UN crimes against Palestine
The writer is a geopolitical analyst. She also writes at globaltab.net and tweets @AneelaShahzad
The British and the French were the leading states that led forth the idea of setting an International System — the League of Nations — after WWI. The primary goals of the League were ‘maintaining world peace; preventing wars through collective security and disarmament; and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration’. The League proved to be a failure however, ending with WWII. The United Nations replaced it in April 1946 and inherited a number of agencies, organisations and obligations founded by the League.
To understand why the UN is structurally incapable of resolving the Palestine Issue, it is essential to understand that the UN was not entirely a new entity created with the League’s mistakes in view, but an extension of the League itself. The League was terminated on April 18, 1946, with the transfer of its properties and assets to the UN. And one of the properties of the League was the ‘Mandate of Palestine’, which the League had previously delegated to Britain, with a certain set of assertions and implications.
The ‘Palestine Mandate’ says, “Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917 (the Balfour Declaration), by the Government of His Britannic Majesty and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people … Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country ... The Mandatory shall be responsible for placing the country under such political, administrative and economic conditions as will secure the establishment of the Jewish national home … shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes…”
The question is: how does the League become obligated to respect a non-public letter written from UK’s foreign ministry to ‘Dear Lord Rothschild’, a leader of the British Jewish community, which was a private entity and not a state entity of any sort? When at the same time the League does not give any mention of the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, a parallel set to agreements on the same matter.
And how, when the objective of the League’s Mandate system was to administer parts of the defunct Ottoman Empire, as ‘a sacred trust of civilization’, ‘until such time as they are able to stand alone’ — could the League self-contradict and self-authorise itself the power of obligating Britain to create a state within Palestine, alien to the existing population? The League allowed the Ottoman land to be cut out into several severed parts, and the UN ensured the people of Palestine would lose their self-determination and identity by facilitating a fascist occupying colony within Palestine
The UN, by structure, is composed of states with varying power-positions — states that are constrained in their geographical limitations and entangled in their regional issues; states that can be intimidated and bribed with respect to their own national interests so that they would compromise on extra-national interests, so that, knowing well that in presence of such ‘structural constraints’ that ensure the will of the more-powerful, each states would lay it preference in maximising its relative power, in a prevailing anarchic state of affairs, thus upending the UN’s status from a uniting one to a dividing one!
In place of principles of ‘sacred trust of civilization’ and the ‘recognize and promote the realization of the right of self-determination of the peoples’, the UN labeled Palestine as a territory not a state, and proposed the Partition Plan for Palestine at the end of the British Mandate. All this when the King-Crane Commission of 1919 that had been conducted by the US on behalf of the Allied Powers had found that “in that old biblical city all the delegations (Palestinian political parties) showed very careful organization. They were in general agreement concerning the unity of Syria and Palestine, wanted complete independence, and were opposed to Zionism and Jewish immigration”. The US government did not officially publish the result of this commission until 1947, but surely the report must have been shared among the ‘powerful’ that were leading the UN.
United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) after its inquiry reported, “During the course of a two-and-a-half-month investigation, the Special Committee went to Palestine and the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Syria and Trans-Jordan, and also visited displaced persons camps in Austria and Germany, which had been ravaged by the Second World War and had experienced the tragedy of the European Jews under Nazism” — as in what the WWII had done to the Jews in some way implied that Palestine could not be granted freedom.
Over and above all this, the UN under its observance allowed a rigged vote. It was widely reported how the Jewish lobby intimidated President Truman to support the vote and in turn how the US bribed and threatened the voting parties for a ‘Yes’. Indian PM Nehru spoke with anger for the way the UN vote had been lined up, saying that the Zionists had tried to bribe India with millions. Liberia’s Ambassador to the US complained that the US delegation threatened aid cuts to several countries. Philippine representative General Carlos wrote, “After a phone call from Washington, the representative was recalled and the Philippines’ vote changed.” So much for democracy and fair ballot that the UN preaches round the world.
Once the Partition Plan was passed, the Palestinians should have at least been allowed to take their part of the territory. But the UN was just not structurally constructed to force a people to declare their statehood, because UN resolutions are ‘non-binding’, they are only proposals. In fact, the UN has no jurisdiction on any entity/state that is not its member. Imagine the convenience, the World Zionist Organization — which was not a ‘people’ of Palestine, and which was responsible for illegal mass immigration of Jews into the Palestinian’s land — was allowed by vote to form a state. Whereas the real ‘people’ of Palestine who had lived there for millennia with the richest historical and cultural heritage for being the centres of Islam, Judaism and Christianity alike were termed by the UN as non-existing, and their land a ‘territory’, a no-man’s-land!
Published in The Express Tribune, March 15th, 2024.
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