When Ban Ki-moon called for an "end to
the violence" in Gaza last month, his call fell on deaf ears. When he
urged an "end to the madness", Israel yawned. It wasn't until the
UN Security Council issued a mild presidential statement urging an
"immediate humanitarian ceasefire" that the Israeli government
snapped.
Even though the statement fell short of
Palestinian and Arab demands, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
called UN chief Ban Ki-moon to protest the statement's partiality
towards Hamas. He lectured him about the rights and wrongs of its wordings,
even though the statement never mentioned Israel or Hamas by name, and,
besides, Ban Ki-moon is not responsible for UN Security Council Statements.
President Mahmoud Abbas made no such call
to the secretary general, but a group of distinguished scholars and NGOs told
him in an open letter that he should either stand for law and justice or
resign.
They recalled how in a series of
statements, Ban Ki-moon neglected to name Israel as the perpetrator of
violence, making no distinction between occupied and occupier.
A former Korean foreign minister, who was
elected twice to the UN post, he has shown the public different faces: the
angry diplomat who demanded that the parties must "stop, stop, stop
fighting" and that "this madness must stop"; or the pragmatic
diplomat who follows the US State Department lead; or the weak toothless
secretary general that presides over the un-United Nations.
Like most of his predecessors, the
secretary general can be effective only when the UN is united. Alas, the
organisation, which has proved particularly indispensable in various parts of
the world, is terribly dysfunctional when it comes to Palestine.
The UN jargon
Over the last few decades, Israel has
disregarded hundreds of resolutions, "censuring",
"deploring", "urging against", "recommending
against", or "condemning" its attacks, settlements,
deportations, occupation, etc.
In the jargon of UN diplomacy, it seems
that a resolution that "urges" means "we aren't happy but
won't move a finger"; "deplores", means "we don't
approve, but you're free to continue with your mischief"; "condemns"
means "we're very unhappy but won't do anything about it, nada";
and, "cease" means "if you don't stop we'll remind you if
someone reminds us the next time around."
Alas, the latest UN Security Council statement does not even add up to a criticism: : "The Security
Council expressed its grave concern regarding the deterioration in the
situation in the Middle East as a result of the crisis related to Gaza and
the loss of civilian lives and casualties."
Moreover, the statement hardly scratches the surface let alone begins
the process of ending the occupation of Gaza and Palestine, which acquired an
observer status at the UN in 2012.
Palestine as a diplomatic football
No cause has consumed as much UN paper work
as the plight of the displaced and occupied Palestinians. But after six
decades, hundreds of its resolutions on Palestine are yet to be respected or
implemented.
Nowhere has the UN ideals been more mired
in power politics than in Palestine. Cold War rivalries have also contributed
to UN paralysis in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which explains why more
than half of the 690 resolutions adopted by the General Assembly from 1947 to
1990 have been ignored. But what justifies sidelining the UN ever since?
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INTERACTIVE: Gaza Under
Attack
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The US has championed efforts to neutralise
UN intervention to end the occupation in Palestine; Washington has vetoed
more than 40 UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel's policies
some of which were drafted by its European allies.
Such obstruction succeeded in lowering and
even diminishing all expectations that the UN can play a major role in ending
the occupation and resolving the conflict. Alas, the end result has served
neither party, nor has it helped peace and security in the region.
It's instructive that most of the major
post-Cold War conflicts have seen direct UN involvement including: Bosnia,
Kosovo, Somalia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria/Lebanon, and as of late, South
Sudan. But not the oldest among them, Palestine.
Likewise, all pleas and demands for
humanitarian and political interventions fell on deaf ears. The only time the
UN was allowed to act was in 1997 when it sent few international unarmed
observers to the occupied city of Hebron. Alas, they weren't even mandated to
speak publicly about the ongoing violations.
Only after the terrible failure of
Washington's sponsored peace process, was the UN "allowed" to play
a political role; it became a junior partner of the US in the International
Quartet along with the EU and Russia.
Shameless impotence
For the past four decades, Israel has
violated all relevant UNSC council resolutions such as the resolution 465 of
1980 that strongly deplored all measures taken by Israel to change the
physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure of
status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967,
including Jerusalem.
It has also rejected Resolution 476, which
reaffirmed the necessity to end the Israeli occupation of Arab territories
since the 1967 war. The only UN Security Council Resolution that was accepted
by the US and Israel as the basis of the diplomatic process, i.e. 242 of
1967, was also systematically violated. Israel has been expanding its
settlement activity when the resolution notes the "inadmissibility of
the acquisition of territory by force".
But the so called
"international community" which entered the diplomatic jargon about
the same time that Israel became a reality and Palestine became a tragedy,
has been neither "international" nor behaved as a
"community" when it comes to Israel and Palestine. Worse,
those who tend to speak for the "international community", namely
in the West, are the powers that obstructed the implementation of the
UN resolution in Palestine.
In that context, Israel was created by a UN recommendation, and was accepted as a
member on the basis of its commitment to respect UN resolutions, and
specifically UNGA 194 regarding the return of the Palestinian refugees. More
than a million of those refugees continue to linger and suffer under Israeli
siege of the Gaza strip.
It takes a lot of nerve for the UN Security
Council to address another Israeli war on the Palestinians of Gaza as if it
were between two equal partners and without recalling the bitter fact that it
has let down Palestinian refugees for decades.
As former Secretary General Kofi Annan
argued, its failure to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and end
decades of occupation will "continue to hurt the reputation of the
United Nations and raise questions about its impartiality."
More importantly, its failure continues to
lead to more suffering and instability in Palestine and beyond.
Marwan Bishara is the
senior political analyst at Al Jazeera.
The views expressed in
this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's
editorial policy.
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