December 14, 2023
As the sole veto to a UN Security
Council resolution calling for an "immediate ceasefire," the US
stands alone in its support of wanton death and destruction in Gaza.
On Friday, December 8, the UN Security
Council met under Article 99 for only the fourth time in the UN’s history.
Article 99 is an emergency provision that allows the Secretary General to
summon the Council to respond to a crisis that “threatens the maintenance of
international peace and security.” The previous occasions were the Belgian
invasion of the Congo in 1960, the hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Iran
in 1979 and Lebanon’s Civil War in 1989.
Secretary General Antonio Guterres
told the Security Council that he invoked Article 99 to demand an “immediate
ceasefire” in Gaza because “we are at a breaking point,” with a “high risk of
the total collapse of the humanitarian support system in Gaza.” The United Arab
Emirates drafted a ceasefire resolution that quickly garnered 97 cosponsors.
The World Food Program has reported
that Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation, with 9 out of 10 people spending
entire days with no food. In the two days before Guterres invoked Article 99,
Rafah was the only one of Gaza’s five districts to which the UN could deliver
any aid at all.
The Secretary General stressed that
“The brutality perpetrated by Hamas can never justify the collective punishment
of the Palestinian people… International humanitarian law cannot be applied
selectively. It is binding on all parties equally at all times, and the
obligation to observe it does not depend on reciprocity.”
Mr. Guterres concluded, “The people of
Gaza are looking into the abyss… The eyes of the world – and the eyes of
history – are watching. It’s time to act.”
UN members delivered eloquent,
persuasive pleas for the immediate humanitarian ceasefire that the resolution
called for, and the Council voted thirteen to one, with the U.K. abstaining, to
approve the resolution. But the one vote against by the United States, one of
the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council, killed the
resolution, leaving the Council impotent to act as the Secretary General warned
that it must.
This was the sixteenth U.S. Security
Council veto since 2000 – and fourteen of those vetoes have been to shield
Israel and/or U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine from international action or
accountability. While Russia and China have vetoed resolutions on a variety of
issues around the world, from Myanmar to Venezuela, there is no parallel for
the U.S.’s extraordinary use of its veto primarily to provide exceptional
impunity under international law for one other country.
The consequences of this veto could
hardly be more serious. As Brazil’s UN Ambassador Sérgio França Danese told the
Council, if the U.S. hadn’t vetoed a previous resolution that Brazil drafted on
October 18, “thousands of lives would have been saved.” And as the Indonesian
representative asked, “How many more must die before this relentless assault is
halted? 20,000? 50,000? 100,000?”
Following the previous U.S. veto of a
ceasefire at the Security Council, the UN General Assembly took up the global
call for a ceasefire, and the resolution, sponsored by Jordan, passed by 120
votes to 14, with 45 abstentions. The 12 small countries who voted with the
United States and Israel represented less than 1% of the world’s population.
The isolated diplomatic position in
which the United States found itself should have been a wake-up call,
especially coming a week after a Data For Progress poll found that 66% of
Americans supported a ceasefire, while a Mariiv poll found that only 29% of
Israelis supported an imminent ground invasion of Gaza.
After the United States again slammed
the Security Council door in Palestine’s face on December 8, the desperate need
to end the massacre in Gaza returned to the UN General Assembly on December 12.
An identical resolution to the one the U.S. vetoed in the Security Council was
approved by a vote of 153 to 10, with 33 more yes votes than the one in
October. While General Assembly resolutions are not binding, they do carry
political weight, and this one sends a clear message that the international
community is disgusted by the carnage in Gaza.
Another powerful instrument the world
can use to try to compel an end to this massacre is the Genocide Convention,
which both Israel and the United States have ratified. It only takes one
country to bring a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under
the Convention, and, while cases can drag on for years, the ICJ can take
preliminary measures to protect the victims in the meantime.
On January 23, 2020, the Court did
exactly that in a case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar, alleging genocide
against its Rohingya minority. In a brutal military campaign in late 2017,
Myanmar massacred tens of thousands of Rohingya and burnt down dozens of
villages. 740,000 Rohingyas fled into Bangladesh, and a UN-backed fact-finding
mission found that the 600,000 who remained in Myanmar “may face a greater
threat of genocide than ever.”
China vetoed a referral to the
International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Security Council, so The Gambia,
itself recovering from 20 years of repression under a brutal dictatorship,
submitted a case to the ICJ under the Genocide Convention.
That opened the door for a unanimous
ruling by 17 judges at the ICJ that Myanmar must prevent genocide against the
Rohingya, as the Genocide Convention required. The ICJ issued that ruling as a
preventive measure, the equivalent of a preliminary injunction in a domestic
court, even though its final ruling on the merits of the case might be many
years away. It also ordered Myanmar to file a report with the Court every six
months to detail how it is protecting the Rohingya, signaling serious ongoing
scrutiny of Myanmar’s conduct.
