Solidarity with Palestine or death warrant?

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators march during a “No Votes for Genocide” rally organised by the Boston Coalition for Palestine before the US election. AFP

Today is the United Nations Day for Solidarity with Palestine. Exactly 77 years ago today, the international community—dominated by the West then as it is now—signed the death warrant for the Palestinian people by adopting a United Nations General Assembly resolution. 

Apart from being the death warrant, UN Resolution 181 itself was everything the UN Charter does not represent. It paved the way for land grabs, settler colonialism, racism, ethnic cleansing, and now genocide.

In what is seen as a miscarriage of justice, the resolution endorsed a colonialist invasion by European Zionists who migrated to Palestine, evicted the indigenous people, and took their land by force—a process that is continuing with the full backing of the Western powers. The illegitimate state thus established is called Israel. It was the first manifestation that the United Nations set up in 1945 was a charade. Hijacked by a coterie of World War-winning thugs, the UN is an ineffectual organisation. Its mechanisms are abused by international thugs who hold the rest of the world for ransom through threats of violence. Their foreign policies are not based on universal moral values but on power politics, which in turn is linked to the use of force, the threat of violence, or intimidation of weaker nations. The biggest abuser is the US.

In the run-up to the United Nations General Assembly vote for Resolution 181 on November 29, 1947, the US arm-twisted weaker nations such as Liberia and the Philippines to change their stance or face aid cuts in what was the first attempt—after the setting up of the UN—to distort the will of the international community. The resolution that partitioned Palestine was adopted by killing principles of natural justice. The indigenous Arab Palestinian people, who were 68 percent of the population, were given 45 percent of the land. In contrast, the Jewish population, who were 32 percent of the population, got 55 percent of the land. 

When in 1897, the Zionist movement adopted a resolution in Basel, Switzerland, to establish a Jewish state, Palestinian Arabs, both Muslims and Christians, were living in harmony with the indigenous Semitic Jews. When World War I ended with the Ottoman Empire losing its Arab territories, including Palestine, to the British and French forces, the Jews were 11 percent of the population.

The partition was also a recipe for conflict because the land mass given to Israel effectively separated the West Bank from the Gaza Strip. The connectivity was a tiny corridor with the state of Israel on either side.

Within five months of the adoption of this preposterously unjust resolution, the Palestinian ethnic cleansing, or Nakba, began. In the first Nakba, ahead of Israel’s declaration of independence in May 1948, some 750,000 to 900,000 Palestinians were expelled from 500-odd villages. Hundreds, if not thousands, were lined up and massacred. Their properties were looted and their history was erased. 

The Palestinian’s right to self-determination and statehood was recognised in the Versailles Treaty that defined the rules of the post-World War I international order. However, after the League of Nations was set up in 1920 in terms of the Versailles Treaty, ‘Not-So-Great’ Britain, one of the permanent members of the League Council—the equivalent of the UN Security Council—manipulated the League process to enforce the 1917 Balfour Declaration. In terms of this declaration, imperial Britain, which was enriching itself by exploiting and plundering its colonies across the world, allowed the European Zionist colonialists to set up a Jewish state in Palestine, as though Palestine was the British monarch’s grandmother’s property.

With Britain, the US, and their allies aborting justice, can they call themselves civilised, and are they morally qualified to be in the UN Security Council? The US has turned the UNSC into a counter that issues permits for genocide. As a result of Washington’s deliberate failure to rein in Israel through the UNSC mechanism, Israel has killed so far 45,000 Palestinians since October 7, 2023. Nearly 20,000 of these victims are children, some dying in their mothers’ wombs, some dying while being suckled, and some dying in schools, UN shelters, and food queues. 

As though a 45,000 death toll is not enough, the sociopathic Joe Biden administration on Wednesday approved fresh arms supplies to Israel. With Israel using these weapons in its war against Palestinian children and civilians, Biden has made his country an accomplice in the genocide. 

It is time that International Criminal Court (ICC) Prosecutor General Karim Khan investigated Biden, the worst US president as far as Middle East peace efforts are concerned.

The ceasefire deal that came into effect this week in Lebanon has nothing to do with any compassion Biden had for the suffering people. It was more a strategic move on behalf of Israel than any humanitarian action. Israel agreed to the ceasefire deal not because it wanted peace but because it found Hezbollah to be a formidable foe. The ground invasion of Lebanon proved costly for Israel. It lost too many soldiers. Hezbollah, though it lost leader after leader in Israeli attacks and its officers were bombed, did not lose its ability to inflict pain on Israel. Throughout the war, Hezbollah was liberally launching hundreds of missiles at once at Israeli targets, including Haifa and Tel Aviv.

So attributing any humanitarian motives to the US-sponsored Israeli-Lebanon ceasefire deal amounts to pleading ignorance to the US moves to protect Israel come what may. Had the Biden administration been moved by the humanitarian suffering, it could have long coaxed or browbeaten Israel to agree to a ceasefire deal in Gaza. Instead, it lets Israel massacre the Gaza innocents at will, even though it knows that under international law what Israel does is wrong and disproportionate even if its action is justified on the basis of its right to defend itself.

This week, the Biden administration even hit out at the ICC for issuing arrest warrants on Israel’s war-crimes suspect cum Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and war-crime suspect cum former defence minister Yoav Gallant. Biden condemned the court’s actions as outrageous and said the US would always stand with Israel. A law-abiding nation will respect the decisions of courts set up for the enforcement of international law and international humanitarian laws. The US is the only country that has enacted laws against ICC. The American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA), enacted in 2002, prohibits cooperation with the ICC and even authorises the President to use military force to free US personnel detained or imprisoned by the ICC. That the ICC took unusually more than six months to issue the arrest warrants on the two Israeli war crimes suspects while it issued arrest warrants on Russian President Vladimir Putin within days is also a controversy that needs to be tackled in a separate article.

Israel-worshipping US Congress members interpret the ASPA to say that the US should send a military force to The Hague and release Netanyahu and Gallant if they were ever arrested and detained by the ICC. Weaker nations are well advised to ignore, with a smirk, any advice or warning from the US if they violate international law.