Israel’s recent attacks on the UN are neither new nor the product of miscalculation. They are, on the contrary, the result of a conscious effort to free oneself from the surveillance of the (theoretical) guardian of the rules of the game established after the end of the Second World War to regulate relations between States, by trying to avoid a new planetary catastrophe which would bring us back to the law of the jungle. And therefore, forgetting that this is a country created precisely by a decision UNThe history of Israel’s relations with the UN is littered with multiple contempts and attacks.
An endless disregard that includes the repeated non-compliance with dozens of resolutions of the General Assembly, taking advantage of the fact that none of them are binding, and even of the Security Council (on the very rare occasions when the United States has renounced the use of its veto power to protect its main ally in the Middle East). Israel considers itself free to both fail to fulfill its obligations as occupying power in Gaza and the West Bank, and to make Jerusalem its “single, eternal and indivisible” capital, contrary to the 1947 partition plan, which determined that it would be an international city with a “corpus separatum” intended to guarantee access to believers of the three religions of the Book.
This contempt includes gestures as ignoble as that made last May by Tel Aviv’s ambassador to the UN, when he shredded the founding Charter of the organization in full Assembly; or others where the tone rises to the point of qualifying the organization itself as an anti-Semitic entity, as well as the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, according to a scenario as classic as it is unacceptable which aims to silence the criticism and complaints not against a people or a religion, but against those who systematically violate international law. In a similar vein, the Netanyahu government declared last week that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was a person unwelcome.
As if that were not enough, Israel had no qualms about putting the organization (its institutions, its workers and its representatives) in the target of its guns. Thus, following a decades-old trend, it once again targeted the peacekeepers of UNIFIL, an international peace operation deployed in Lebanon since 1978, and against UNRWA, the United Nations Agency for Palestinian refugees. In the first case, he not only dared to demand the withdrawal of the 10,500 soldiers deployed along the Blue Line, but, faced with the mission’s refusal to accede to his wishes, he launched directly into the attack from his headquarters and against some of them. its observation posts. These are undoubtedly deliberate attacks that seek, once again, to get rid of uncomfortable witnesses who, moreover, have the mission of denouncing violations of Security Council Resolution 1701.
In the second case, the range of violent actions is much broader. On the one hand, the Israeli government has long worked to eliminate the existence of UNRWA, adding bureaucratic obstacles to its activity in the occupied Palestinian territory, with the aim of preventing it from helping the population and to be able to intervene directly find out what the settlers and Israeli forces do on a daily basis. On the other hand, more than two hundred temporary workers have already been murdered by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) last year; a macabre balance that far exceeds what has happened to the UN so far in any other conflict scenario in which it has been present.
Impunity and no punishment
Added to this are repeated attacks against its headquarters in Jerusalem, the same one that the Israeli government has just confiscated with the aim (even more sarcastic) of building 1,440 housing units for the settlers. And on the horizon – while Tel Aviv aspires to redefine the notion of Palestinian refugee to reduce it to some 400,000 survivors of the Nakba (instead of the more than 5.7 million registered with UNRWA) –, already the The agency’s process of declaring it a terrorist organization is underway in the Israeli Parliament (Knesset).
In short, behavior that would have cost any other state on the planet an avalanche of diplomatic, economic and even military sanctions; but in the case of Israel, with the very direct complicity of Washington, this remains without any form of sanction. It should also be remembered that UNIFIL and UNRWA promptly inform the Israeli military authorities of the location of their installations and their movements. It is therefore not possible to assert ignorance on the part of the IDF each time it commits an assassination of soldiers or workers of the two bodies or destroys their installations.
*Jesús A. Núñez Villaverde is co-director of the Institute for Conflict Studies and Humanitarian Action (IECAH)
