by Brian Durrans

Founded in October 1945 in San Francisco, the United Nations Organisation (UNO or UN) replaced the League of Nations that was originally set up in January 1920 in Geneva. Dominated by Western Europe, the League of Nations was supposed to keep the peace but couldn’t prevent the Second World War.

The UN had a similar mandate but a new composition. The United States and its capitalist allies were still there, competing among themselves for resources, markets and strategic advantage (as they still do), but were now joined by the Soviet Union and would soon be joined by a growing bloc of socialist states and the first former colonial territories attaining political independence. Over the coming years, as one pro-Western historian recently put it, “[…] non-interventionism and anti-imperialism became more powerful forces, not least because swathes of newly independent countries were joining the United Nations […]. This made it more difficult for Britain to keep up its long tradition of interfering in the affairs of others.” (1)

IMBALANCE OF POWER 

The structure and key posts in this new forum, however, reflected the continuing power and influence of the West, especially in the prescribed membership of the Security Council. Imperialist powers were able to co-opt the UN for their own purposes, most obviously through “peacekeeping” forces in UN uniform, such as in Korea (1950-53) and the Congo (1960-64); and increasingly so following the defeat of the socialist bloc in 1990-91, such as deployments in Bosnia (1992-96), Haiti (1993-96), Iraq (2003-), Haiti again (2004-17), Libya (2011-), Syria (2012-) and Afghanistan (2022-). (2)

The UN thus reflects the (im)balance of forces in the world, but it’s important to remember that socialist and non-aligned countries could prevail on issues of racism and colonialism, for example, when the imperialists themselves were divided, most obviously on apartheid South Africa and Israel.

Although socialism is weaker today than at any other time in the UN’s history, the future predominance of US imperialism is no longer assured, given the growing assertiveness of the global South, Russia’s resistance to NATO and the continuing rise of China. As with Israel, so also on nuclear weapons and global warming, UN policies are progressive but implementing them is impeded by what the West currently sees as its own interests. Those interests could change, however, if the West is able to adapt pragmatically to a changing world. In the meantime, the UN’s capacity to act on these vital issues will depend on how successfully it can defend its operations and principles against attacks, now coming thick and fast, from the US and its closest allies. Targeting an institution which it originally sponsored and long found convenient is a sign of weakness, suggesting the world’s most powerful state is losing its sense of direction.        

UN SUPPORT FOR PALESTINE 

The problem of Israeli colonisation of Palestine has preoccupied the UN from its earliest days, but on no other issue is the contrast between the mountain of policy statements and their practical implementation more glaringly obvious. Besides updating and reconfirming its long-standing policies, there two main ways in which the UN supports Palestine.

The first, mainly political, way in which the UN supports Palestine is through the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and its Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the latter appointing the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967. The Special Rapporteur has long been an outspoken critic of Israel’s oppression of Palestine. The current Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, appointed in 2022, and an expert on Palestinian refugees in relation to international law, is no exception. On 27 March 2024, three months after the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) found “plausible evidence” of Israeli genocide against Gaza, she spoke and answered questions at a press conference in Geneva, following her recent field-based report to the OHCHR confirming the genocidal character of what Israel was doing. (3)

All rapporteurs have faced heavy criticism from Israeli and pro-Israeli politicians,  but  Richard Falk (2008-14) was not only detained and barred from entering Israel at the start of his appointment but three years after the end of it, in 2017, UN Secretary General Guterres responded to pro-Israeli pressure by removing the first comprehensively documented report on Israeli apartheid which Falk wrote with Virginia Tilley, from the website of the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA), where it was originally published. UNESCWA’s Executive Secretary resigned in protest.

This episode is a reminder of both the intensity and ultimate futility of pro-Israeli attacks on the UN. Despite US UN ambassador Nikki Haley’s dismissal of the Falk-Tilley report as “anti-Israel”, and Guterres’s compliant gesture, it went on to inspire further, well publicised reports from Israel and elsewhere which confirmed its findings and disseminated them even wider. It is now more difficult than ever to deny that Israel is an apartheid state. (4)

UNRWA

The second way the UN supports Palestine is more direct or “hands on”. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), established in 1949, provides healthcare and primary and vocational education (and some degree of “disaster relief”) for Palestinian refugees from the Nakba (the violent expulsion of more than 750,000 people from their homes), which paved the way for the Israeli state in 1948. This provision also covers the descendants of those refugees and new ones from the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank in 1967 and ongoing displacement caused by Israel’s apartheid practices. UNRWA is currently active in the Occupied Territories (West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem) and in the refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, and serves some 5.9 million people, 2.3 million of whom are in Gaza. (5)

UNRWA is largely funded by Western nations, including foremost past and present allies of Israel, which was responsible for the Nakba in the first place and hence for the predicament which UNRWA strives to make more tolerable for the Palestinians themselves. In that Israel produces the problem for someone else to deal with, this arrangement parallels having the Palestinian Authority (PA), mainly funded by the US and EU, administer the West Bank on its behalf. This arrangement allows Israel’s allies to pose as friends of Palestine – including, through UNRWA, when conditions are/were relatively stable, giving some the chance of a better life, while continuing to arm and support their oppressors. Involvement on the ground makes UNRWA’s work and staff, whether drawn from the local population or overseas, especially vulnerable to Israeli disruption, obstruction and physical, including fatal, attacks. The genocidal onslaught on Gaza highlights not only this dimension of local conditions but also why Israel, which has long criticised UNRWA’s involvement, now chooses to attack it more seriously.

