The passing of two bills in the Knesset on Monday night that, when implemented, will block the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) from providing life-saving support across Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank, is the latest chapter in a longer story of Israel’s divergence from the global community and international norms that govern the behaviour of states.
In addition to its confrontation with the UN’s principal relief agency for Palestinians as a people are Israel’s attacks on the UN peacekeeping presence in Lebanon, UNIFIL, whose international troops in Lebanon have come under Israeli fire, including the potential deployment of white phosphorus, as the invading Israeli military advance on what they say are Hezbollah forces around UN positions.
For the 1.9 million displaced people of Gaza – many already living in UNRWA refugee camps – the potential loss of the only agency that exists to help them stands to hit them very hard.
“If any additional restrictions are placed on UNRWA, it will be the people in Gaza who will continue to suffer,” Louise Wateridge, UNRWA’s senior emergency officer in Gaza told Al Jazeera.
“[For days] I have received images of people standing on top of each other, trying to receive a piece of bread. I have spoken to colleagues who are beside themselves, trying to do whatever they can with the limited supplies they have in the Gaza Strip.
“The needs are as vast yet as simple as they ever have been: families need food, water, medicine and shelter. Any further prevention of access to these basic supplies will worsen what is already a catastrophic and completely man-made humanitarian disaster,” she said.
A history of violence
The current conflict between Israel and the views of the international community does not exist in isolation but is the latest in a string of confrontations Israel has had with the UN.
On Tuesday, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denied on its Hebrew X account the historical fact of the UN’s role in Israel’s establishment, claiming that Israel was founded solely through “victory…in the War of Independence”, which is what Israel calls the conflict that resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homes in 1948.
לשכת ראש הממשלה:
תזכורת לנשיא צרפת: לא החלטת האו"ם הקימה את מדינת ישראל, אלא הניצחון שהושג במלחמת העצמאות בדמם של לוחמים גיבורים, שרבים מהם היו ניצולי שואה – כולל ממשטר וישי בצרפת.
— ראש ממשלת ישראל (@IsraeliPM_heb) October 15, 2024
Translation: “Prime Minister’s Office: A reminder to the president of France: It was not the UN resolution that established the State of Israel, but rather the victory achieved in the War of Independence with the blood of heroic fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors – including from the Vichy regime in France.”
The English-language account did not carry a similar post.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been barred from entering Israel over what the government says is his failure to “fully condemn” a missile strike by Iran on Israel in October.
Trying to discredit the UN
“The UN matters to people in Israel. That the country was founded by UN charter [in 1948] is part of the collective memory,” analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg said from Tel Aviv.
“However, we’ve been seeing a gradual process of delegitimisation of the UN throughout the last few decades, when it has been portrayed as a bastion of anti-Israel or even anti-Semitic sentiment by Israel’s leaders.”
Ironically, one of the leading critics of the UN is Netanyahu, himself Israel’s former ambassador to the body from 1984 to 1988.
Under his right-wing Likud party – in power since 2009 – and more recently during its alliance with Israeli extreme-right and ultra-Orthodox factions, confrontations have grown with the UN and, with them, the international body’s legitimacy challenged in the eyes of many.
“The UN often makes it easy for its critics,” Flaschenberg cautioned. “Guterres [the former secretary-general of Portugal’s Socialist Party] is a problem for many,” he said, describing the distrust of left-wing and liberal thought among Israel’s growing right wing.
Flaschenberg explained that “the UN Human Rights Council’s ‘obsession’ with Israel/Palestine is undeniable. The fact that a disproportionate amount of time is dedicated to us, makes it easy for Israeli critics of the UN to call it anti-Semitic.”
Contacted by Al Jazeera, a spokesperson for the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said, “The mandate of the high commissioner is to promote – universally and specifically with member states – the respect and protection of human rights in accordance with applicable international law and standards.”
Referring to High Commissioner Volker Turk, the spokesperson continued: “The high commissioner carries out his mandate impartially irrespective of by whom, when or where abuses and violations of international human rights law are committed.
