A Tale of Two Speeches - the UN and Israel - and the US!

https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/u.n.-delegates-endure-one-speech-and-walk-out-on-another.html

Delegates walk out as Prime Minister of Israel Binyamin Netanyahu prepares to speak during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the United Nations headquarters on Sept. 26, 2025, in New York City. World leaders convened for the 80th session of UNGA, with this year’s theme for the annual global meeting being “Better together: 80 years and more for peace development and human rights.” (MICHAEL M. SANTIAGO/GETTY IMAGES)

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November/December 2025, pp. 13-15

United Nations Report

By Ian Williams

THE “TRUMP” PEACE PLAN is less than the mixed bag that some Panglossian commentators suggest: it is a string bag with far more holes than fabric. Like all other plans that Israel signs up for, its major premise is to bypass the United Nations and all accepted international norms and treaties to produce a “negotiated” settlement. As we said many years ago when President Bill Clinton called for U.N.-free negotiations between the parties, this is tantamount to a referee who is overtly taking sides, putting a toddler in the dojo with a champion Sumo wrestler, while saying let the best man win. In short, it is based on lies. 

President Donald Trump has once again negotiated with himself and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to produce the alleged Gaza settlement. Netanyahu got his way in the end by getting Trump to rewrite the deal that the Arab monarchs had agreed to even while alleging that it had their approval, but even then the Israeli prime minister was clearly surprised that, as a sop to the autocratic Gulf states, Trump had the temerity to demand Israel stop bombing. After all, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has money, but when did it last gift-wrap a Boeing for the president, or offer such lucrative financial possibilities to the extended Trump family? 

Even the sheikhs have to pay some regard to their domestic constituencies, and it is clear that none of the Gulf states can officially countenance overt Israeli annexation of Gaza and the West Bank with the consequent ethnic cleansing. So the annexation plans are put on hold for the Gulf while the smiting continues for the rabid and bloodthirsty Israeli electorate.

Despite his initial shock, the Israeli PM soon recovered his sang-froid (it means “cold blood,” remember) and adopted the oldest Israeli tactic—feign agreement and continue bombing. 

For the credulous of the world, they have even excavated the maggoty cadaver of the Quartet, charging its last head, Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister and joint author of the lies that started the Iraq War, with supervising the Trump-Netanyahu New Deal. The so-called U.N. Quartet, dead but not yet officially buried, had been contrived to wrap what Kofi Annan called the “unique legitimizing power” of the U.N. around the Israeli wish list.

Showing what they are dodging by excluding U.N. involvement, former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said Trump’s plan “manifestly breaches” last year’s International Court of Justice legal opinion that Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is unlawful and should end unconditionally. Unsurprisingly she also noted the complete absence of Palestinian representation in the looters’ cabal proposed to “rebuild” Gaza. Avoiding the cliche of “needless to say,” in fact we do need to say that some explicit mention of which countries have demolished Gaza might have lent some perspective.

But one can almost understand why people might want to discount the U.N. seeing the debilitating result of the interaction between the malign neglect of its founding member and the relative quiescence of its senior leadership. As it hits its 80th anniversary, President Trump’s infantile and petulant speech to the U.N. General Assembly ignored almost every major issue on its global agenda. Presented with the opportunity to present a vision to the world, no matter how skewed, he chose instead to ventilate a string of petty personal grievances and perceived slights, confirming that his vision of the world is, at best, myopic and narcissistic.

His demand for the Nobel Peace Prize would almost be reassuring if it implied any sensitivity to global opinion, but of course it was no more than a bullying hissy fit. Obama, the first Black president, got a peace prize, so Trump wants one too and he will throw his toys out of the crib if he doesn’t get one. 

By stolidly sitting it out in the auditorium, delegates showed how far the global community is from mustering a serious challenge to the U.S. It is sad testimony to the enduring hegemony of the U.S. that delegates did not walk out (in droves) as they later did for Netanyahu. However, enduring the speech should not be confused with applause or approbation. Delegates who had made the ultimate sacrifice for their countries by sitting through the speech afterward made odious comparisons with the Trumpathon: Chavez smelling lingering evil on the podium, Fidel Castro’s marathons and Muammar Qaddafi’s fancy-costumed polemic. But at least all these in their own distinctive ways addressed subjects and themes more relevant to the U.N. than Trump’s autistic self-indulgence. A geopolitical highlight was the leaders of Albania and Azerbaijan overheard mockingly congratulating each other on ending the war between them that only Trump knew was being fought. 

