What Israel has done over the past 12 months, however, goes well beyond what ordinary nations have, historically, at the UN, and is tantamount to a war against it.
International condemnation has been building against a series of Israeli tank strikes against the headquarters of the United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon (UNIFIL), indicating that patience is growing thin with Israel’s unhinged war crimes.
Yet, despite the strikes now grabbing attention, the UN itself has been subjected to unprecedented attacks by Israel over the past 12 months, which could be argued is another front in its war.
While the United Nations is supposed to be an international organization, designed to bring nations together in the interests of peace and cooperation, politics are also crucial to it.
As has always been the case, countries at war and with opposing opinions, use the United Nations as a platform to communicate their national propaganda.
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What Israel has done over the past 12 months, however, goes well beyond what ordinary nations have, historically, at the UN, and is tantamount to a war against it.
In late September, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, delivered a speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in which he said that “this UN house of darkness” is “contemptible in the eyes of decent people everywhere”.
He went on to call the UNGA a “swamp of antisemitic bile” and an “anti-Israel flat-earth society”, despite it being the UN’s General Assembly that passed resolution 181 which gave Israel its right to exist in the first place.
While Israel has long blocked UN officials from entering its territory and refused meetings with their officials citing various reasons as to why, in early October the situation dramatically escalated when Israel declared the UN’s Secretary-General Antonio Guterres persona-non-grata and later banned him from entry.
On October 11, Israeli forces opened fire on UNIFIL forces operating in southern Lebanon for the second time within a 48-hour period. Israeli tanks directly fired upon the UNIFIL headquarters in Lebanon, based in Naqoura, with one of the attacks injuring two UN personnel.
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“Any deliberate attack on peacekeepers is a grave violation of international humanitarian law”, UNIFIL said in a statement.
Following the attacks, international condemnation then poured in and triggered pushback even from the European Union, without any follow-up actions being taken, however.
Then, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, openly stated that the UN forces should leave the area so that his military could target the location, where he claimed Hezbollah had built a presence.
The suggestion that Hezbollah forces are located at, or around, the UNIFIL headquarters, is a justification for considering it to be a valid military target; thus justifying bombing it.
Yet, there is no evidence of any Hezbollah presence there and the Lebanese resistance group had even published a communique that stated they had held off from targeting an Israeli invading force due to them using UNIFIL as cover, taking the decision to refrain from opening fire in order to ensure the safety of UN personnel.
Israel has killed around 230 UN employees in the Gaza Strip since October 2023, making the war in Gaza the most deadly conflict for United Nations staff in history.
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In addition to this, the Israeli regime has fabricated and lied about having evidence to suggest the involvement of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Hamas-led attack on October 7, which was a controversy that resulted in the withdrawal of donations by major Western contributors, at a time where the agency’s work was crucial to keeping civilians alive.
The campaign against the United Nations’ various organs by Israel has also been unmistakably pronounced, as it not only shrugs off and ignores UN General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, but goes on the offensive and labels them anti-semitic.
When the top judicial body on earth, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ruled that not only is Israel plausibly committing genocide, but also that its occupation of Palestinian land is illegal, it was also met with insults and language that was designed to undermine the authority of the UN’s judicial arm.
Israel has violated more UN resolutions than any nation, which is often justified by stating that the majority of those resolutions have been passed through the UNGA and are thus non-binding.
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Not only would this argument work to state that Israel’s very existence, which is predicated on UNGA res. 181, is therefore invalid, but the argument that seeks to undermine the UNGA doesn’t work, because Israel actively violated a UNSC resolution earlier this year.
The UNSC resolution ordered Israel to implement a ceasefire until the end of the Muslim Holy Month of Ramadan, which they condemned as anti-semitic and even slammed their American allies for allowing it to pass.
In response, the US tried to argue that the UNSC resolution was non-binding also, which is not only flatly false but also served as a green light for Israel to ignore it.
At this point, the question is, why are the Israelis still a member of the United Nations?
– Robert Inlakesh is a journalist, writer, and documentary filmmaker. He focuses on the Middle East, specializing in Palestine. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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