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un general assembly
When Will the UN General Assembly Suspend Israel?
Israel’s abusive repudiation of the very idea of the United Nations; its escalating and lethal violation of countless international norms; its repeated, deadly attacks on U.N. sanctuaries and peacekeepers all justify its expulsion.
Nov 17, 2024
The biblical Book of Job chronicles a string of catastrophes relentlessly plaguing the main character, Job, who loses his prosperity, his home, his health, and his children. Eventually, an agonized Job curses his own existence as well as the god that created him. Issues of evil, justice, and divine wisdom are explored, and while the Book of Job surrenders divine wisdom to God, it recognizes that the work to be done here on Earth is our own.
Numerous interpretations of the story exist, and more than one version has circulated through the ancient Near East. One version concludes with Job avowing repentance: “I know that my redeemer liveth, and so I repent in dust and in ashes.”
The Latin root for the word “repent” is pensare—to think. “Repent” suggests an effort to rethink.
Job’s surprising repentance has been on my mind as calls increase, in 2024, for the United Nations to rethink its relation to Israel as a member state. Increasingly, civil society groups are pressuring Permanent Missions to the U.N. to eject Israel as a voting member of the General Assembly.
In a way, Israel has already removed itself from norms maintained by the U.N. Charter as it has consistently flouted U.N. treaties, resolutions, and advisery opinions.
To paraphrase Pankaj Mishra, writing for The New York Review of Books, a stunned world has watched with disbelief as the United States provisions Israel with weapons enabling a mass murder spree across the Middle East.
Palestinians in the West Bank have recently urged all organizations demanding U.N. compliance with the International Court of Justice ruling of July 2024 to sign a letter available at World BEYOND War which urges Member States of the United Nations General Assembly to fulfill their duties.
Following up on the potential of this letter, a new coalition, “Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine,” has issued a letter to His Excellency Mr. Philemon Yang, the president of the United Nations General Assembly asking him to convene an urgent meeting of the General Assembly to demand an immediate and permanent cease-fire, establish and secure humanitarian aid corridors, and ensure the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
The letter additionally requests:
- The revival of the U.N. Committee Against Apartheid to address systemic violations of international law and human rights in the OPT;
- Consideration of targeted boycotts, sanctions, and divestments, particularly against illegal operations in the OPT;
- The establishment of an arms embargo on Israel; and
- Exploration of suspending Israel from the General Assembly until it complies with international law.
To further support these efforts, the letter calls for the establishment of an unarmed U.N. peacekeeping mission in the OPT under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter to ensure the safety and dignity of all civilians.
In a way, Israel has already removed itself from norms maintained by the U.N. Charter as it has consistently flouted U.N. treaties, resolutions, and advisery opinions. We must not forget that Israel refuses to acknowledge to the U.N. its possession of nuclear weapons.
I felt startled, during an initial planning call held with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, when one of them spoke of the evacuation he and his family faced, that very day, and said, “We are facing the final solution. Israel is imposing the final solution on us.” Other participants spoke of having shuddered during bombings, day and night.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan, writes movingly in The Guardian of how absurd it is that the United Nations General Assembly agrees to seat Israel as a U.N. member nation.
Israel’s abusive repudiation of the very idea of the United Nations; its escalating and lethal violation of countless international norms; its repeated, deadly attacks on U.N. sanctuaries and peacekeepers all justify its expulsion. Hasan reminds us that Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the United Nations shredded the U.N. Charter while standing at the General Assembly podium. This is the charter that declares the U.N. mission to eradicate the scourge of warfare for future generations.
It is time for the clouds to part above the burning lands of West Asia—for the suffering there to be comforted and their pitiless accusers rebuked by the gathered voice of humanity, by the agent that created Israel and can, when it wishes, “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The work here is ours, and so let our United Nations demand, and not beg, humanity from Israel and from its imperial sponsor, the United States.
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Not Just Its Neighbors, Israel Makes War on the Entire World
Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point, and U.S. obstruction offers no solution to this crisis—it only fuels it.
Oct 17, 2024
Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.
In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.
In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.
Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.
Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law
In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.
Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates. On October 15th, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.
This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China.
Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.
The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52 peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.
Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that "such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated."
Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel.
UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.
When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.
Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system.
Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for "perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem" instead of solving it and called for it to be eliminated.
After October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found that Israeli authorities had not provided "any supporting evidence" to back up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its funding, with the sole exception of the United States.
Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.
UN Secretary General Guterres warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”
Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.
Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.
Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN, using its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.
American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict.
The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.
A U.S. arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.
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In Overwhelming Vote, UN General Assembly Demands Swift End to Israeli Occupation
"The vast majority of countries have made it clear: Israel's occupation of Palestine must end, and all countries have a definite duty not to aid or assist its continuation."
Sep 18, 2024
The United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday passed a resolution demanding that the Israeli government end its occupation of Palestinian territories within 12 months, affirming a recent International Court of Justice opinion that deemed the decadeslong occupation unlawful.
The Palestine-led resolution, co-sponsored by dozens of nations, calls on Israel to swiftly withdraw "all its military forces" from Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The final vote tally was 124 member states in favor and 14 against, with 43 nations abstaining.
Unsurprisingly, Israel and the United States—Israel's top ally and arms supplier—were among the 14 countries that opposed the resolution, which is not legally binding. The United Kingdom, which recently suspended some arms export licenses for Israel, abstained from Wednesday's vote, a decision that the advocacy group Global Justice Now (GJN) said shows "complete disregard for the ongoing suffering of Palestinians forced to live under military-enforced racial discrimination."
"The vast majority of countries have made it clear: Israel's occupation of Palestine must end, and all countries have a definite duty not to aid or assist its continuation," said GJN's Tim Bierley. "To stay on the right side of international law, the U.K.'s dealings with Israel must drastically change, including closing all loopholes in its partial arms ban and revoking any trade or investment relations that might assist the occupation."
The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement welcomed passage of the resolution, noting that the U.N. General Assembly voted "for the first time in 42 years" in favor of "imposing sanctions on Israel."
The resolution specifically calls on all U.N. member states to "implement sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against natural and legal persons engaged in the maintenance of Israel's unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including in relation to settler violence."
The resolution's passage came nearly two months after the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the U.N.'s highest legal body, handed down an advisory opinion concluding that Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal and must end "as rapidly as possible."
The newly approved resolution states that "respect for the International Court of Justice and its functions... is essential to international law and justice and to an international order based on the rule of law."
The Biden administration, which is heavily arming the Israeli military as it assails Gaza and the West Bank, criticized the ICJ's opinion as overly broad.
Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said in a statement Wednesday that "the Biden administration should join the overwhelming majority of nations around the world in condemning these crimes against the Palestinian people, demanding an end to the occupation, and exerting serious pressure on the Israeli government to comply."
"We welcome this U.N. resolution demanding an end to one of the worst and ongoing crimes against humanity of the past century," said Awad.
Ahead of Wednesday's vote, a group of U.N. experts said in a statement that many countries "appear unwilling or unable to take the necessary steps to meet their obligations" in the wake of the ICJ's opinion.
"Devastating attacks on Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territory show that by continuing to turn a blind eye to the horrific plight of the Palestinian people, the international community is furthering genocidal violence," the experts said. "States must act now. They must listen to voices calling on them to take action to stop Israel's attacks against the Palestinians and end its unlawful occupation. All states have a legal obligation to comply with the ICJ's ruling and must promote adherence to norms that protect civilians."
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