Israel’s War on the United Nations
The United Nations is an easy body to hate. At times, it seems to be effusion without substance, body with no backbone. It was conceived in a fit of post-war idealism, when egos were humbled and hatred briefly stemmed. Over the ruins of the Second World War, the builders were favoured over the destroyers and mischief makers – at least for a time.
On its establishment, the UN became a hostage to the political intrigues and power blocs that have continued to plague it for its duration. Of particular concern was the body’s pursuit of international law protocols – formulation, drafting and implementation. A central feature of this: resolutions passed by various bodies, the most significant being by the UN Security Council. Such measures are followed by nation states when convenient, ignored when not.
One such nation state in the mischief making class is Israel. Its relationship with the UN has often been tetchy. The Anti-Defamation League, for instance, admits that the body “played a pivotal role in the establishment of the Jewish State by passing UN Resolution 181 in 1947.” The resolution, with its hefty consequences, called for “the partition of British Mandate Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab.” The same organisation, however, goes on to note with satisfaction the remarks in April 2007 by then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon: “Unfortunately, because of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, Israel’s been weighed down by criticism and suffered from bias – and sometimes even discrimination.”
For various periods of its history, Israel has felt hard done by in the international forum. The folder of resolutions against it has burgeoned. Notable ones include UNSC Resolution 242 (1967) which asserts, in accordance with the UN Charter principles, that a “just and lasting peace in the Middle East” includes the withdrawal of Israel’s armed forces from territories occupied during the Six Day War and the termination of territorial claims and affirmation of sovereignty of all States in the area. UNSC Resolution 338 (1973), passed in response to the Yom Kippur War between Israel, Egypt and Syria, called on the parties to cease hostilities within 12 hours and implement Resolution 242 “in all its parts.”
UN Resolution 2334, passed in December 2016, particularly hurt, striking at the expansionist, displacing drive of the Jewish state through settlements in occupied territory that amount to de facto colonisation. It particularly condemned “all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem.” This included, among other matters, the expansion of the settlements, the transfer of Israeli settlers, the confiscation of land and the displacement of Palestinian civilians.
Instead of seeing such a measure as a clear assessment of predation in breach of international law and the principles of the UN Charter, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, called it an unnecessary reward to the Palestinians “to continue down a dangerous path they have chosen” in avoiding direct negotiations with Israel. That Israel cared not a jot on that score hardly mattered.
A number of recent incidents reveals the poor regard the United Nations is held in, notably within Israel’s warring circles. Its agency aiding Palestinians, UNRWA, is threatened by two bills before the Israeli parliament that will significantly hamper its operations by evicting the body from its premise in territories within Israel’s control. The proposed laws will also abolish any associated privileges and immunities. Having failed to convince all major donors to the organisation that it should be defunded for being packed with Hamas apologists and operatives (the evidence has always been paltry on that score), the Israeli government is using a legal sledgehammer fashioned by the Knesset.
The passage of the bills, warns UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.” The provision of shelter, food and healthcare “would grind to a halt” without the agency. Some 600,000 children “would lose the only entity that is able to re-start education, risking the fate of an entire generation.”
With Israel’s broadening campaign against Hezbollah to the north, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is facing continuous harassment by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Established in 1978 by the Security Council to confirm the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon and aid Lebanese authorities restore peace and security in the area, UNIFIL has been a source of endless irritation to the IDF’s operations.
In an October 13 statement, UNIFIL revealed that two IDF Merkava tanks at 4.30 that morning had gone about the business of destroying the main gate of their post in Ramyah, near the Israeli border. The tanks forcibly entered, after which Israeli personnel demanded that the base turn out its lights. “The tanks left about 45 minutes later after UNIFIL protested through our liaison mechanism, saying that IDF presence was putting peacekeepers in danger.”
At 6.40 am, peacekeepers at the same post reported the firing of several smoke emitting rounds 100 metres to the north. “Despite putting on protective masks, fifteen peacekeepers suffered effects, including skin irritation and gastrointestinal reactions, after the smoke entered the camp.”
On October 14, persisting in its approach of impeding and harrying the peacekeeping force, the IDF halted “a critical UNIFIL logistical movement near Meiss ej Jebel, denying it passage. The critical movement could not be completed.”
The statement goes on to remind the IDF about its obligations to ensure the safety and security of the UN peacekeepers and property. Breaching a UN position violated UN Security Council Resolution 1701 (2006), while any deliberate attack on peacekeepers was aserious violation of international humanitarian law, in addition to breaching resolution 1701.
In an almost disdainful manner, the IDF suggested in a statement that the peacekeepers had entirely misunderstood the brutal encroachment. The actions had been motivated by goodwill to evacuate soldiers wounded by an anti-tank missile. “For the sake of evacuating the wounded, two tanks drove backwards, in a place where they could not advance otherwise in light of the threat of shooting, a few metres towards the UNIFIL position.” The smokescreen had been created to aid the evacuation, while the entire operation was conducted throughout with continuous contact with the UN peacekeepers. After a time, the dressing of lies becomes tatty and banal.
