Stratégiques, and member of the Académie de l’Eau in France; William DeOreo, hydrologist, President of AquaCraft, and proponent of nuclear desalination, based in Colorado, in the U.S.; and Dr. Kelvin Kemm, nuclear physicist and former Chairman of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation. Their ensuing presentations all reflected an optimism that the problems of this region could be solved with an Oasis Plan approach to transform and improve man’s living conditions. As Dr. Kemm said: “Over many centuries, if there’s one subject that has transcended political conflict, it’s been science.”

All the participants agreed that the problems in the region related to the acute lack of water must not become the seeds of ongoing and future conflicts. In concluding, Jason Ross underlined the importance of getting all those many people around the world now demanding a ceasefire, humanitarian aid for Gaza, and an end to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, to understand the importance of mobilizing for a concrete perspective of mutual economic and social development for all, such as a project like the Oasis Plan would allow. In fact, many speakers and attendees of the two panels are now commited to bringing this issue into the public debate.

The entire proceedings of the conference can be viewed here. Highlights of the different presentations are available in a one hour video here.