“I find it rather difficult to make it clear to my children why we are not eligible, for from one point of view it isn’t quite clear to me.” (X, “The Jew and the Club,” The Atlantic, October 1924.)
It must surely make certain ethnic and religious groups reflect, notably those languishing in minority status for decades, if not centuries. There was a time when the rental advertisements in London had such caustic couplings as “Irish and Blacks need not apply.” Oxbridge bursaries and scholarships, in all their variety, reveal a tapestry of personal prejudice and lively bigotry. In terms of recreational clubs, the east coast, moneyed establishment in the United States prided itself from keeping Jews out of the membership circle, notably in such mind destroying facilities as golfing establishments. The wall was impervious, idiotic, resistant.
The United Nations, yet another, albeit larger club, functions on similar principles. Do you have the right credentials to natter, moan and partake in the body’s constituent parts? Do you satisfy the seemingly elementary criteria proposed in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States? (These are: a permanent population, a defined territory, an identifiable government and a capacity to enter into relations with other states.) Meeting that threshold, the assumption of recognised statehood and, it follows membership, should be a matter of minor controversy.
What is not mentioned in the United Nations Charter is the political dimension that boils beneath the text: states who are refused admission, let alone recognition, on grounds petty or substantial. All clubs, it follows, are institutions oiled by the tenacity of small minds and rarely troubled by actual principle.
For Palestinians, the still incomplete road to recognition, let alone UN membership, has been particularly potholed. In November 1988, the Palestine National Council, the legislative wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, declared the existence of the State of Palestine. In 2011, an application was made for admission to the United Nations. All the way, their claims have been challenged. Israel, having pinched Palestinian land, guards the door to admission with zeal, and confident, for the most part, that a viable Palestinian state will never come into being.
On May 10, the UN General Assembly resolved (143 votes in favour, nine against, including the drearily predictable US and Israel, iced with 25 abstentions) to sanitise the Palestinian application to become a member of the club. The significantly diluted resolution throbs with enormous condescension, more a nod and wink than anything significant.
The summary from the UN does little to dispel this assumption, suggesting an “upgrade” to “the rights of the State of Palestine within the world body, but not the right to vote or put forward its candidature to such organs as the Security Council or the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC).” The Assembly merely found Palestine a suitable candidate for full membership, recommending the Security Council “reconsider the matter favourably.”
What, then, can the Palestinian delegation actually do with its revised status? From September, delegates will be able to make, for instance, statements on behalf of a group, submitting proposals and amendments and their introduction. They will qualify for election as officers in the plenary and Main Committees of the General Assembly. They will also be able to fully participate “in UN conferences and international conferences and meetings convened under the auspices of the General Assembly or, as appropriate, of other UN organs.” Hardly breathtaking, though an improvement on the current “observer status” which should be designated “spectator status”.
Like an applicant to the Garrick Club in London or the Savage Club in Melbourne, private institutions long in tooth and vanity, their membership heavy with colostomy bags and short of females, the Palestinians were found to be partially deserving. In other words, they had, in circumstances absurd and crude, been deemed by the UN’s largest forum to be potentially clubbable. Exercising all rights of membership will ultimately depend on what the big boys and gals on the Security Council, notably the permanent five, say.
Some clue of what will happen when the matter comes up for discussion in the Security Council can already be gathered by the sinking of a previous resolution for Palestinian admission last month. The Algerian sponsored resolution was quashed by the United States as a matter of course, despite receiving 12 approvals. The grounds for doing so were familiar: recognised statehood could only spring from “a comprehensive peace agreement.” Sustainable peace was only possible “via a two-State solution with Israel’s security guaranteed.” All other matters, including the debate on admission, were “premature”.
All of this makes the reaction from Israel’s UN ambassador, Gilad Erdan, all the more absurd. Before fellow delegates, the intemperate representative sported a miniature shredder in which he placed a copy of the UN Charter, declaring that granting Palestinians greater rights of representation entailed the following message: “you are telling the child-murdering Hamas rapists that terror pays off.” In that statement can be detected the echoes of such founding representatives of Israel as Ben Gurion and Menachim Begin, all of whom were well-versed in the calculus of violence and its ill-gotten rewards.
The unhinged Erdan, perhaps unwittingly, revealed a perspective many had suspected: that Israeli policy towards the Palestinians is one of conflation, denigration and the eradication of distinctions. All are terrorists of the animal variety, as Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, would have it, and all are, at best, only suitable for playing a subservient role on the international stage.
“We always knew that Hamas hides in schools,” moaned Erdan. “We just didn’t realise that it’s not only in schools in Gaza. It’s also Harvard, Colombia and many elite universities.” If all that was, indeed, true, then any improvement in the Palestinian situation, culminating in the UN General Assembly vote, must surely be regarded as pitifully modest. Palestine remains, at the end of the day, ineligible for full club membership.
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Gilad Erdan, to put it bluntly, is another one the of dangerous nationalist RRWNJ’s that Netanyahu is surrounded by and would think nothing of the Gaza and West Bank being wiped clean.
lf he shredded the UN charter , so rejecting it , can lsrael stay a legitimate member?
The United Nations is very distinct from the Garrick, the Savage and the many other clubs and institutions in that it doesn’t refuse membership to Jews, or at least their representative state, Israel. That Israel would oppose Palestinian membership of the UN, hypocritical as it is, comes as no surprise but the opposition from states which facilitated the destruction of Palestine is nothing short of unseemly. Australia’s late conversion to support for Palestinian recognition needs to be followed by support for full membership of the UN.