Humorous anecdotes aside, we have to consider whether the United Nations has reached its sell-by date after 80 years. Far from being a panacea for the world’s woes, it no longer seems to function even as a placebo, failing to resolve global crises from the Middle East to Myanmar, from Ukraine to Sudan. Famously, the organization was intended, not to take us to Heaven, but to stop us going to Hell. But it has been getting very hot here on the threshold. 

Little remarked (because it might have rattled Make America Great Again fans), Trump said, “Our country is behind the United Nations 100 percent. I think the potential of the United Nations is incredible. Really incredible. It can do so much. I’m behind it. I may disagree with it sometimes but I am so behind it.” 

Observers have to decide whether this is a shrewd commercial appreciation of the effect on his native New York property portfolio of a U.N. exit from the land that had been made available by an earlier property magnate, William Zeckendorf, arguably because it exponentially increased the value of his neighboring real estate.

But while it is easy to see what the U.S. gets from the U.N. in terms of legitimizing Washington’s whims, we can see why there is increasing consideration of the possible advantages of a U.S.-free U.N. On basic U.N. principles, most members get more than they can give up out of membership. The Uniting for Peace procedure provides a mechanism for what could happen if enough members decided to isolate Israel as their predecessors did South Africa. 

Back in 1945, the founders of the organization had a recently reinforced lesson from the failure of the League of Nations. Then, they concluded that if no U.S., then no U.N. On many levels that was certainly true then, not least that Washington paid 50 percent of the budget and put up the cash for headquarters in New York. The new organization had several built-in features whose significance has since changed to the extent that it invites reconsideration.

Famously, the organization was intended, not to take us to Heaven, but to stop us going to Hell. But it has been getting very hot here on the threshold.

The Security Council, based on an overall consensus between its dominant members, was vested with huge powers in the organization, which was not the universal global organization it has become, but was composed of “peace-loving” nations who had been part of the Allied coalition and who were unlikely at that stage to have existential differences with the five permanent members (China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, United States). In the beginning universality of membership was not a principle, and many were excluded, deemed to have shown insufficient affection for peace. Reportedly, the first draft of the U.N. insignia deliberately cut off the cone of Latin America to signal disapproval of Argentina and Chile’s lack of support for the allies. Those with a sense of irony might also remember that Stalin insisted on membership for Belarus and Ukraine, which, 80 years later, Putin claims does not exist!

Around the same time, the General Assembly with some misgivings partitioned Palestine and accepted Israel into membership, following promises to abide by U.N. resolutions—which at that time included accepting the return of Palestinian refugees. That established a pattern of recidivist Israeli pledge breaking that has remained consistent to this day.

The U.N.’s core attraction has been “anti-annexation” insurance for members, outlawing the acquisition of territory by force. This is why so many micro-states rushed to join after the invasion of Kuwait, while George H.W. Bush’s friendship with several of their rulers meant that the U.S. dropped its long-standing opposition to membership for postage stamp states. And we should remember that out of respect for the basic principles of sovereignty, Bush senior stopped Desert Storm at the Iraqi border once Kuwait was cleared of Iraqi invaders. However, he also paved the way to devalue sanctions as a tool by imposing such harsh and anti-humanitarian conditions that countries in the end refused to apply them and are still very reluctant to consider them.

Things have changed. Israel has pushed the bounds of that mutual U.N. Charter non-invasion pact and stretched the “guarantees” to breaking point, as has Putin’s invasion and annexation of Ukrainian territory. Trump has made direct threats to Canada and Denmark/Greenland—both NATO members— and Panama. The U.S. has recognized the annexation of the Golan Heights, accepted Morocco’s claims to Western Sahara and is on the way to blessing the seizure of the West Bank. Ronald Reagan broke international law with the invasion of Grenada and George H. W. Bush did the same in Panama–but both left after effecting regime change (unlike Saddam!).

