Israel is criminal, stay out of the UN

Similarities - The United Nations have never expelled any member state. However, in 1974 an attempt was made to expel apartheid South Africa: a case with several similarities to today.

What follows is my English translation of an article, originally in Italian, by Pino Arlacchi¹, published this morning, 26th October 2024, on the Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano (paywalled, but it can also be found on Antimafia Duemila), thus it was probably written before the overnight Israeli attack on Iran, which I covered in this article. All footnotes and emphasis mine.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The measure is full. The State of Israel can no longer stand in the United Nations. It has become an outlaw state that breaks one after another of the cornerstones of international law and flaunts its impunity by being able to count on the political protection and unlimited military support of the United States.

If this were not the case, Netanyahu would never have dared to insult the UN, in the midst of the General Assembly, calling it “a swamp of anti-Semitic bile”, and he would not have had 230 UNRWA² employees killed in the course of bombings, fires, and assaults on schools, food depots, and UN-marked humanitarian aid convoys in 2023 alone. UNRWA is the agency created in 1949 by the General Assembly to assist Palestinian refugees created by “Nabka” [sic - it should be “Nakba”], the 1948 catastrophe that saw 700,000 Palestinians violently driven from their homes and land by the Zionist militia that became Israel's army. All of this made a mockery of the settlement plans established by the UN, and inaugurated a long series of crimes and illegalities that reaches the present day. And which lies at the root of the founding of the State of Israel as well as Al Fatah, Hamas, Hezbollah and the like.

Next to UNRWA, the second biggest victim of Israeli hostility towards the UN is UNIFIL, a 50-country mission created in 1978 by the [UN] Security Council to promote peace in Lebanon. UNIFIL has so far paid for the implementation of its mandate with 337 lives. Not all of its losses are due to Israeli attacks, but it is precisely in recent weeks that Tel Aviv's intolerance against possible witnesses of atrocities planned and about to be carried out has exploded.

From 1948 until today, there are over 24 [UN] Security Council resolutions criticising or condemning Israel's illegal occupation of territory and cruelties against Palestinians. Some of these resolutions have become notorious for being recalled frequently during crises triggered by Israel.

Resolution 242 of 1967 stipulates Israel's withdrawal from the occupied territories after the Six-Day War in order to foster a lasting peace in the Middle East. Resolutions 446 of 1979, 904 of 1994, 1073 of 1996 and 1394 of 2002 join the 155 resolutions passed by the General Assembly from 2015 to the present and covering the three military interventions in Lebanon prior to the current one, illicit settlements in the West Bank, withdrawal from occupied territories, massacres and deportations of Palestinian civilians.

These deliberations of the global majority are so many stages in the furrow that has been dug between the governments of Israel on the one hand and the United Nations and the rest of the world on the other. The 41,000 dead in Gaza, the 100,000 wounded, the millions of displaced people in Lebanon and Gaza, the repeated attacks on Iran, Yemen and Syria, the targeted assassinations of individual foreign dignitaries over the past year are in no way justifiable. They are not excesses of self-defence caused by the massacre of 1,200 Israeli civilians.

We are dealing with a UN member state affected by a degenerative process. It has become a serial aggressor that cannot refrain from committing crimes against humanity, war crimes, attempted genocides and massacres on repeat, only to play the victim and take refuge behind the shield of the United States.

No member state has ever been expelled from the United Nations. However, the organisation came very close, in 1974, in the case of South Africa, a case that bears obvious similarities to that of Israel today. The debate in the UN over the expulsion of South Africa was triggered not only by the growing international aversion to apartheid, but also by South Africa's continued occupation of Namibia, defined as illegal by the International Court of Justice, as in the case of the current Israeli occupation of Lebanon and the West Bank.

It all started in 1969, with Resolution 269, which stated that if South Africa did not withdraw from Namibia, the Security Council would “meet immediately to determine effective measures” to be taken.

The issue was raised of the application of Article 6 of the UN Charter³, which concerns the procedure for the expulsion of a member state, to be voted on in the [UN] General Assembly at the proposal of the [UN] Security Council.

South Africa was not expelled from the UN only because three out of five members of the Security Council - the US, France and the UK - vetoed the proposal. It was still an anti-communist bastion to be protected. But the [UN] General Assembly circumvented the obstacle in 1974 by refusing to accept, by an overwhelming majority, the credentials of the South African delegation. South Africa was thus excluded from participation in the General Assembly for a good twenty years, until 1994, only re-joining after the end of apartheid.

Israel's current situation is much more serious than South Africa's in the 1970s. In both cases we are dealing with rogue, “delinquent” regimes on the fringes of the international community. But the white racist state - faced with the attacks committed by the terrorist wing of the liberation movement led by the young Mandela and the huge street demonstrations - did not attempt genocide or the deportation of the black population. The years of the transition to democracy, therefore, cost South African blacks “only” 14,000 dead. In the last decades of its life, the Jo[h]annesburg regime made no war on the UN or UN missions. Its demise came with an agreement between the parties and the promise of future reconciliation.

Kicking Israel out of the UN is a drastic but necessary measure. We need to break the bubble of hysteria and omnipotence within which lives a regime of psychopaths who do not realise that they are at war not against the Palestinians and the Middle East, but against the whole world. The shock can also be healthy for its protector, a declining superpower tempted to go in the same dangerous direction.

On a final note, it is worth mentioning that there is actually an initiative by the Palestinian Authority to expel Israel from the United Nations General Assembly and it is making headway, as reported by Jewish Insider 10 days ago - I strongly recommend that you read this article, especially if you think that kicking Israel out from the UN may not accomplish much from a practical point of view.

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1. Former UN Under-Secretary-General from 1997 to 2002 and full professor of sociology at the University of Sassari.

2. United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

3. 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. [link to Chapter II of the UN Charter, including Article 6]