As for the Israeli UN representative he showed himself, and the state he represents, up for what they are: a corrupt state, led by corrupt leaders willing to do or say anything to shore up their genocidal actions in both West Bank and Gaza Strip. From the river to the sea indeed.
Extracted from Wikipedia (‘Backsliding democracies’):
‘A number of scholars and commentators have identified Israel in the late 2010s under the premiership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as facing a crisis of liberal democracy and a risk of right-wing populism-fueled democratic decline, undermining its traditional status as a democratic state.’
‘Israeli legal scholar Aeyal Gross wrote that while Netanyahu’s early premiership embraced a U.S.-style neoconservative approach, his later tenure “increasingly resembled the model of right wing populism with authoritarian tendencies” in the mode of Trump, Orbán, and Bolsonaro. Yaniv Roznai of the Radzyner Law School at Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya wrote in 2018 that while Israel remained “a vibrant democracy with strong and effective judicial and democratic institutions”, its liberal democracy was at risk from “incremental erosion of Israel’s democratic institutions through countless initiatives to prevent antigovernment criticism, to weaken the judiciary, to infringe minority rights, and to modify the democratic rules of the game.”’
‘Various scholars and commentators have cited as examples of democratic risks in Israel the “rise of ethno-nationalist populism”; the passage of the Nation-State Law; the use of nativist and exclusionary rhetoric by Netanyahu and his cabinet ministers; including comments during the 2015 election campaign delegitimizing Arab Israeli voters and comments labelling opponents and left-wing critics as traitors and tools of outside forces; proposals to change Israeli law to modify the status of (or unilaterally annex) the West Bank; Netanyahu’s effort to grant himself immunity from prosecution on charges of corruption; legislative proposals to limit the powers and independence of the Israeli Supreme Court, including the scope of its judicial review competence; overtly racist or fear-mongering campaign advertisements by some parties of the populist right; and efforts to exert greater control over the media and NGOs.’
‘In a 2019 report, Tamara Cofman Wittes and Yael Mizrahi-Arnaud of the Brookings Institution argue that Israeli politics has “sources of resilience” that offer “pathways away from illiberal populism” including structural features of the Israeli political system (such as norms of liberal democracy and a fragmented parliamentary system that leads to competing populist parties) and cultural features of the Israeli society (such as a burgeoning women’s movement that spans “secular-religious, Ashkenazi-Mizrachi, and Jewish-Arab divides”).’
‘In 2019 and 2020, four national elections were held. The first three resulted in a tie, essentially deadlocking between pro- and anti-Netanyahu forces. The March 2021 election resulted in Netanyahu’s ouster and the formation of a broad-based coalition government consisting of right-wing anti-Netanyahu parties, centrist, center-left, left-wing, and Arab parties. Scholars discussed whether the change in power would mark the end of democratic backsliding that had occurred under Netanyahu.’
‘After the collapse of the Bennet-Lapid government, Netanyahu was inaugurated again as Prime Minister and formed a new government which is considered to be the most far-right, ultra-nationalist, religiously conservative government in Israel’s history. Netanyahu’s government unveiled plans to weaken the judicial system, including overriding Supreme Court decisions with a simple 61-vote majority of the Knesset and changing the structure of the Judicial Selection Committee by adding more politicians. The ultranationalist Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was also previously convicted of supporting a terrorist group known as Kach, which espoused Kahanism and anti-Arabism, was appointed Minister of National Security after changing the law, giving Ben-Gvir unprecedented power over the police.’
I don’t know what happened to your comments, frances. At least one got through.
Thanks Roswell, my dopey end probly, felled by flu.
Catch quack quack (when I used to take mum to bingo),
Netanyahoo, to get a state, peace is required.
Netanyahoo, to get peace giving up all semblance of a state is required???
Excellent article Dr Binoy,
Since Rabin and Peres, its almost certain that the criminally inclined Netanyahu, and Likud and the now flunky IDF have now verged on completely mind-blowing the (mixed-country-of-origin) Israeli populace into hatred, oppression and brutality as the necessary m.o. of state.
Their historical hysterical jiggery-pokery, enforced militarism and anti-intellectualism is no way to run a state, puts paid to democracy and supplants it with a blame mentality, paranoia and hatred. It seems that the ‘west’s’ mock apologia to the Jews was also met with a plan of those orchestrating the Israeli state from within. It seems that it is more a suzerain to Uncle Sam’s desires, funded and armed to the teeth by the hegemon, a situation which any lunatic notions would welcome and play-off.
In their exercise of brutality, lies and pique, they appear now to be climaxing, looking to a future with only exhaustion of the gifts they’ve been given. Now alienating the vast majority of the rest of the world, it seems the Israeli govt amongst all its other divisive constructions and destructions is well on its way to destroying its own state. Bringing, yet again, another nightmare to its citizenry.
With the rest of the world paying for this debacle, what next for the UN and Uncle Sam?
Yes, Frances.
Man-flu.
Touché Paul Walter but not a cure sadly!
I noticed overnight that a BBC news item referred to ‘Palestinian resistance to Israel in Rafah’ rather than the normal mantra of ‘Israel’s war against terrorist group Hamas in Rafah’.
All of a sudden it makes for a different complexion on the ‘war on terrorism’ which may actually be ‘an invasion of sovereign Gaza’ and, of course it is quite legitimate for the Palestinians to mount a defence of their homeland.
Israel insists on its right to ‘self defence’ in mounting an invasion : is it therefore legitimate for Palestinians to mount a defence against an invasion ?
It’s all in the language used !