An ominous cloud on the horizon has been an ingenious attempt to flout several different U.N. mandates in one fell swoop: to transfer the people of Gaza to Western Sahara while cementing Morocco’s illegal annexation of that territory. It seems far-fetched, but look where the hazy hints in the Balfour Declaration have taken us.

U.N. members could vote to refuse credentials to Israel and call for a boycott, but they have not yet screwed their courage to the sticking place. While they will walk out on Netanyahu, they sat through Trump. The jury is actively considering the future of the organization but it is gloomy, as they consider a new Secretary General who they will choose on the basis that he, or she, will be a self-effacing nonentity—another António Guterres in fact.

U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is president of the Foreign Press Association of the U.S. He is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).

Ecocide as well as genocide.

 Israel has upped its repressive occupation and insidious ethnic cleansing to a generally identified level of genocide. Increasingly, shocked observers of the flattened Gaza cityscape compare it to the aftermath of Hiroshima. This is unfair. The Japanese city was the target of just one bomb. Unlike the IDF in 2025, the American occupiers in 1945 did not go in afterwards to demolish systematically every surviving structure, nor to strafe, bomb and shoot survivors. The sheer methodical vindictiveness of the Gaza operation has shocked even those of us who had begun with very low expectations of the Israeli forces’s conduct. 

The shock was not based on any misconception that the Israelis are too nice for this, but rather that the government renowned for its hasbara had stopped caring about the global optics of their exultant atrocities – or had given up trying to control or discipline their army of professional pogromists. More and more it invites the most odious comparison, with what the Nazis did to the Warsaw Ghetto which only lasted a month but did directly kill almost as many people as recorded in Gaza.

Overwhelmed by the horror of the direct casualties, we are not just witnessing genocide, but ecocide as it has been doing for many decades. Israel has always appealed to its own brand of “useful idiots,” as Joseph Stalin called the people who uncritically supported the Soviet Union, during the Great Purge. This enabled Israel to cultivate its image as a cosy liberal social democratic community engaged in a long-term environmental project to make the “desert green.” For example, it collected money from sentimentalists abroad to plant trees and dedicate acclaimed and named national forests. Less noticed was that these plantings were of intrusive alien intrusive species of fast growing conifers designed to obliterate the signs of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages as quickly as possible.

Similarly, Israel touts its water management skills as uniquely suited to the arid zone. Water management is much easier if it is based on water piracy. In the West Bank a major impelling fact for the occupation has been Israeli control of the aquifers there, whose waters are purloined for Israel proper and, increasingly the settlements, whose untrammeled access to water contrasts sharply with the Draconian Israeli control enforced on long standing Palestinian villages which suffer droughts as the Settlers fill their hilltop swimming pools.

Israeli apologists should perhaps be questioned about how they reconcile “making the desert green” with felling and uprooting long-standing olive trees and burning croplands.

In Gaza, already crowded and thirsty, the aquifer has been increasingly polluted by sea water as a line of Israeli pumping stations extracted water at the border line. Since the Israelis started their genocide, access for hydrologists has probably been as restricted as for journalists, but all reports indicate desperate shortages as sewage and water facilities are destroyed simply because they are there. 

One has to question the so-called deal” to rebuild Gaza, which does not mention who destroyed the territory. It is undoubtedly one of the most thoroughly demolished development sites in history but it will be interesting to see Tony Blair’s plans on how to dispose of the millions of tons of debris left by Israeli depredations. We can be confident that there will be more, since anyone who believes that Israel will actually stop bombing and demolishing the strip because of a so-called peace deal is in the market for a suit from Hans Christian Anderson’s imperial tailor. 

Like all other agreements that Israel has signed up for, its major premise is to by-pass the United Nations and all accepted international norms and treaties to produce a “negotiated” settlement. That it will break and declare is no longer binding when the other side has given Israel all that is had asked for. 

With no Palestinian input, the Trump’s deal has even excavated the mummified UN Quartet, dead but not yet officially buried. The Quartet had been contrived to wrap what Kofi Annan called the “unique legitimizing power” of the UN around the Israeli wish list. This reincarnation, in the form of Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister and joint author of the lies that started the Iraq War, supervising the New Deal. 

