Israel versus the UN: an old story

No sooner had it begun its Gaza offensive than the State of Israel launched a campaign of denigration against the UN, depicting it as a corrupt outfit which prevents Israel from fulfilling its goals by unduly protecting its enemies, Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, two amorphous “terrorist” entities which Israel intends to “totally eradicate”. Addressing the General Assembly on 27 September 2024, Benyamin Netanyahu called the UN “a swamp of antisemitic bile which needs to be drained”. If the UN doesn’t change its tune, he said “it will be seen as nothing more than a contemptuous farce.” Three-quarters of the delegates left the hall.

But it took more than that to faze Netanyahu. His offensive only grew more vicious against all the UN organisations on the ground, be they military (Blue Helmets) or civilian (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - UNRWA). Israel dismisses as antisemitism any criticism of its crimes in Gaza - the worst since the turn of the century, as the humanitarian organisations keep repeating. On 8 October 2024, while the Israeli Prime Minister was explicitly threatening the Lebanese with the same destruction and suffering as that inflicted on Gaza¹¹ if they didn’t submit to his demands, namely to “eradicate Hezbollah”, his armed forces deliberately attacked three positions of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). A week later, there had been at least five Israeli assaults on that organisation, which was established in 1978 to monitor the activities of the belligerents after a major Israeli military incursion into South Lebanon against the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Whenever Israel acts this way, the UN and many countries are sharply critical. But the army goes right on with its campaign: on 13 October 2024 two of its tanks forced their way into a UNIFIL position just to make clear that international pressures make no difference. In Gaza, on 14 March 2024, UNRWA had counted “at least 165 of its members killed in the exercise of their duties” since October 2023. Four days after the mass killing perpetrated by Hamas and other Palestinian militants on 7 October 2023, the UN Secretary General, the Portuguese Antonio Guterres, reminded the world that according to international law “the premises of the UN and all hospitals, schools and clinics must never be targeted”. It was as though he knew from experience the Israeli general staff’s habit of exacting reprisals. Since then Israel’s vindictiveness towards the organisation has never flagged.

UNWRA in the cross-hairs of Israel’s offensive

On the 1^st of October 2024, Foreign Minister Ysrael Katz declared Guterres persona non grata in his country. On several occasions during the past year, Israel demanded that UNRWA leave the Occupied Palestine territories - accusing it of protecting the “terrorists”. That organism is the only one providing permanent humanitarian, sanitary and educational aid in the few remaining Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, as well as Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Not only does the army bomb its schools and hospitals in Gaza but Israel also blocks the transfer of the funds to finance it and orchestrates a smear campaign against it.

In July 2024, the Israeli Parliament began debating a draft law defining UNWRA as a “terrorist organisation”; the debate should be concluded at the end of October and could lead to the seizure of its buildings and assets¹².

On 9 October, Katz also hinted that the organisation’s headquarters in Jerusalem might be confiscated and turned into housing facilities for Israelis. At the same time, without a shred of proof, Israel has launched an active propaganda campaign aimed at depicting UNRWA as a “den of terrorists”. On 26 January 2024, Netanyahu claimed that 12 of its employees had taken part in the Hamas attack on 7 October.

As if by chance this claim was made on the very day that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) opened an investigation into a “plausible risk of genocide” in Gaza. Soon afterwards Israel achieved its first major success: on 23 March 2024, the US Congress voted the suspension of US financing of UNRWA until March 2025, a step which the rest of the world ultimately largely failed to follow.

The Israeli government’s allegations gave rise to no legal proceedings for it offered no convincing proof to back them up, according to the findings of the independent Colonna commission¹³. But the essential had been achieved: a shadow of doubt had been cast over the UN agency.

The threat of epidemic : a textbook case

Amazingly enough, this Israeli campaign was suspended for a time. The story is worth telling, so much does it reveal. In Gaza August 2024, there was the beginning of a polio epidemic in the Gaza strip. Considering the danger that the disease might spread to soldiers on the battlefield and through them to the whole unvaccinated Israeli population - since the soldiers go home regularly on leave - UNRWA’s role suddenly became crucial again. The Israelis held negotiations with the UN body. One month later, 560,000 Palestinian children had been vaccnated. The Israeli army had to admit that without UNRWA’s unique logistics “the vaccination campaign would never have been successfully carried out” as journalist Jonathan Adler explained in the international version of the online daily, Local Call (+972 Magazine)¹⁴.

Thus the government revealed the full extent of its duplicity. While it allowed 1.2 million doses of vaccine into Gaza to stamp out the threat of an epidemic, it continued to limit the entrance of other vital medicaments as well as the food and water so desperately needed by the Gazans. And once the threat of an epidemic was eliminated, the anti-UNRWA campaign could resume. Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor, Nir Barkat (Likud), organised permanent demonstrations in front of UNRWA’s headquarters in order to force it to move to the Jordanian capital Amman. At the end of this month, there is to be a first reading in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) of two draft laws: one aimed at breaking off all ties between Israeli public authorities and UNWRA, the other banning all activities of that body on the national territory. In the meantime, Israel continues blocking UNRWA’s accounts in Israeli banks and issuing entrance visas for its new personnel.

Statistics: between 8 October 2023 and 27 September 2024, UNRWA’s buildings in Gaza - schools, hospitals, hostels, offices - have been subjected to 464 Israeli attacks¹⁵. More than one per day. 226 of its team-members have been killed as well as 553 civilians who happened to be on the premises.