Typically, it fell to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to shed some light on the mendacious fog. UNIFIL, he suggested, had to immediately withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon. “It is time for you,” stated the PM in a pointed message to Guterres, “to withdraw UNIFIL from Hezbollah strongholds and from the areas of combat.” Yet again, international law which, in this case, provides legitimacy to the UN peacekeeping operations in the area, could be treated as a tissue easily torn.
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leefe
Return to home pageIsrael doesn’t like people monitoring what it’s doing. The UN has often been in its sights, beginning in 1948 when it assassinated envoy Folke Bernadotte.
During the 1982 Lebanon War, UN positions were overrun by proxy Lebanese forces controlled by the IDF.
On April 18, 1996, near Qana, a village in then Israeli-occupied Southern Lebanon, the Israeli military fired on a UN compound sheltering around 800 Lebanese civilians, killing 106 and injuring around 116. Four Fijian UN soldiers were also seriously injured.
In yet another war on Lebanon, on 25 July 2006, four unarmed United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) peacekeepers were killed during an Israeli air strike on a UN observation post in southern Lebanon.
And it’s not just the UN. In 1949, Israel shot down five British spitfires on a reconnaissance mission over Egyptian territory to monitor the fighting there. In 1967 during the Six-Day War, it attacked US surveillance ship the USS Liberty in international waters, killing 34 sailors and wounding over 170.
The UN, because it does not have practical enforcement powers, will go the way of the League of Nations, or be totally reformed. After all, why persist with an entity that cannot control a tiny rogue state, as William Holdsworth describes?
But the UN has not been a waste of time and effort.
It has developed a useful body of international law, by continuing a process that had already begun.
For example, the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933) has been accepted in full, I believe, as international law.
When the dissolution or reformation of the UN takes place, its parcel of international law must be retained.
The Zionist have destroyed Gaza and seem to be forging ahead with their dream of creating a Greater Israel. If so, that means more violent expansion into parts of Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, land to the Euphrates River in Iraq and the Nile River in Egypt, all a by-product of blood lust of the IDF. Viewed through the lens of land theft and genocide, Zionism makes sense.
To say that Netanyahu is blatant, is now an understatement. To me, he has never changed what he is, a committed underminer of all things that might lead to peace, and proper definitive statehood and cooperation for all in the Levant and Arabian Peninsula, and at least Iran to the north.
This appears to be his ceaseless, hate-filled ambition, as a corrupt corruptor.
It is only now that he is pressured by the personal risk he faces of prosecution by the Israeli civil courts, that he has come out of his usual sleazy cringe, to bugle disdain and disregard of the UN from behind the skirts of the other most notorious blockers of the UN, the exceptionalist USA, and the vengeful Putin’s Russia. All (with proxies abounding) holding the world to ransom, incompetently tampering with the Sunni / Shiite matter for the purposes of divide, conquer and commercial hegemony.
I hold hope of the UN persisting because of the vast majority of other states backing it.
Given the role played by Doc Evatt and other Australians in the formation of first the League of Nations and subsequently the United Nations, you would think our current government would be more supportive of it, especially given the contempt that Netanyahu and his genocidal IDF are showing for it. Would that the power of veto was gone and the will of the majority of the world’s countries with regard to Israel could be enacted with force. Ignoring UN directives is bad, actually attacking UN bases and personnel is unconscionable and if Australian Labor can’t see that, then a minority government with Greens and Independents is the obvious answer. But never the LNP who are in such a position vis-a-vis Netanyahu’s Israel we can only see the soles of their shoes.
I am still trying to process how a democratically elected Israeli Knesset can equitably explain why committing GENOCIDE EXECUTIONS of 42,000+ Palestinian mainly women & kids, demolishing any two stones remaining on top of each other is anything other than the deliberate displacement & dispossession of the Indigenous Palestinians for the future benefit of the international carpet-baggers willing to invest in the construction of fresh residential residences for the ZION@ZI IDF and other ZION@ZI supporters of a theocratic apartheid ZION@ZI dictatorship.
Perhaps a reader could explain the difference between these GENOCIDAL POLICES IN PALESTINE now and the policies of the 1933-1945 democratically elected German government.
I am reminded of the comment, ”What is the difference between a German stormtrooper in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1944 and an amoral IDF soldier in Gaza today”?
The answer: That after 80 years, the only difference is that the jackboot is on the other foot.
The repulsive zionist jews have showed time and time again that they don’t care one iota about anybody else but themselves. Even the mightly Septic Tank military who arm the land stealiing scum to the teeth can’t control them because they are too worried about upsetting all the greedy rich jews that own and control half their country. They behave no better than the very people who tried to wipe them off the face of the earth 80 years ago.
It’s very simple. Stop giving them weapons so the poor Palestinians can at least have a fairer fight to regain their homes rather than just be targets for the violent hatred the jew scum have for anybody not the same as them. They plan to steal ALL of what was Palestine, already for many years stealing land in the occupied territories against international agreements, and wipe out the true citizens of that part of the planet. I am disgusted at the international community for standing by and allowiing this genocide to continue.
