One rogue nation cannot declare war on the UN itself and continue to get away with it
Over the past year, Israel has launched attacks on multiple countries and occupied territories: the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran.
Yet countries and territories aside, Israel has also targeted one specific organization with a series of unprecedented rhetorical and violent attacks.
Yes, the United Nations. We have all witnessed Israel, in effect, declare war on the UN.
Consider the record of recent weeks and months:
Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”
How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?
Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? 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”.
To be clear: it’s not as if there isn’t a mechanism for expelling a UN member state. Article 6 of the UN charter says:
“A Member of the United Nations which has persistently violated the Principles contained in the present Charter may be expelled from the Organization by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”
Now some might point out that no member state has ever been expelled from the UN under Article 6. Plus, the United States, which has vetoed over 50 UN security council resolutions critical of Israel since the early 1970s, would never allow such a “recommendation of the Security Council” to be made.
It’s a valid objection. History, however, teaches us that there are workarounds to security council vetoes. As the international law professor and former US state department adviser Thomas Grant pointed out in October 2022, while making his own case for expelling Russia from the United Nations in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, “UN members on two occasions in the past have judged a particular Member delegation no longer fit to sit at the organization’s table. On both occasions, the UN improvised a solution.”
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In 1971, socialist and non-aligned nations in the Global South voted in the UN general assembly to recognized the People’s Republic of China as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” and thereby replaced the representatives from the Republic of China (Taiwan), which had been a founding member of the UN. ROC was out, PRC was in – and it was the general assembly, not the security council, that decided it.
Three years later, relying again not on the UN charter but its own “rules of procedure” as the human rights lawyer and former UN official Saul Takahisi has noted, the UN general assembly “voted to refuse to recognize the credentials of the South African delegation” and “barred South Africa from participation in the Unga” until 1994.
Oh, and the two main reasons cited by the UN general assembly for suspending South Africa’s membership? Its practice of apartheid against the indigenous Black population and its illegal occupation of neighboring Namibia. Sound familiar?
Crucially, as Thomas Grant has written, “the move against South Africa followed no precise procedural pathway in the UN charter or existing UN practice” and the UN showed how “an improvisatory ethos prevails, when the member states judge a matter important enough that they must act.”
So what is more “important” for the UN member states right now than attacks on the UN itself by a single member state? On the UN’s authority, personnel, headquarters and charter? On Saturday, 40 countries issued a joint statement condemning Israel’s brazen and ongoing assault on UN peacekeepers in Lebanon but talk is cheap. UN member states need to act.
The Israeli government may want to pretend that the United Nations, and the general assembly in particular, is irrelevant, impotent and filled with antisemitic bias, yet Israel only exists today because of a UN general assembly resolution. The country’s own 1948 Declaration of Independence makes seven different references to the United Nations, all of them super-positive and ever-so-grateful.
So evicting Israel from the UN, or at least suspending its participation in the general assembly as a first step, would send a powerful message – both to the people of Israel and to the rest of the world.
That the authority of the United Nations still matters. That the lives of UN staff and peacekeepers also matter. And that one rogue nation cannot declare war on the UN itself and continue to get away with it.