Among the “outdated” Un principles it is designed to avoid are the recent legal opinions from the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. Navai Pillay, former UN Human Rights commissioner,declared that Trump's plan “manifestly breaches” last year’s ICJ legal opinion that Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is unlawful and should end unconditionally.  Unsurprisingly she also noted the complete absence of Palestinian representation in the looters’ cabal proposed to “rebuild” Gaza. 

If this gang were to remedy this ecocide, it will not be for the benefit of Gazans. The neutron bomb was once touted as the weapon that removed the people but left the structures intact, but the Gaza pogrom reverses that. It has destroyed the buildings but left behind a shellshocked population – or some of it. 

Trump and the Israelis have been actively scouting for some obliging desert country to which they can transportany survivors. Less out of solidarity, but more because they do not want an influx of highly educated radicalized refugees, there have been few takers among the Arab autocracies to house the dispossessed. The reluctant feign a principled aversion to aiding and abetting ethnic cleansing which is, in a way, commendable. However, those Egyptian soldiers massed in the Sinai are not there to withstand IDF incursions, but rather to keep the Palestinians out.

One solution floated has been to defy several different UN mandates in one fell swoop: to transfer the people of Gaza to Western Sahara, thus cementing Morocco’s illegal annexation of that territory, now recognized by Trump, while emptying Gaza of all those people who so inconsiderately survived to spoil his perfect Mediterranean resort development. It sounds mad, but it fits the times.

Whether 'tis Nobeler in the Mind...

The binary polemics about Venezuelan opposition candidate's Maria Corina Machado's Nobel Peace Prize obscure many shades of gray. On balance, it was far from the perfect choice, but it was not completely irrational. On the upside, the award did thwart Trump's infantile demands to cheat and bully his way into his global golf trophy. 

 The Committee's choice suggests an element of caution bordering on cowardice, designed to avert possible ungracious  and infantile petulance from Trump. Not giving it to him risked serious damage to the Norwegian economy and a diplomatic rupture. Hence the "safe" choice. 

 Machado is, after all,  an unrepentant Trump fan and her acknowledgement of his role in winning the prize is sincere and factual. Without the shameless lobbying from the White House, the Committee would probably not have picked her but, they had to throw something to the MAGA crowd to aver the tariff tantrums and possibly worse. Imagine the White House Reaction if the committee had en-Nobeled Lula, or Carney! 

On the positive side the award undermines Maduro's authoritarian claims to legitimacy, which is why some shrill pseudo- Leftist groups - Code Pink springs to mind - have been so vociferous in condemning Machado's win.  

There has been a strong statistical correlation between their support for Maduro,  and for Milosevic, Putin, Al-Assad, Xi and similar thugs whose primary factor of unity is stated opposition to the West, even though they all do extensive business there, where they park their loot.  Their opposition is really against the Western government lip service to human rights. And could they impose tariffs on Oslo?

Also on the positive side of the ledger, Trump's infantile eagerness for the award might finally have led him to pressure Netanyahu into a deal that Hamas had offered two years before. But did 60,000 really have to die to give Trump a chance of basking in feigned Nobelity?

 As Trump wanted but failed to get, Henry Kissinger was awarded the prize for seeming to negotiate the end of a war that he had prosecuted ferociously, perhaps even genocidally! Kissinger's nomination  betokened the death of satire according to uber-satirist Tom Lehrer. But it was an early sign that the committee looks at immediacy and headlines rather than reality. In fact, a special additional posthumous Nobel should be given to Kissinger's co-awardee Le Duc Tho, who refused the award because  in reality there was no peace, not least because Kissinger  and the US carried on prosecuting the war regardless.

Reputation plays a part as well. Mandela deservedly came out of prison smelling of roses and was so lionized by the liberal center and left that we all managed to overlook his continuing expressions of loyal and grateful support to Gaddafi, Al Assad, the Syrians, Moscow and similar regimes that had supported the struggle against an Apartheid regime that had been backed so firmly by Israel, the UK and USA.