GENOCIDE IN GAZA  

The attack on Israel by armed Gazans on 7 October 2023 no more “caused” the genocidal response than the attack on the US on 11 September 2001 “caused” the subsequent “War on Terror”. Whilst neither event was fabricated, both provided an excuse to fast-track policy options already in place. As Sara Roy (Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University) suggests, Israel’s approach to Palestinians has long been implicitly genocidal, “As part of their overall embargo plan against Gaza,” US officials wrote from Tel Aviv in November 2008, “Israeli officials have confirmed … on multiple occasions that they intend to keep the Gazan economy on the brink of collapse without quite pushing it over the edge.” More specifically, they aimed to keep it “functioning at the lowest level possible consistent with avoiding a humanitarian crisis.” The goal, that is, was not to elevate people above a specific humanitarian standard but to ensure they stayed at or even below that standard. (6)

As for Israel’s genocidal intent, the ICJ found in January, and Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese confirmed in March, that the “plausible evidence” for it is now explicit. 

There are at least three signs that the genocidal assault on Gaza represents a new moment of truth for imperialism in both Palestine and the United Nations. First, the presentation by Israel and its allies and their complicit media – to the exclusion of any other view - of questionable evidence of the character and scale of the armed attack on 7 October against Israeli civilians, while sidelining or ignoring the military aspect and its historical significance. Second, and closely linked to this, the immediate censoring of the preceding decades-long struggle between occupier and occupied, including “mowing the grass”, the dehumanising euphemism Israelis often use for the periodic, mainly airborne, shockingly destructive and disproportionately deadly reprisals for Gaza’s relatively minor acts of resistance. (7) The third sign is the open attack on UNRWA.

A quick but necessary aside: the argument I am putting forward here assumes a close alignment between Israel’s strategic role in the Middle East and the interests of US imperialism. To mix domestic pet metaphors, Israel is usually a cat’s paw but the tail sometimes wags the dog.  At the moment it’s a bit of both and its future unclear.

ISRAEL ATTACKS UNRWA AND THE UN  

In early January 2024, Israel privately alleged to UNRWA that twelve of its staff in Gaza were involved in the 7 October 2023 attacks on Israel, and on 26 January UNRWA said it was investigating the allegations. There is some confusion about what happened next. UN Secretary-General Guterres urged donors not to withdraw funding. UNRWA commissioner-general Lazzarini (resisting pressure to resign) announced that accused staff were fired first before being investigated and complained ten days later that Israel had not yet provided any evidence to back its claim. A US intelligence report expressed “low confidence” in Israel’s claim and UNRWA reported that Israel had used torture to extract false confessions from some of its employees. In late January the US, Italy, Canada and Australia and then in February the EU declared they were halting UNRWA funding.

Given that only twelve people out of 13,000 UNRWA staff in Gaza were being accused, and that Gazans were facing starvation and disease on top of the destruction of homes, schools and hospitals – together with growing awareness across the world of the ICJ deliberations on Israeli genocide and of the horrific scenes daily presented on TV and social media, there was strong push-back against defunding. This came from the World Health Organization, Amnesty International and other bodies. US-based writer Jamal Kanj, who owes his own career to the education he received from UNRWA, points out that Israel was responsible for the recent deaths of 152 of its staff in Gaza for which it has not yet been held to account, and the number has probably risen since. (8)

Without waiting for UNRWA to complete its investigations, and far from halting their own contributions, Spain, Portugal and Ireland increased them, and by 1 March the EU restored and increased its own funding. Australia, Canada, Japan and Finland also reversed their earlier decisions and announced their funding would be restored. The UK is waiting for more information about the claims against UNRWA before deciding its position. The US is the biggest donor to UNRWA and its announcement that it is withholding payment until March 2025 suggests its siding with Israel on this issue has isolated it from most of its closer allies. The State Department tried to soften this impression by claiming that since most of the allocation for the year has already been sent to UNWRA, the shortfall will be minimal. (9)

With the US trying to limit its reputational damage from this propaganda debacle, the biggest loser in any other circumstances would be Israel itself. The loser was not Israel, however, but (as so often) the Palestinians. This is where the World Central Kitchen incident comes in.

