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ISRAEL’S WAR AGAINST THE WORLD  
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Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies
October 17, 2024
LA Progressive
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_ Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at
a breaking point, and U.S. obstruction offers no solution to this
crisis—it only fuels it. _

, Photo credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons

 

Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries
neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the
promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan
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to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the
world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this
plan
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Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and
settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a
dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled
slaughter
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those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon
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millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to
pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For
Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every
demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future
Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt
and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the
entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of
the world come together at the United Nations and in international
courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which
Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have
signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that
Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since
1967 is illegal
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and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all
those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed
a resolution
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Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel
fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may
take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo,
economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and
invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping
force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the
conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions
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Lebanon. At least five
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were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately
firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters,
before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates.
On October 15th, an Israeli tank fired at
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UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently
deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting
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missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under
attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL
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up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed
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UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria
and China.

The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon
from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and
Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and
thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their
lives
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to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese
territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in
the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52
peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.

Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL
peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana,
India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have
strongly and unanimously condemned
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latest attacks, and insisted
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"such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately
investigated."

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its
peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian
agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious
assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed
a horrifying number
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UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed
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fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide
relief 
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some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba
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or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli
army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and
homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of
the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.

When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new
state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders
concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own
borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop
them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with
the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.

Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays
maps
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a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies,
while Israelis openly talk of annexing
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of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017,
Netanyahu accused 
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agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for
"perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem" instead of solving it
and called
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it to be eliminated.

After October 7, 2023, Israel accused
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of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on
Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries
suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found
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Israeli authorities had not provided "any supporting evidence" to back
up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its
funding, with the sole exception
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the United States.

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are
now three anti-UNRWA bills 
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the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in
Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded
to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the
agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of
parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s
headquarters
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Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned
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if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the
people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an
unmitigated disaster.”

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a
breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed
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General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp
of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another
planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try
to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless
crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for
the whole world.

Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even
entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran
launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of
Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres
put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle
East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded
by declaring
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UN Secretary General _persona non grata _in Israel, a new low in
relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on
the UN, using its veto
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the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to
force Israel to comply with international law.

American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only
fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United
States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a
more direct role in the conflict.

The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders
are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of
the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership,
after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would
“never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.

A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the
UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor
of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.

_MEDEA BENJAMIN is a cofounder of both CODEPINK and the international
human rights organization Global Exchange. She has been an advocate
for social justice for more than 30 years._

_NICOLAS J. S. DAVIES is an independent journalist, a researcher for
CODEPINK and the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion
and Destruction of Iraq._

* Israel; Palestine; United States; United Nations;
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* Israel bombing
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* UNRWA
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