Israel-UN relations sink to new depths

Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly on September 27 – Copyright AFP Charly TRIBALLEAU

Nina LARSON

Israel’s long-contentious relationship with the United Nations has since October 7 spiralled to new depths, amid insults and accusations and even a questioning of the country’s continued UN membership.

Addressing the UN General Assembly on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused the world body of treating his country unfairly.

“Until this anti-Semitic swamp is drained, the UN will be viewed by fair-minded people everywhere as nothing more than a contemptuous farce,” he thundered.

The past year has seen repeated accusations from within the UN system that Israel is committing “genocide” in its war in Gaza, while Israeli officials have made charges of bias and have even accused the UN chief of being “an accomplice to terror”.

The heat has been turned way up in a war of words that has raged between Israel and various UN bodies for decades.

And temperatures have risen further in recent days amid Israel’s escalating strikes on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“There has been a great deterioration” in the relationship, said Cyrus Schayegh, an international history and politics professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute.

“It has gone from fairly bad to really bad.”

– UN ‘betrayal’ –

Since Hamas’s deadly attack inside Israel nearly a year ago, UN-linked courts, councils, agencies and staff have unleashed a barrage of condemnation and criticism of Israel’s devastating retaliatory operation in Gaza.

“We feel the UN has betrayed Israel,” the country’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva Daniel Meron told AFP.

Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.

Of the 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 41,500 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The UN has described the figures as reliable.

Israel has especially taken aim at UNRWA, the UN agency supporting Palestinian refugees, but its ire has been felt across the UN system, and up to the UN chief.

Israeli calls for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to resign began just weeks after October 7, when he asserted that the attack “did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”.

– ‘Above international law’ –

Even before October 7, Israel complained of UN bias, pointing for instance to the towering number of resolutions targeting the country.

Since the creation of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, more than a third of the over 300 condemnatory resolutions have targeted Israel, Meron pointed out, describing this as “mind-boggling”. 

Critics meanwhile highlight that from the time a General Assembly vote paved the way for Israel’s establishment in 1948, the country has ignored numerous UN resolutions and international court rulings, without consequences.

Israel has always snubbed resolution 194, which guarantees the Palestinians expelled in 1948 from the territory Israel conquered the right to return or to compensation.

It has also ignored rulings condemning its forceful acquisition of territory and the annexation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the continuing and expanding settlement policy in the West Bank, among others. 

By allowing Israel to remain in “non-compliance with international law, the West has been basically making the Israelis believe that they are above international law”, Geneva Graduate Institute political sociology professor Riccardo Bocco told AFP.

– ‘Impunity reigns’ –

Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN rights office, also said a lack of accountability in the Middle East crisis appeared to have made “the parties to the conflict more brazen”.

“We rang the alarm bells multiple times and now there is the impression that impunity reigns,” she told AFP, lamenting increasing attacks on UN bodies and staff expressing concern over the situation.

“This is unacceptable.”

UNRWA has faced the harshest attacks.

It saw a series of funding cuts after Israel accused more than a dozen of its 13,000 Gaza employees of involvement in the October 7 attack.

Agency chief Philippe Lazzarini has accused Israel of conducting “a concerted effort to dismantle UNRWA”, which has suffered dramatic human and material losses in Gaza, with more than 220 staff killed.

Netanyahu demanded earlier this year that UNRWA, which he said “perpetuates the Palestinian refugee problem (and) whose schools indoctrinate Palestinian children with genocide and terror … be replaced by responsible aid agencies”.

– ‘Pariah’ –

Francesca Albanese, the UN independent rights expert on the Palestinian territories, who has faced harsh criticism and calls for her ousting from Israel amid her repeated accusation it is committing “genocide” in Gaza, recently suggested the country was becoming a “pariah”.

“Should there be a consideration of its membership as part of this organisation, which Israel seems to have zero respect for?” she rhetorically asked journalists last week.

Meron slammed Albanese as “anti-Semitic and really an embarrassment to the UN”.

Other experts warned that Israel’s disregard for the UN was threatening the broader respect for the organisation.

Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, the UN expert on the right to drinking water, warned of the consequences when UN bodies “make decisions and nothing is respected”.

“We are blowing up the United Nations if we don’t react.”