Israel's adversaries found a favorable space in UN structures to implement their strategy, in actions reinforced especially after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and which have gained even more intensity in recent months. For example, on November 9, 2023, the UN General Assembly, which brings together 193 members, approved, […]
Israel's adversaries found a favorable space in UN structures to implement their strategy, in actions reinforced especially after the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and which have gained even more intensity in recent months.
For example, on November 9, 2023, the UN General Assembly, which brings together 193 members, approved, through two committees, eight resolutions condemning and criticizing Israel, without any mention of other issues on the international scene. “The UN offensive against Israel with a torrent of biased resolutions, just a month after the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, and on the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) is surreal,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the UN Watch. “The sole purpose of these unbalanced condemnations is to demonize the Jewish State. The world should not be deceived that such resolutions advance the cause of peace or human rights in any way.”
Neuer, a Canadian lawyer, heads a non-governmental organization based in Geneva and created in 1993, with the aim of monitoring and promoting the UN's impartiality on global issues such as human rights and democracy and, in particular, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. .
In the November 2023 statements, regarding the actions carried out under the UN umbrella, Neuer continued: “The disproportionate offensive against the Jewish State undermines the institutional credibility of what is supposedly an impartial international body. Politicization and selectivity undermine its original mission, erode the promise of the UN charter of equal treatment to all nations, large and small.”
UN Watch also reports against UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees. On January 29, 2024, the North American newspaper The Wall Street Journal published a report on intelligence reports indicating connections of at least 12 UNRWA officials to the October 7 terrorist attacks.
In the field of political initiatives, as early as 2017, the US representative on the Human Rights Council, diplomat Erin Barclay, criticized the institution's disproportionate focus on Israel. “Regrettably, many of this council’s actions do not support universal principles. In fact, they contradict them,” she declared, according to the newspaper The Times of Israel. “No other nation is the focus of an entire agenda item... Obsession with Israel is the greatest threat to the Council's credibility,” she continued. “The United States will oppose any effort to delegitimize or isolate Israel.”
UN Watch also showed that, in 2022, the General Assembly approved more resolutions against Israel than the sum of criticisms approved of other countries. There were 15 anti-Israeli votes, against 13 aimed at other countries, six against Russia, and one against North Korea, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Syria, Iran and the United States.
Israel's diplomatic actions have proven incapable of avoiding the avalanche of initiatives distributed by numerous political or legal organizations, which form a bureaucratic labyrinth under the umbrella of the UN. Actions can come, for example, from the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Human Rights Council, among other structures.
In November 1975, the General Assembly witnessed one of the most regrettable moments in the transformation of United Nations structures into a stage for attacks against Israel. By 72 votes in favor, 35 against and 32 abstentions, it approved the infamous resolution 3379, which defined Zionism as “a form of racism”. The text also mentioned a political declaration adopted by the Conference of Foreign Ministers of Non-Aligned Countries, held in August of that year and which defined the nationalist movement of the Jewish People as a “threat to world peace” and “a racist and imperialist ideology”. . In 1991, amid the meltdown of the Cold War and the USSR, the resolution was repealed by a vote in the General Assembly.
In the 1970s, the Manichaean logic of the Cold War still prevailed, and the movement of non-aligned countries, despite its name, was inclined to play into the hands of the so-called “third worldism” and the Soviet Union, in the scenario of dispute between Washington and Moscow. And, in the late 1960s, the Kremlin, after the defeat of its allies Egypt and Syria in the Six-Day War, broke diplomatic ties with Israel and began to sponsor a strategy of delegitimization of the Jewish State, whose creation it had intensely supported in 1948. .
“The solution to the Palestine issue based on the partition of Palestine into two separate states will be of profound historical significance, because such a decision meets the legitimate demands of the Jewish People,” speech, according to website Jewish Virtual Library, by Soviet Chancellor Andrei Gromiko at the UN in 1947, in defense of resolution 181. The text, approved by 33 votes in favor, 13 against and 10 abstentions, defined the creation of two countries, a scenario rejected by Arab nations, which culminated in the military attack on Israel shortly after its independence, on May 14, 1948.
The Soviet Union, driven by the interest of having a possible ally in Zionism, at the time led by socialists, played an important role in the creation of the State of Israel, then working towards the recognition of the Jewish State, in the same direction as the arch-rival United States. Years later, geopolitical calculations and ideological differences led to the separation between Israel and the USSR, in a fracture that was consummated with the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War in 1967.
From then on, the Kremlin placed the Israeli-Palestinian issue as a priority on its global agenda, with an eye on weakening the US position in the strategic Middle East. The discourse of “third worldism and anti-imperialism” emanating from Moscow was then directed intensely against Israel and became a kind of compass for the global left.
After the Israeli triumph in the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, the enemies of the Jewish State began to intensify attacks also through another path, in addition to the military sphere: that of demonizing and delegitimizing Israel before international public opinion, in search of isolate him and wear him down politically and diplomatically.
In this context and strategy, UN spaces served as a valuable sounding board. At the founding, in 1945, there were 51 members and, today, 193, with a significant increase in countries that were part of the so-called “third-world” bloc in past decades, and a significant part of them aligned with discourses, in the 21st century, still contaminated by rhetoric and visions disseminated by the Kremlin during the Cold War.
The UN plays a historic role in the approval of resolution 181, in 1947, and the attempt to build a scenario of two states, living side by side, in security and harmony. Decades later, unfortunately, the organization's structures are often used to undermine and prevent a scenario that it itself approved.
Jaime Spitzcovsky collaborator of FSP, was the newspaper's correspondent in Moscow and Beijing.