Ian Williams
WRMEA June July 2022
WHETHER THE UNITED NATIONS can survive this “Special Military Operation” on a member state is a moot point. The invasion of Ukraine is a direct challenge to the whole 1945 world order enshrined in the U.N. Charter. And that is not good news for people like the Palestinians, whose advocates and diplomats have invoked the “unique legitimacy” of the U.N. and its refusal to authorize Israel’s acquisition of territory by force. The closest parallel is the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, where the U.N.’s response was entirely legal if perhaps ill-advised in subcontracting the details to the klutzes in Washington.
No friend of the Palestinians should wield “What about?” to justify Vladimir Putin’s illegal aggression on Ukraine, let alone the illegal and inhumane ways in which he has waged that war. But it is indeed legitimate to raise the questions in Washington, although the purpose should be to hitch Palestinian issues to the Ukrainian bandwagon, not to give Putin a “Get-out-of-The-Hague-Free” card in the Superpower monopoly game.
For half a century, the U.S. veto has vitiated the Palestinian cause at the U.N., so it was almost a coming of age for Moscow when the General Assembly vote on Russia’s veto against the Ukraine Security Council Resolution was as badly supported as previous U.S. vetoes on behalf of Israel.
However, U.S. diplomats—and media— were making no such odious comparisons as they crowed about Putin’s lack of support. Admittedly the reportage usually added (very) small print to the self-congratulations, that General Assembly resolutions are “not legally binding.” Archivists in the State Department could remind them that the reason for their alleged lack of effect is that for 30 years the U.S. has eroded their standing by declaring them as “not legally binding.”
That was, of course, because most such resolutions condemned U.S. vetoes protecting Israel. In the U.S. presentations, somehow the General Assembly resolution partitioning mandatory Palestine and setting up a Jewish state was indeed as binding and unalterable as the Laws of the Medes and Persians. But then, the Uniting for Peace resolutions were legally effective enough to fight the Korean War— until Palestine resurrected the procedure and Washington denigrated it.
Washington is not alone in suffocating in the stink of its own hypocrisy. Russia claims its veto from the U.N. Charter, whose core principle is a ban on “the acquisition of territory by force” accompanying the principle that all sovereign states are equal. Of course, the veto means that some states are more equal than others, but the U.N. Charter did not give Russia a permanent seat on the Security Council. That privilege belonged to the U.S.S.R., which was with Ukraine (and Belarus!), a founding member of the U.N. in 1945. The U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, after which Moscow usurped the seat. There was no formal vote on it, but the diplomatic identity theft went unchallenged, but not un-noticed, at the time. U.N. diplomats did discuss it but, like abuse within the family, decided that discretion was the best path.
Even so, albeit 30 years on, it is a useful point to make against Putin’s specious legalism of a “special military operation” against a state he claims is not really a country. However, it is not practical to remove Moscow from the Security Council, although Russia’s removal from the Human Rights Council sets an interesting precedent for a challenge to its delegation’s credentials for the General Assembly.
Secretariat inactivity apart, U.N. agencies of every description have responded to the war with material help and facilitated the rescue of civilians under siege by Russian forces, but U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has ducked the chance to “name and shame” and has instead been the soul of wriggly circumspection. That might have been acceptable if he were keeping his powder dry ready for a big diplomatic push. A U.N. Secretary-General has a role, indeed a duty, to provide a ladder for preposterous politicians like Putin to climb down from the tree in which they have trapped themselves.
Sadly, it took several months to get Guterres to attend to the war in person, without a ladder, and then only after hundreds of former and present U.N. luminaries signed a letter demanding action. When he went to the region, he raised eyebrows—and hackles—by calling on Putin first rather than the obvious victim. The Russians showed their appreciation by rocketing Kyiv within hours of Guterres landing there. Anyone who thinks that was an accident will maintain that the Black Sea flagship Moskva was hit by a stray iceberg. Belatedly Guterres gave the firm U.N. position that “in line with the resolutions passed by the General Assembly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of its territorial integrity and against the Charter of the United Nations.” He added “There is one thing that is true and obvious, and that no arguments can change: We have not Ukrainian troops in the territory of the Russian Federation, but we have Russian
troops in the territory of [Ukraine].”
During the war, Russian troops have breached numerous international conventions with attacks on civilians, in voluntary transfers of population, looted cultural property and so on ad infinitum. Whatever you think of Russian military prowess, it is not a People’s War as Mao or Ho Chi Minh preached, and, as far as winning hearts and minds go, the Russophone Ukrainians in the East, who have borne the brunt of the Special Military Operation, have been vociferously inveighing against their aspirant liberators—in Russian.
One small bright spot was the successful move by Liechtenstein, ironically endorsed by the U.S., to trigger a General Assembly vote whenever a permanent member casts a veto. Almost ironically as he looked around at the ruins Russia had wrought of the U.N. Charter and the post-World War II settlement, Moscow’s representative claimed that “the division of powers between the Assembly and the Council has allowed the United Nations to function effectively for more than 75 years.” This “effectiveness” is indeed news to millions of people from Indochina to the Congo, the Balkans and the Middle East, whose lives have been afflicted by the “scourge of war,” unhindered by the U.N. Charter and the organization it set up to end it forever.
Consistently, as a frequent victim of the veto, the Palestine delegation was a cosponsor of the measure, leading to an Israeli delegate to protest that it was against the rules. But then the Israeli delegate compounded her obtusity, trying to reconcile the good vetoes that Washington used with the bad ones that Russia had wielded. “In some cases, the problem has been the text of the resolution before the Security Council, not the veto itself.”
Indeed, as she implies, the text of a resolution might well call Israeli actions into question and “in the case of a particular resolution in the Security Council that does not promote peace and security, the veto should be cast.”
From now on, supporters of Palestine can and should use every occasion of a General Assembly debate on a U.S. veto to relate American statements about Russian frightfulness in Ukraine with Israeli behavior in Gaza. Bombings of civilians, deaths of children, violation of boundaries, defiance of Geneva conventions, annexation of territories acquired by force: you would almost think that Putin had studied the Israeli blueprint, and as Adolph Hitler famously concluded over the Ottomans’ Armenian massacres, “they got away with it.”
It is a reciprocal learning process as the barbaric Israeli assassination of Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh demonstrates. Who knows though, maybe the White House foreign policy team might also learn from the self-serving expediency and manifest ambivalence of Israel and the Gulf states to U.S. resolutions on Russia and let them know they cannot expect automatic diplomatic and military support.
And maybe the U.S. can once again realize that international law is not something you can turn on and off when Israel is involved: that you cannot preach effectively against annexations in Ukraine, while condoning land grabs in the Golan, West Bank and Western Sahara. ■
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