Panel 1 • 11:00 a.m. • Creating the Conditions for Dialogue, Security, Peace, and Development in Southwest Asia

Moderator: Dennis Speed, Schiller Institute

• Schiller Institute Founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche

• H.E. Prof. Dr. Manuel Hassassian, Palestinian Ambassador to Denmark

• H.E. Mounir Anastas, Palestinian Ambassador to UNESCO

• H.E. Beryl Rose Sisulu,  Ambassador of the Republic of South Africa to Mexico

• H.E. Donald Ramotar, Former President of Guyana

• Connie Rahakundini Bakrie, Lecturer, strategic analyst (Indonesia)

• H.E. Pavel Shidlovsky, Chargé d'Affaires of Belarus to the U.S. 

• Prof. Georgy Toloraya, Director, Russian National Committee for BRICS Research

• … and more

Panel 2 • 2:30 pm • The Oasis Plan, The Physical Foundation for Economic Development of Southwest Asia

Moderator: Stephan Ossenkopp, Schiller Institute

• Jason Ross, Schiller Institute Science Advisor

• Ilya Andreev, First Secretary, Expert in Humanitarian Affairs, Russian Federation Mission to the United Nations

• Dr. Pierre Berthelot, Associate Researcher at IPSE, member of the Académie de l’Eau and director of the journal Orients Stratégiques

• Dr. Kelvin Kemm, nuclear physicist, former Chairman, South African Nuclear Energy Corporation

• … and more, including a U.S. hydrologist and proponent of nuclear desalination

On February 18, The LaRouche Organization released a 14-minute video entitled, "The Oasis Plan: LaRouche's Solution for the Middle East."

"The whole world is witness to the horrors being inflicted upon the Palestinian people, shared with us every day in video form," opens the video. "But the destruction continues, actively supported by the United States and a diminishing number of other countries. Humanity’s moral fitness to survive is being tested. The horror show must end, starting with an immediate, unconditional ceasefire." This must be accompanied by a massive flow of humanitarian assistance to Gaza, and work towards a political solution to the crisis, including the existence and full international recognition of a sovereign Palestinian state.

"But without economic development," the video states, "without a viable and meaningful path of progress into the future, political agreements in themselves are unsustainable. The people of the region must know that their children will enjoy a better future, a better life. Peace through economic development is the only successful basis for a lasting, just peace in the region. This is what Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin came to realize — there is no purely military basis for peace or security; development is essential."

How can the Israelis and Palestinians ever make peace after what has happened? Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and international leader of the Schiller Institute, emphasizes that we cannot solve this conflict, or any conflict, by remaining on the level of the conflict. Using a concept from Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464) called the coincidence of opposites, she urges us to rise above the level of despair, hatred and vengeance, to find a common interest in increasing the welfare of all the people through economic development of the region as a whole.  

We urgently need an inspiring vision of a future in which the Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side. "Peace through development" is the name of the concept Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) and his co-thinkers have proposed since 1975, and not only here, in the form of the Oasis Plan, but for the whole world in the form of the World Land-Bridge.

The Oasis Plan focused primarily on addressing the greatest barrier to development in the region — the shortage of fresh water — through the construction of a network of desalination plants, ideally nuclear powered, that could turn the plentiful seawater into freshwater. And these plants would not only be on the Mediterranean coast; they would be built along two new canals: one connecting the Red Sea with the Dead Sea, and another connecting the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean.

By cooperating to fight the desert, rather than each other, the people of the region will better be able to recognize the humanity in each other, the common capability of human beings to discover principles of nature and to transform our relationship to the environment around us.

There are no human animals.

The Oasis Plan is not only for Israel and Palestine, and the neighboring countries, but the whole Southwest Asia region, including war-torn Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.  And it will only come about by rejecting geopolitics, and starting to build a new paradigm of international relations – a new security and development architecture.

Many speak about the day after. But the only way to get there is to give people hope right now. Now, it is urgent that the future vision of the Oasis Plan be known, developed, and supported, in order to chart a course out of death and destruction, towards mutually beneficial cooperation among sovereign nations.

As Helga Zepp-LaRouche said in a webcast on March 6, 2024, "You have to have hope! You have to give young people some perspective of having a decent future, where they can raise families, where they can have a normal life of studying, of doing useful things with their lives. Because if you don’t put this on the agenda, what will happen is that even if you get some kind of a partial solution or a ceasefire, but you don’t have a perspective of hope, you will have new waves of conflict, of terrorism, of all kinds of even war. So, are we the intelligent species, or not? And that is the real question...."

"But I think if we all mobilize," she continued, "if we would get some countries, some heads of state, some former heads of state, some Nobel Prize winners, or any combination of really top religious leaders, to come out and say: the only way is peace through development, the new name for peace is development, and here is the Oasis Plan which can do it, that would inspire everybody. It would inspire the people in the region, it would inspire the neighboring countries, it would really—and I have thought about it a lot and the proposal made by my late husband Lyndon LaRouche, already in 1975, it’s still the only way to get peace in the Middle East!"

The memory of those who have perished, and to give hope to the living, demands that we summon the courage to make peace through development.

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