I heard that a Christian church in Lebanon was bombed a couple of days ago. Can the Zionists, via their IDF militia, make it any more obvious they want to inflame all communities to the point of reactionary hostility? That way the aggressors, the Zionists, with crocodile tears in their eyes can tell anyone dumb enough to listen to them that other people are anti-semantic? It’s so predictable.
Message to Labor, the party in power atm – Roll over Labor, roll over. Good boy.
They are only allowed to get away with this because the Lobby-dominated US allows it.
Irrational stupid superstition does all this filth, crime, violence, in the name of some image. There is no god and nobody has seen one, had a visit, personal appearance, has a signature, a signed photo, a DNA sample, a copy of a police file, or contract, or photolicence, NOTHING, whether out of Rome, Jerusalem, Mecca, Delhi, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, Canterbury Cathedral, Wall St., Trump’s arse. And so, there is NO chosen race, elect group, saved soul squad, promised land, NOTHING. Murder, theft, occupation, violence, triumphal and supremacist attitude, is all wrong, evil. Religious superstition is just evil filth. Of course, people of goodwill and decent charitable open attitude are fine people, and have done much good. Can we get some balance, honesty, openness, morality back into this horror?
I wonder if anybody has subjected Netanyahu to a mental health assessment : he is behaving more and more like a man with a Messiah complex.
It seems a new nazism, irrational and demented as was the original, has taken over Israel and parts of the USA. These manifestations do not bode well for the future.
Like Phil. I become more puzzled by the hour at the irrational turn of event over the last year, think of the people creating the frustrations and wonder why. Israel is the visible tip of the fatberg, but I worry more about the USA.
Netanyahu and a shrink. I think he and his lunatic fringe in government, wearing their dark shirts, put a bloke in mind of Silence of the Lambs, the pathologies now own the unconscious and reactionary types beyond recovery. Pity so many innocent folk have to pay for the delusions.
That Israel calls itself a ‘democratic state’ is a joke. It doesn’t have, and refuses to have the fundamentals: No state Constitution, and no defined borders. Whilst it has a parliament, its only ‘guiding’ writ is the Zi#nist manifesto – a most beguiling document that does not accord with the internationalism accepted by the rest of the world at the time, but has its roots firmly embedded in an ideology of the supremacy of thought of the Jewish (religious) culture, and a mandatory push to personally spread it globally.
And to that extent, it ought be observed that from the get-go it was compulsory that every citizen do ‘national service’ in its military, and then forever more be available for military service. And that successive Israeli heads of government (with perhaps the exception of Rabin) have aggressively refused advice from the rest of the world for diplomatic settlement of matters with the Palestinians and Israel’s other neighbors.
It is no small irony (and likely a device of convenience) that the ‘West’ that set up the ‘mess’ in the first place, turned a blind eye to all Israel’s (aforementioned) inconsistencies – accepting Israel as a state, and bringing it into the UN, whilst ignoring and barring Palestine. To today, this remains the situation.
But it does not end there. In the 1960s the Zi#nist manifesto was amended to mandate that all / any corporations and organizations founded / run by Jews anywhere were bound to join / promote the Zi#nist objective and provide a proportion of their proceeds as donations to the Zi#nist state. It is also notable, that the Zi#nists continue to press-gang disinterested folk across the globe who might have distant lineage, declaring them as Jews, with voting obligations and obligations to Zi#nism whether they like it or not. The 1960s Zi#nist manifesto amendment remains in force, and remains ignored / tacitly accepted by the ‘West’.
It surely does not take a great leap of mind to see all this as a continuation of the olde West:East divide, and the further pursuit of the commercial / strategic ambitions of the ‘West’. Contemporarily, George Dubblya, called those in the spread to Israel’s north, “the axis of evil”, and to my surprise, Biden recently said publicly, “I am a Zi#nist.”
Like it or hate it, to underestimate the power that the ‘West’ has conferred on (the non-state) Israel / Zi#nists is a grave error. Its tentacles reach across the globe, making Netanyahu’s Israel (as proxy to particularly the USA) the holders of the balance of power of the ‘West’. It holds to ransom and severely threatens non-Zi#nist Jews, any other non-Zi#onists, other cultures and religions, corporations and governments, and as we well know, the UN.
To hold out that the ALP are toadies to the Zi#onists is ludicrous – it has a policy: Supports the recognition and right of Israel and Palestine to exist as two states within secure and recognised borders. It is in fact the Duttonate that clearly holds the biassed toadie position. The ALP is in government, and to that extent, since the Oct 2023 ‘blow up’, their position both in Oz and internationally is precarious. Its initial positioning was handled clumsily, but has significantly improved, no doubt after significant public pressure, and very intense diplomatic interaction across the globe. In this globally we are comparatively a ‘minnow’, but given our vast interdependencies, there remains a razor’s edge to walk, with international law and humanitarianism at the fore.
There appears to be a long way to go in all this, with no cooling end-game in sight. It seems to be down to the USA and the UN – yeesh, what a nightmare.
The passage of the bills, warns UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.” The provision of shelter, food and healthcare “would grind to a halt” without the agency. Some 600,000 children “would lose the only entity that is able to re-start education, risking the fate of an entire generation.”
Yes. That’s the point. Especially the last bit.