Last year, Israel launched attacks against several countries and occupied territories: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. But he didn’t just attack countries and territories. Israel has also carried out a series of violent and unprecedented rhetorical attacks against a specific organization.
Yes, I’m talking about the United Nations. We all saw Israel declare war at the UN. Let’s review what’s happened over the past few months and weeks:
- From the stage of the United Nations General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the organization “despicable,” a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of anti-Semitic hatred.”
- On the same General Assembly stage, 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.”
- The Israeli Foreign Minister wrongly accuses UN Secretary General António Guterres of failing to condemn Iranian attacks against Israel, declares him persona non grata and announces that he is banned from entering Israel.
- The Israeli government is actively obstructing the commission of inquiry mandated by the UN to collect evidence regarding the attacks carried out by the Palestinian group Hamas on October 7.
- The Israeli Parliament is considering designating a long-established UN agency as a “terrorist organization”: the United Nations Palestinian Refugee Agency (UNRWA).
- The Israeli army has bombed schools, warehouses and UN refugee camps in Gaza for twelve consecutive months, killing a record number of UN staff: 231. According to Guterres, “since the creation of the UN, it is the largest number of UN employees. This is by far the number of our employees killed during a single conflict or natural disaster.
- Israeli troops are now also attacking United Nations peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, several peacekeepers serving in Lebanon were injured during various attacks by Israeli forces on UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) positions near the so-called “blue line”. The latest attack took place this Wednesday.
Why hasn’t Israel been kicked out of the UN?
How can all this be okay? Is this acceptable or legal? But perhaps the most important questions are others: How is it possible for Israel to remain a member of the UN? Why has he not yet been kicked out of an organization he relentlessly and shamelessly attacks and undermines?
Of course, there are other countries that violate human rights and remain full members of the UN. There is Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name a few. But none of them murdered UN employees on a large scale; none sent tanks to invade a UN force base; none have “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’s be clear: there is no mechanism to expel one of its member states from the UN. Here is what Article 6 of the Charter of the United Nations says on this subject: “Any member of the United Nations who has persistently violated the principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon recommendation of the Security Council. » .
It could be argued that no member state has ever been expelled from the UN under Article 6. Additionally, it could also be said that since the early 1970s the United States has vetoed over 50 Council resolutions criticizing Israel’s security and would never allow it. the Security Council to recommend his 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 adviser Thomas Grant cited two occasions when “members of the UN “considered that a certain delegation was no longer appropriate to sit at the table of the organization. “On both occasions, the UN improvised a solution,” he explained in October 2022.
Two backgrounds
In 1971, socialist nations and non-aligned nations of the South voted in the UN General Assembly to recognize the People’s Republic of China as “the sole legitimate representative of China to the United Nations.” , with the aim of replacing the UN representatives. the Republic of China (Taiwan), which was a founding member of the UN. Following this vote, Taiwan was excluded; the People’s Republic of China internally; and it was not the Security Council that decided this but the General Assembly.
As human rights lawyer and former UN official Saul Takahisi pointed out, what happened three years later was also based on the UN’s “internal regulations” and not on the Charter of the United Nations. It was at this time that the General Assembly voted against recognizing the credentials of the South African delegation and banned South Africa from participating in the General Assembly until 1994.
What were the two main reasons why the UN General Assembly decided to suspend South Africa’s membership? He apartheid against the indigenous black population and illegal occupation of neighboring Namibia, does this sound familiar?
“The action against South Africa did not follow any specific procedure in the Charter of the United Nations or in existing UN practice,” Thomas Grant wrote in his argument. The organization had demonstrated that “ethos “Improvisation prevails when member states consider an issue sufficiently relevant to act.”
What could be more “relevant” to UN states today than attacks on the UN itself by a single member state? What could be more important than attacks on the authority, personnel, headquarters and statutes of the UN?
Forty countries issued a joint statement on Saturday condemning Israel’s relentless and brazen aggression against UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. But talking costs nothing, what UN member states must do is act.
The Israeli government could attempt to portray the UN and, in particular, its General Assembly as unimportant, powerless organizations rife with anti-Semitic prejudice. But Israel’s very existence today is due to a resolution of the United Nations General Assembly. In Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, there are seven references to the United Nations: super positive and full of gratitude in every case.
For the people of Israel, as well as the rest of the world, expelling the country from the UN or at least taking the first step by suspending its participation in the General Assembly would send a powerful message: that the authority of the United Nations remains current; 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 working in the organization as if nothing had happened.