So which country will step up to bring
an ICJ case against Israel under the Genocide Convention? Activists are already
discussing that with a number of countries. Roots Action and World Beyond War
have created an action alert that you can use to send messages to 10 of the
most likely candidates (South Africa, Chile, Colombia, Jordan, Ireland, Belize,
Turkïye, Bolivia, Honduras and Brazil).
There has also been increasing
pressure on the International Criminal Court to take up the case against
Israel. The ICC has been quick to investigate Hamas for war crimes, but has
been dragging its feet on investigating Israel. After a recent visit to the
region, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was not allowed by Israel to enter Gaza, and
he was criticized by Palestinians for visiting areas attacked by Hamas on
October 7, but not visiting the hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements,
checkpoints and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.
However, as long as the world is faced
with the United States’ tragic and debilitating abuse of institutions the rest
of the world depends on to enforce international law, the economic and
diplomatic actions of individual countries may have more impact than their
speeches in New York.
While historically there have been
about two dozen countries that have not recognized Israel, in the past two
months, Belize and Bolivia have severed ties with Israel, while others–Bahrain,
Chad, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Jordan and Turkey–have withdrawn their
ambassadors.
Other countries are trying to have it
both ways–condemning Israel publicly but maintaining their economic interests.
At the UN Security Council, Egypt explicitly accused Israel of genocide and the
U.S. of obstructing a ceasefire.
And yet Egypt’s long-standing
partnership with Israel in the blockade of Gaza and its continuing role, even
today, in restricting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza through its own
border crossings, make it complicit in the genocide it condemns. If it means
what it says, it must open its border crossings to all the humanitarian aid
that is needed, end its cooperation with the Israeli blockade and reevaluate
its obsequious and compromised relationships with Israel and the United States.
Qatar, which has worked hard to
negotiate an Israeli ceasefire in Gaza, was eloquent in its denunciation of
Israeli genocide in the Security Council. But Qatar was speaking on behalf of
the Gulf Cooperation Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the
United Arab Emirates (UAE). Under the so-called Abraham accords, the sheikhs of
Bahrain and the UAE have turned their backs on Palestine to sign on to a toxic
brew of self-serving commercial relations and hundred million dollar arms deals
with Israel.
In New York, the UAE sponsored the
latest failed Security Council resolution, and its representative declared,
“The international system is teetering on the brink. For this war signals that
might makes right, that compliance with international humanitarian law depends
on the identity of the victim and the perpetrator.”
And yet neither the UAE nor Bahrain
has renounced their Abraham deals with Israel, nor their roles in U.S. “might
makes right” policies that have wreaked havoc in the Middle East for decades.
Over a thousand US Air Force personnel and dozens of U.S. warplanes are still
based at the Al-Dhafra Airbase in Abu Dhabi, while Manama in Bahrain, which the
U.S. Navy has used as a base since 1941, remains the headquarters of the U.S.
Fifth Fleet.
Many experts compare apartheid Israel
to apartheid South Africa. Speeches at the UN may have helped to bring down
South Africa’s apartheid regime, but change didn’t come until countries around
the world embraced a global campaign to economically and politically isolate
it.
The reason Israel’s die-hard
supporters in the United States have tried to ban, or even criminalize, the
campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) is not that it is
illegitimate or anti-semitic. It is precisely because boycotting, sanctioning and
divesting from Israel may be an effective strategy to help bring down its
genocidal, expansionist and unaccountable regime.
U.S. Alternate Representative to the
U.N. Robert Wood told the Security Council that there is a “fundamental
disconnect between the discussions that we have been having in this chamber and
the realities on the ground” in Gaza, implying that only Israeli and U.S. views
of the conflict deserve to be taken seriously.
But the real disconnect at the root of
this crisis is the one between the isolated looking-glass world of U.S. and
Israeli politics and the real world that is crying out for a ceasefire and
justice for Palestinians.
While Israel, with U.S. bombs and
howitzer shells, is killing and maiming thousands of innocent people, the rest
of the world is appalled by these crimes against humanity. The grassroots
clamor to end the massacre keeps building, but global leaders must move beyond
non-binding votes and investigations to boycotting Israeli products, putting an
embargo on weapons sales, breaking diplomatic relations and other measures that
will make Israel a pariah state on the world stage.
Israel-Hamas war live: US shifts tone, but says Israel support steadfast
December
15, 2023
·
US President Biden says he wants Israel to be ‘focused on how to
save civilian lives’ after adviser Jake Sullivan’s meeting with Israeli PM
Netanyahu focused on shift from “high-intensity” phase of conflict in Gaza.
· Palestinian telecommunications firms say services cut in Gaza once again, as Israel attacks locations across the enclave. Gaza’s government media office says a communications blackout means it will be even more difficult to reach the dead and injured.
· Israel concludes a day-long raid in Jenin, killing at least 11 civilians. However, Israeli forces are conducting other overnight raids across the West Bank.
· At least 18,787 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7. The revised death toll in Israel stands at 1,147.
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