Never again. When the United Nations was originally founded from the ashes of the second world war, it was at least in part to give more solid meaning to those words. The first treaty it ever adopted, thanks to the efforts of a Polish Jew named Raphael Lemkin who had lost more than 40 members of his family in the Holocaust, was the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide. From Rwanda to Srebrenica, the UN itself admits it hasn’t always lived up to Lemkin’s ideals. Its founding mission remains, however, to learn from history, not to repeat it. But whose history, exactly?
This week Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the UN, furiously accused the organisation of becoming a “stain on humanity” after its secretary general, António Guterres, declared that while nothing could justify the 7 October massacre perpetrated by Hamas, the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum”. They had, Guterres said, followed “56 years of suffocating occupation” and vanishing hopes of a political solution to Palestinians’ plight. History, in other words, matters; perhaps especially so in the Middle East, where some trace the roots of conflict back to the Bible, and every modern war unfolds in the psychological shadow of the last.
