The UN wants what Israel wants: genocide and its spillover across the region

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told the UN Security Council on Friday, “We must avoid a regional war at all costs.” Gaza, he added, remains the epicentre of the violence. After Israel assassinated Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and was lauded by the US for doing so as “a measure of justice,” Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric issued a statement that commenced with purported grave concern at “the dramatic escalation”, as if Israeli air strikes are theatre productions. He ended with a call for “an immediate ceasefire and the release of all hostages held there.”

The UN can’t even keep up the pretence that it stands for human rights any more.

Meanwhile, at the UN General Assembly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his audience a display of pathetic power with his speech full of menace promoting Greater Israel at the institution that is supposedly dedicated to eradicating colonialism, which is defined by the Statute of the International Criminal Court as a crime against humanity.

“We are focused on mopping up Hamas’s remaining fighting capabilities,” Netanyahu told the General Assembly. Israel is not mopping up, it is spilling blood demonically in Gaza. And to make an invalid point, Netanyahu likened Hamas to the Nazis, asking who would have allowed the Nazis to rebuild Germany after the war. There is no comparison, of course. As a resistance movement, Hamas exists out of opposition to settler-colonialism — a crime against humanity, remember — and the movement’s existence and fight are entirely legitimate under international law, which the UN overlooks. Genocide, on the other hand, is completely illegal, but the UN has normalised it.

Most disgustingly, Netanyahu appropriated language that has been used by Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. Hezbollah, he said, forced Israelis to become “refugees in their own land.” But… the land is not theirs, it belongs to the Palestinians. “Hezbollah turned vibrant towns in the north of Israel into ghost towns,” Netanyahu continued. Who has turned vibrant Palestinian towns into rubble since 1948? Israel’s Zionist terrorists and settler paramilitaries, that’s who.

And yet, despite the butchered civilians who Israel leaves behind each day as proof of its genocidal intent and action, the UN stays silent after expressing grave concern. The expression itself looks comical now, in the most tragic way possible. What exactly is the UN concerned about? Its inaction gives tacit support to Israel’s genocide. Logically, therefore, the UN wants what Israel wants: genocide and its spillover across the Middle East.

The illusion of the UN as an impartial entity needs to be called out.

Power within the UN lies with a cabal of former colonial powers who approve of genocide, settler-colonialism and racism — the hallmarks of Zionism — because they have been responsible for the ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations around the world.

The UN created rules for the colonised to follow, and for former colonial powers and the current colonial state – Israel – to exploit. The cycle of violence is seamless, because there is no challenge to the status quo of expecting the colonised to resort to begging for crumbs from international institutions while imperialism delays justice in order to destroy and annihilate.

To the delegations that walked out when Netanyahu spoke, I say, you are diplomats, not activists. Walking out does not imply political power at the UN General Assembly. Israel cannot be shamed; it is shameless. But it can be stopped, first and foremost by destroying the illusion of the UN as having a human rights agenda and exposing the interests of individual countries that hold the UN’s political power.

Lies are killing civilians in Palestine and in Lebanon just as much as weapons are. The UN is no shelter for human rights; it is an international enabler for the torture of the colonised.

The UN wants what Israel wants: genocide and its spillover across the region