CUTTING OFF AID TO GAZA 

Seven staff of the charity World Central Kitchen (WCK) were killed by targeted Israeli airstrikes while travelling in convoy in central Gaza on 1 April 2024. To ensure its safety (sic), the convoy notified the Israel Defense Forces of its exact route and location. Some of the victims, who included individuals from the UK, Australia, Poland, and one with dual US and Canadian citizenship, had links to Western special forces. WCK had earlier been deployed in Haiti and Ukraine, and its founder is a close associate of President Biden. Some reports suggest it was planning to create a pier for shipping in food aid (10) or shipping out refugees or was even a candidate for replacing UNRWA itself. Although Israeli prime minister Netanyahu called it “unintended” and “tragic”, the incident was plainly deliberate and possibly a rebuke to Biden for unwelcome advice on military tactics. So there may well be more to the story than an ordinary aid charity having a bit of bad luck.

What really matters here is that the attack led immediately to at least three other aid organisations, as well as WCK itself, suspending their operations in Gaza. To that extent, the airstrikes on the WCK convoy were of a piece with the accusations against UNRWA staff. Israel wanted to minimise any mitigation of the humanitarian catastrophe it was preparing for Gaza, and – under unprecedented scrutiny from the UN – to minimise its accountability for breaches of international law, not least in the form of genocide or other war crimes.

RULES BASED ORDER VERSUS INTERNATIONAL LAW 

When Western politicians refer to a (or the) “rules based order” they mean they find existing international law inconvenient. The US and its allies have a problem with the UN as a bastion of international law. Various nations are or have been in breach of one or more such laws, but Israel is the top offender, and – although the outcome is still uncertain – the UN is at last taking serious steps to hold it to account, along with complicit states and possibly corporations. As that process accelerates, US imperialism finds itself increasingly at odds with the world, not merely because of its complicity with Israel (which is bad enough) but because of the liberties it has taken or will yet take on its own behalf (which are potentially worse).

Trita Parsi, co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft in Washington DC, highlights, “[a]n  important aspect of Israel's conduct - and Biden's acquiescence to it - that has gone largely unreported is that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy existing laws and norms around warfare” (emphasis added), He cites as examples the bombing of Iran’s diplomatic compound in Damascus; the war crime of bombing hospitals including all of those in Gaza and assassinating patients inside them; preventing delivery and access to humanitarian aid in defiance of the ICJ; starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; and indiscriminate bombing of civilians.

Parsi argues that Israel is not simply trying to beat an adversary but to destroy international law itself by making it inoperable. (11) This is key to explaining why Israel and its apologists insist the armed attacks from Gaza of 7 October are a completely new phenomenon rather than part of continuing resistance to colonial occupation. Because in legal terms a war only happens between states, calling those attacks an act of war allows Israel to excuse its own response, which others recognise as genocide, as self-defence under international law. This cynical manoeuvre is plainly an attack on international law itself.   

This idea of making existing (and inconvenient) law inoperable connects with what the PA’s ambassador to London, Husam Zomlot, and others have taken to be Israel’s goal in Gaza: paraphrasing Sara Roy, finally to expel Palestinians without international censure or sanction, (6) (emphasis added). That goal can only be achieved if Israel is shielded by its complicit and increasingly isolated allies, even if reduced to the US alone.

A “rules based order” that would permit the mass slaughter or expulsion of a population by sidelining international law deserves only contempt. Palestinians are now the front line of defence for international law and the United Nations as its institutional expression. If the UN fails them now, restraining imperialism in the tumultuous years ahead will be a hundred times harder. 

(1) Rory Cormac, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy. Oxford, 2018, p3. This proved easier for the better-resourced US which couldn’t yet match the colonial and later neocolonial legacies of its European allies.  

(2) For a full list of UN “peacekeeping missions”: https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/list-of-past-peacekeeping-operations.

(3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8512p-80wI

(4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Falk. The report is accessible and downloadable here: https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/ps_pubs/9/. The reports it inspired are from B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch (both 2021) and Amnesty International (2022).

(5) https://www.unrwa.org/who-we-are?tid=85;  https://www.unrwa.org/what-we-do 

(6)  https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/12/19/the-long-war-on-gaza/?lp_txn_id=1544322  

(7) Jamie Stern-Weiner, ed., Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm. New York/London, 2024.

(8) https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/14/defunding-unrwa-the-last-phase-of-israeli-genocide/ The Struggle against Apartheid: Lessons for Today's World | United Nations

(9) “Israeli allegations against UNRWA”, Wikipedia (accessed 19 April 2024); “Frozen U.S. Spending for U.N. in Gaza Is Minimal, State Dept. Says”, New York Times, 30 January 2024.

(10) Tamara Nassar, “What’s the real purpose of Biden’s Gaza port?”, Electronic Intifada, 14 March 2024.

(11)  https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1774872023098888465

 

 

UNRWA school shelled by Israel in Gaza in 2009 photo by International Solidarity Movement

UNRWA office in Lebanon photo by RomanDekert