Given its murderous attacks on UN staff in Gaza and declaration of its chief as ‘persona non grata’, it’s about time to invoke Article 6 of the UN Charter to expel the rogue state.
Suppose you are a member of a club that you hate and despise so much you have denounced some of its staff as criminals and started killing them en masse. You have denounced the club president as a non-person and theatrically shredded a copy of its constitutional charter on stage at a general meeting for all members.
The question is not so much whether you should have been expelled already as a minimal response from the club, in addition to calling the police. Rather you should ask yourself why you want to stay and pay your dues as a member at all.
These questions have been raised by prominent journalist Mehdi Hasan in a new op-ed in The Guardian and a legal analysis by Saul Takahashi, a human rights professor at Osaka Jogakuin University and former deputy head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Palestine.
“Why has it [Israel] not yet been expelled from an organisation that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining?” Hasan wrote.
“Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have ‘refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions’. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself ‘persona non grata’.”
Hasan was referring to the killing of a record 228 UN employees over the 12 months Israel has invaded Gaza in ongoing military operations that saw the bombing of UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps. No country has managed to kill more UN staff in a single conflict during the international body’s entire existence.
According to Takahashi, the Israeli military has attacked the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff and facilities in at least 464 instances as of late September.
Israel has falsely denounced the long-standing UN agency as a Hamas outfit, when it has been a lifeline for the Palestinian population over decades and predated Hamas’ takeover of Gaza. It now plays a crucial role in trying to feed and save Gazans under sustained lethal conditions.
The relief agency truly deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, it’s being maligned by Israel, its staff murdered, while Israeli propaganda has been spread uncritically by Western politicians and the news media.
Hasan also was referring to a post on X early this month by Foreign Minister Israel Katz in which he declared UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres persona non grata in Israel.
Katz claimed Guterres didn’t condemn Iran’s latest missile attack on Israel, which Guterres actually did but without mentioning Iran by name. He also claimed the UN chief didn’t denounce Hamas’ terrorist attacks and “sexual atrocities” committed on October 7 last year. Actually he did condemn or denounce the Hamas attacks by name.
Katz has openly considered himself Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political successor. The man is clearly qualified.
No country has defied more UN resolutions than Israel, with full US backing, over the decades. You can find a partial list of more than two dozen such resolutions, compiled by Takahashi, in Opinio Juris, a publication of the International Commission of Jurists.
These include UN resolutions against what he calls “the relentless Israeli colonisation of the West Bank”, the “unilateral annexation of East Jerusalem”, refusal by Israel to comply “with standards of international humanitarian law, in particular the Fourth Geneva Convention applicable in situations of occupation”.
Takahashi did not mention the latest UN resolution condemning as “unlawful” the Israeli presence in occupied Palestinian territories.
Both Takahashi and Hasan have convincingly argued Israel has no place in the UN any more.
It’s about time to invoke Article 6 of the UN Charter, which says: “A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organisation by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”
Perhaps Israel should just quit the international body it hates so much it’s actually and actively killing its staff.
By the way, it recently breached a UN peacekeeping outpost in southern Lebanon, injuring several UN soldiers. Separately, it has ordered the withdrawal of the UN peacekeepers in the south of a sovereign country it is now invading.
There are rogue nations, and then there is Israel, which is in a class all of its own.
Republished from South China Morning Post, 17 October , 2024