In the last year, Israel has launched attacks against several countries and occupied territories: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. But it has not only attacked countries and territories. Israel has also directed an unprecedented and violent series of rhetorical attacks against a specific organization.
Yes, I am talking about the United Nations. We have all seen Israel effectively declaring war on the UN. Let’s review what happened in recent months and weeks:
- From the stage of the UN General Assembly, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel calls the organization “despicable,” a “house of darkness,” and a “swamp of anti-Semitic hatred.”
- On the same stage at the General Assembly, Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN uses a miniature paper shredder to shred a copy of the UN Charter. He would later say that the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth.”
- Israel’s Foreign Minister falsely accuses UN Secretary General António Guterres of not having condemned Iran’s attacks against Israel, declares him persona non grata and announces that he is prohibited from entering Israel.
- The Government of Israel is actively obstructing the commission of inquiry commissioned by the UN to gather evidence regarding the attacks by the Palestinian group Hamas on October 7.
- The Israeli Parliament plans to designate a long-established UN agency as a “terrorist organization”: the United Nations Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA).
- The Israeli Army has been launching bombs against UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for twelve consecutive months, killing a record number of UN employees: 231. In the words of Guterres, “since the creation of United Nations, it is the largest number of our staff killed in a single conflict or natural disaster, by far.”
- Israeli troops are now also attacking United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, several blue helmets serving in Lebanon have been injured during various attacks by Israeli forces on UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) positions near the so-called ‘blue line’. The last attack occurred this Wednesday.
Why hasn’t Israel been expelled from the UN?
How can all this be okay? Is it acceptable, or legal? But perhaps the most important questions of all are others: How is it possible for Israel to remain a member of the UN? Why has he not yet been expelled from an organization he relentlessly and shamelessly attacks and undermines?
Of course, there are other countries that violate human rights and remain card-carrying members of the UN. There are Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name just a few. But none of them have murdered UN employees on a large scale; none have sent tanks to invade a UN force base; none has “refused to comply with more than two dozen United Nations Security Council resolutions.” For more than 60 years, no country in the world has dared to declare persona non grata to the UN Secretary General himself.
Let it be clear: it is not that there is a mechanism to expel one of its member states from the UN. This is what Article 6 of the United Nations Charter says about it: “Any member of the United Nations that has persistently violated the principles contained in this Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” .
One could argue that no member state has ever been expelled from the UN under Article 6. Not only that, one could also say that since the early 1970s the United States has vetoed more than 50 Council resolutions. Security critical of Israel and would never allow the Security Council to recommend its expulsion. The objection is valid, but history shows that there are solutions to circumvent the Security Council veto.
In defending Russia’s expulsion from the United Nations – following Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine – international law professor and former US State Department advisor Thomas Grant mentioned two occasions in which “the members of the UN “They considered that a certain delegation was no longer suitable to sit at the organization’s table.” “On both occasions, the UN improvised a solution,” he explained in October 2022.
Two antecedents
In 1971, the socialist nations and non-aligned nations of the Global South voted in the UN General Assembly in favor of recognizing the People’s Republic of China as “China’s sole legitimate representative to the United Nations”, with the aim of replacing the representatives of the Republic of China (Taiwan), which was among the founding members of the UN. As a result of that vote, Taiwan was left out; the People’s Republic of China within; and it was not the Security Council that decided it but the General Assembly.
As human rights lawyer and former UN official Saul Takahisi has pointed out, what happened three years later was also based on the “internal regulations” of the UN and not on the United Nations Charter. It was when the General Assembly voted against the recognition of the credentials of the South African delegation and prohibited, until 1994, South Africa from participating in the General Assembly.
What were the two big reasons why the UN General Assembly decided to suspend South Africa’s membership? He apartheid against the indigenous black population and the illegal occupation of neighboring Namibia, does it sound familiar?
“The action against South Africa did not follow any precise procedure in the United Nations Charter or in existing UN practice,” Thomas Grant wrote in his argument. The organization had demonstrated that the “ethos “Improvisation prevails when Member States consider an issue sufficiently relevant to act.”
What can be more “relevant” at this time for UN States than attacks against the UN itself by a single Member State? What could be more important than attacks on UN authority, staff, headquarters and statutes?
Forty countries this Saturday published a joint statement condemning Israel’s incessant and shameless aggression against UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. But talk is cheap, what UN member states have to do is act.
The Government of Israel may try to portray the United Nations and, in particular, its General Assembly as irrelevant organizations, powerless and plagued by anti-Semitic prejudices. But Israel’s very existence today is due to a UN General Assembly resolution. In Israel’s Declaration of Independence of 1948, there are seven references to the United Nations: super positive and full of gratitude in all cases.
For the people of Israel, as well as the rest of the world, expelling the country from the UN or taking at least the first step of suspending its participation in the General Assembly, would send a powerful message: that the authority of the United Nations remains relevant. ; that the lives of UN employees, and its peacekeepers, also matter; and that an unscrupulous country cannot declare war on the UN itself and continue in the organization as if nothing happened.
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