“All actions of the Office are based on facts obtained through a rigorous monitoring and reporting methodology and assessed in accordance with relevant international legal standards (International Human Rights Law and International humanitarian law),” he added.
Earlier this year, the international community’s report on Israel’s action in Gaza, Anatomy of a Genocide, which contained numerous documented instances of rights abuses, was dismissed as biased or anti-Semitic by both Israel and its close military and diplomatic ally, the United States.
The US has also led condemnation of the UN’s open-ended Commission of Inquiry (COI) into the frequent accusations against Israel for its breaches of international human rights law in its treatment of the Palestinians under its control.
The same year, UN Watch, an NGO described by the AFP news agency as “a lobby group with strong ties to Israel”, claimed that the UN General Assembly (UNGA) had adopted 15 resolutions against Israel, compared with seven against the rest of the world.
Two of the UN’s 2023 resolutions concerned Israel’s actions in Gaza of that year, where more than 20,000 people had been killed.
Other resolutions reinforced previous rulings, such as those condemning Israel’s settlements in the occupied West Bank, or the construction of its security barrier, condemned as an apartheid measure by numerous rights groups.
Still others included the environmental damage Israel was charged with carrying out in the Palestinian territory it occupies, as well as in Lebanon.
Hardwired conflict
“Israel was both created by and early on was in violation of much of international law,” Paul Salem of the Middle East Institute said. “There’s a built-in conflict.”
Almost immediately after Israel was created by UN mandate came the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 700,000 Palestinians, who to this day are refugees, barred from returning, many living in refugee camps in the occupied West Bank or neighbouring countries.
Likewise, the occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem, which Israel has maintained since 1967, puts it on the wrong side of the fourth Geneva Convention and demonstrates its disregard for UN edicts and international law, seen as inviolable the world over.
Some areas of dispute between the UN and Israel are more recent. Principally, the bills banning UNRWA from the Palestinian territories where it is most needed and the ongoing attacks on UN forces operating to enforce a resolution that Israel had been party to.
However, as Israel extends its war in Gaza northwards, its invading forces in Lebanon have come up against the UN forces operating there under international mandate.
“UNIFIL is in the way. They want them out of the way but this is not a legitimate or legal way to do it,” Salem said, pointing to diplomatic and legal restraints that protect UN peacekeepers.
“Perhaps Israel should withdraw from the UN and no longer claim that it wants to resolve things through diplomacy.
“Diplomacy is frustrating, I get it. It doesn’t always work, but that’s why the UN was created, so that things are not resolved by military force,” he said.
Changing Israel, changing UN
That the UN has changed since Israel’s creation is a fact.
The 51 member states in the UN that gave birth to Israel have grown to a General Assembly (UNGA) of 193 as countries gained their independence from colonisers.
In the UNGA, most of the world’s countries view the Palestinian cause as important.
Likewise, recently Israel has diverged even more dramatically from other members of the GA.
“I am pessimistic about Israel’s future as a liberal democratic state,” Richard Caplan of Oxford University said.
“At the moment, Israel is in survival mode, responding to immediate threats with blatant disregard for international humanitarian law, notwithstanding its repeated assertions that it operates the ‘most moral armed forces’ in the world.”
Even during a relatively optimistic period, with the Israeli economy strong after the COVID pandemic and relations between Israel and some Arab states warming, Caplan noted, Israel chose not to seek a political settlement to its conflict with Palestine and, by extension, help heal the rift with the UN.
“To the contrary, the brutal colonisation of the Occupied Territories continued unabated, with Netanyahu pledging to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state,” Caplan wrote by email.
“While there may be broad opposition to Netanyahu among Israelis, by and large Israelis tolerate, if not support, the occupation.
“Who are the members of the Knesset who have been elected on a platform to end the occupation? The only hope may be if Israel’s allies work earnestly towards establishing a Palestinian state and use their leverage … to pressure Israel to alter its behaviour.” he wrote.
“Otherwise I fear the future will bring more deracination, more ethnic cleansing, more violence.”
