Gaza, a Veto and Palestinian Graves

Syed Badrul Ahsan:

It doesn’t matter that 17,000 Palestinians, including 8,000 children, have been bombed to death by the state of Israel. It doesn’t matter that Gaza is today a valley of death, a throwback to the days before life sprouted on the planet. Gaza is today a canvas where life swiftly mutates into a ghost land.

It matters little that a resolution tabled by the United Arab Emirates for a ceasefire in Gaza is supported by a hundred other countries. It doesn’t matter at all that 13 members of the UN Security Council supported the resolution and called for it to be put into implementation.

None of this matters. What matters is America’s determination to block the path to a restoration of sanity in the Middle East and by extension in the wider world.

In a clear spirit of hubris, the US representative at the UNSC debate vetoed the resolution. The British ambassador came close to vetoing it but then stopped at the point of abstention.

And thus was a move, prompted by the desperate appeal by Secretary General Antonio Guterres through invoking Article 99 of the United Nations Charter to ensure an end to the human and humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, shot down by Washington.

The Russian ambassador spoke for everyone when he pronounced the US veto as the passing of a death sentence on Palestinians, who will have more of themselves--- thousands or tens of thousands --- perish in Israel’s killing mission in Gaza.

Gaza has been ruined. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli soldiers go on raiding homes and carting young Palestinians off to incarceration. Images of Palestinians, detained and in their underwear, have gone viral. These images are a reminder of Hitler’s Nazis, his SS troops, indulging in atrocities in Europe decades ago.

These are reminders of what Imperial Japan did to the Chinese and the Koreans in the 1930s and 1940s. These images revive in the souls of good men and women around the world sordid tales of the disaster visited upon Bosnia-Herzegovina by the murder squads of Slobodan Milosevic. These are a cruel re-enactment of what Yahya Khan and Tikka Khan did to the Bengalis in 1971.

When Robert Wood, the deputy US ambassador to the UN (his boss was apparently away) raised his hand, with little sign of embarrassment, to veto the UAE resolution, he and his government were giving a new signal to Benjamin Netanyahu and his occupier-regime to carry on with the carnage in Gaza. It is here that you have an interesting and disturbing situation. A government which has been roused to fury because Hamas killed 1,400 Israelis --- which Hamas was absolutely wrong to do --- and has in these past two months gone around, in a mood of revenge, to kill as many Palestinians as it can, now has the latest signal of American support to keep up its campaign of murder.

Netanyahu will go on being on the rampage.

It is a genocide taking place in Gaza. Back in the late 1940s, Nazi and Japanese war criminals were brought to trial and marched to the gallows. In more recent times, Serbian and African war criminals were rounded up and deposited in The Hague to answer for their misdeeds. But in 2023 the war criminals in Tel Aviv are being encouraged to keep up their offensive in Gaza, in the name of finding Hamas fighters and killing them. It doesn’t matter that the Israel Defence Force (IDF) has found few, if any, Hamas men during its offensive. But it has bravely destroyed homes, hospitals, offices, mosques and schools.

It has presided over a lengthening of cemeteries housing the Palestinian dead.
It doesn’t matter that Anthony Blinken goes all over the Middle East informing the world that his is a mission for peace. It doesn’t matter that all those thousands of peace marchers in Washington, London, Paris, Berlin and all over the world demand an end to Israel’s genocidal mission in Gaza. People don’t matter.

It doesn’t matter that the Biden administration arms Netanyahu to the teeth so that he can go after more Palestinians to kill. But it matters, to these men in Washington and Tel Aviv, that the Iranians may be behind Hamas, behind Hezbollah. The word we have here is hypocrisy. Give Netanyahu all he needs to kill Palestinians, but see to it that Hamas and Hezbollah and even the Palestinian Authority remain emasculated.

Shame is written --- or is it? --- all over the image of the International Criminal Court. It has remained silent on Gaza, has never sought to call the perpetrators of the genocide to account. It is that same ICC which only months ago audaciously served a warrant of arrest on Russian President Vladimir Putin in light of Moscow’s military action in Ukraine. And yet today the ICC sees nothing, hears nothing, feels nothing in Gaza.

These double standards define the ICC as they define all those states which have consistently stood up for Israel through all its bloodletting in the Middle East.

The ICC is therefore irrelevant. And swiftly turning into irrelevance too is the United Nations itself. The decline of the League of Nations is part of history, a commentary on its failure to ensure peace in Europe after the 1914-1918 war. The United Nations, brought into being with much fanfare and hope in 1945, was conceived as a more durable international mechanism to ensure peace on earth. It has not lived up to its promise.

It is treated with cavalier disdain by the five permanent members of the Security Council. Its directives on a restoration of peace around the world are observed more in the breach than in the implementation. Its resolutions on the Middle East, especially those relating to Israeli occupation of Arab land since 1967, have flagrantly been violated or ignored.

Its secretaries-general have held office on the sufferance of its more powerful members. Boutros Boutros-Ghali was unable to secure a second term in office because Madeleine Albright did not want him to carry on as UN chief. And lest one has failed to see the gravity of the situation, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, emboldened by American support for Tel Aviv’s offensive in Gaza and angry at the emphatic comments on the situation by Guterres, has demanded that the secretary general resign.

The audacity is unbelievable.

And so the war crimes go on in Gaza. Israel is stuck in a dilemma of its own making. It cannot destroy Hamas and it cannot therefore take its soldiers back home. Hundreds of its soldiers have perished in Gaza, with many more wounded. The lesson is clear: even as Gaza is reduced to a wasteland, Hamas refuses to admit defeat and Israel cannot claim it is winning the war it has imposed on the more than two million Palestinians inhabiting Gaza.

It is the apocalypse in Gaza. That the Palestinian procession of death will go on was ensured when the American spokesperson for the Biden administration at the UNSC raised his hand to nullify the efforts of a hundred nations towards bringing about a ceasefire in Gaza. That raising of the hand by Robert Wood was one more sign of the growing irrelevance into which the UN is slipping before the eyes of the world.

Writer: Politics and international affairs analyst