As Jonathan Adler writes, “the legislative offensive aimed at making UNRWA leave the occupied Palestinian territories is merely the incorporation into the law of existing military practices¹⁶.”. However the Israeli army is also pragmatic; a number of high-ranking officers, Adler goes on to explain, are worried about these laws. “If UNRWA were to leave Gaza a new pandemic might prevent the Israeli army from hunting Hamas.”

From Bernadotte to the OCHA

Although today it has reached new heights, Israeli hostility towards the UN and the legitimacy of any external criticism of its policies, especially in time of war, goes way back, practically to the country’s origins. The complete list would be very long, so I will simply cite a few examples. On 17 September 1948, four months after the creation of the State of Israel and when the first Israeli-Arab war had broken out, the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, UN mediator since May 1948, was assassinated in Jerusalem. Bernadotte had a “peace plan” which stood in the way of Israel’s ambitions. He was gunned down by four men wearing military uniforms but who belonged to the Stern Gang, an ultra-nationalist movement. As Jean-Pierre Filiu reminds us, this armed militia occupies today a place of honour in the Israeli Army Museum¹⁷.

More recently, in 1996, during an operation against Hezbollah, the Israeli air force bombed a UNIFIL base in the town of Qana where the population had taken refuge: 106 civilians killed. In 46 years, of all the UN bodies, UNIFIL has suffered the greatest losses: by April of this year a total of 334 of its members had been killed, most of them in Israeli air raids. Another body subjected to permanent constraints by Tel Aviv is the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the only neutral agency compiling an inventory of the illegal acts (killings, expulsions, occupations, destructions, etc.) perpetrated in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

When French President Macron declared that “Mr Netanyahu should not forget that his country was created by a UN decision” refering to Resolution 181 which divided Palestine into two States, one “Jewish” the other “Arab”, adopted on 29 November 1947, he was chided by the Israeli Premier: “It wasn’t the UN resolution that established the State of Israel but its victory in the war of Independence [in 1948 against the Palestinians and the Arab nations].” Exit the UN.

The return of neoconservatism

This rejection of the UN authorities goes hand in hand with an oft-repeated mantra. In Hebrew, the acronym for UN is pronounced “Oum”. David Ben Gurion founder of the State of Israel used to say derisively “oum schmoum”, meaning “who cares about the UN?”. An attitutude which fits into a political vision. Just like in the United States where the UN is reviled by a notorious segment of the political class, especially the nationalists. The latter are convinced that no international organism can make their country submit to any general law running counter to its chosen policies - a universal law that only the United Nations can promulgate. Similarly, Israel claims the right to exempt itself; this is practically official state doctrine even if it is never expressed.

In 2004, I interviewed Carmi Gilon who had been sacked from Shin Bet, the internal security agency. The Abu Ghraib affair had just come to light in Iraq¹⁸. My first question was this: “In the struggle against opponents who use terrorism, can one respect international humanitarian law or is violating it a matter of course?“ His answer was crystal clear: ”I’m no expert in international law. I can only express an opinion based on Israeli law¹⁹.” In other words, the former head of Israeli special services dumps on international law and makes no bones about it. This attitude is not his alone. It embodies a philosophy which Israeli rulers have always espoused: justifying in every possible way their refusal to submit to international law. Circumventing the latter in the name of national sovereignty is the philosophy that many regimes intend to impose today.

In this arena, Israel has been a pioneer. The clearest example has to do with the notion of “preemptive war”. The rejection of this concept was included by the UN in the Geneva Conventions “on the laws of war and the use of weapons to settle conflicts.” It was in their name that in 1967, for example, General De Gaulle declared tu sum up: In the conflict between Israel and Egypt over the blockage of access for Israel’s ships to the Red Sea, the first to open fire will be committing a breach of the laws of war and will not have the support of France. Since 1949, the ban on starting a war or armed operation “preemptively” has often been ignored de facto by powers great and small. But where Israel stands out is that, virtually from the outset, it has constantly refused to observe the ban on preemptive warfare. As early as the early fifties, Israeli general Yigal Allon, who had become the leader of the most militant wing of the ruling Labour Party, was an advocate of “preemptive war”. Until then, the army’s strategy was based on a concept known as “defensive-offensive” (giving priority to defence over attack). But after 1953, it became, in Israeli military jargon, “offensive-defensive”. A strategy “which has mostly lasted to this very day” as Israeli scholar Oren Barak wrote in 2013²⁰ .

To quote from him:

[Israel has] for decades, de facto, adhered to a foreign policy strongly based on a doctrine [which] provides for preventive strikes and wars against Israel’s neighbours in the event of existential threats before they have a chance to materialise.

This policy, he adds, has become ’a matter of routine’ Tel Aviv systematically using the argument of “an existential threat” at every opportunity.

In 1982 when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in order to drive out the forces of the PLO and change the country’s government, the then Prime Minister, Menahem Begin explained that he had launched that war because “we had decided that a second Treblinka was not going to happen”. Similarly, the day after the Hamas attack, on 7 October 2023, Benyamin Netanyahu called it “the greatest crime against the Jews since the Shoah.” And so this “existential” reference allows any and all UN remonstrations to be brushed aside, dismissed as we have seen, as “antisemitic.”

This rehabilitation of “preemptive war” was royally enthroned in September 2002 by then US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice in the annual document of “national strategy”. Today, this same doctrine rules Israeli behaviour even more radically. Standing defiant, Israel displays its determination to respect none of the norms of the laws of war, a determination greater even than US troops displayed in Iraq twenty years ago. The fact is little known, but in the eighties and nineties, Benyamin Netanyahu was a significant ideologue influencing the rise of neoconservatism in the United States.

Translated by Noël Burch