Obama won his prize, not for what he had done on the world stage, but for what the naive Norwegians thought he was going to do, based on his speeches and demeanor and his historic victory. As the first Black US President he also seemed to augur a new politics freed of the historic prejudice which permeated the American body politic. The prize was a mistake, as, we now see, was the illusion of the end of racism.

It is, after all, the Peace Prize, and while there is a case for Machado getting it on behalf of the embattled and persecuted opposition, her rhetoric smacks less of Mahatma Gandhi and more of Ahmed Shalabi (look him up!) 

Nor would the avowed devotee of Trump and Donald Milei get the so-called Economics Nobel even though it  has tended to go those who engineered the growing global income disparity. 

But if we assume that the award is on behalf of a brave and indefatigable opposition to the Venezuelan opposition, many of whom unite in wanting to vote out Maduro even if many of them deplore Trump's policies, economic and military, there is a strong case for the award, heartening the opposition and to some extent  protecting them agains the dictatorship. 

So, there is a case both for and against the Award. In the case of Kissinger two of the committee resigned in protest. Resurrect them! That type of berserker Viking steadfastness is called for in the face of the overwhelming pressures of expediency and bullying.

On balance, for Norway, the Nobel Prize, and Venezuelan democracy it was not a perfect decision but it was understandable and defensible.

Bordering on Belligerent

 

Nothing Sacred About Borders
with Jonn Elledge

The latest in our FPA series of on-line conversations about topics that might interest members and others interested in the global flows of information.

“Good fences make good neighbors" claimed poet Robert Frost., forgetting about the Iron Curtain,. Jonn Elledge’s book explains how lousy fences start wars. In an entertaining discussion of claims to “eternal” ownership of territory and “sacred” boundaries he dissects the assumptions of sovereignty and frontiers and acknowledges the legacy of the British Empire in sketching so many of them - but also state boundaries in the US and the border with the 51st state - Canada!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocPpKN6plw0
Comments welcome!

A Timely Blast from the Past

https://media.un.org/avlibrary/en/asset/d210/d2105596 

Another great writer is dead - and I'm not feeling too good myself!

News of Brian Patten's death evoked dangerous nostalgia. I lived in a bedsitter in Huskisson St, in what is now pretentiously known as Liverpool's "Georgian Quarter," but which in those days was an exciting warren of artists, students, writers, prostitutes, transient immigrants or sailors attracted by affordability.

My rent was twenty five shillings a month (1.25) and the landlord did not ask for references. Our former merchant prince's house still contained the original 18th Century furniture, some of which I appropriated and still have in Manhattan.

For a time Brian lived in the bedsitter directly above mine which also later housed Adrian Henri's separated wife Joyce. To maintain the connection with the muses, Henri Graham also an ancillary, but by no means negligible Mersey Poet, lived in the attic flat.

Night after night groupies traipsed up the stairs for a tryst with Brian, including some I know who would have later blushed to admit it. One night, I heard him calling Hell's wrath down on someone, and shortly afterwards the rejected acolyte, genuinely scared, hammered on my door pleading for asylum as Brian thundered up and down the stairs looking for her.

Whatever he had been inhaling or ingesting was strong stuff. Normally subdued and gentle, he was berserk but very eloquent for a Bootle-bred ex-journalist! In the morning she fled and of course,later self published her own poetry.

In those days it was great to be alive, but to be a poet was very heaven, and the "Georgian" quarter bred them. Poet Laureate Carol-Anne Duffy, and Craig Charles, whose early promise as a poet was overshadowed by his role as stand-up comic and "Red Dwarf" hero were memorable denizens of a creative era that it would be difficult to envisage now.

https://www.wrmea.org/israel-palestine/shoot-them-all-god-will-sort-out-the-innocent.html

Shoot Them All, God Will Sort Out the Innocent

IAN WILLIAMS 

REGIONS 

ISRAEL-PALESTINE 

POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 2, 2025

This screen grab taken from AFPTV on Aug. 11, 2025, shows Al Jazeera’s Anas Al-Sharif speaking during an AFP interview in Gaza City on Aug. 1, 2024. He and three Al Jazeera colleagues, as well as two freelance journalists, were killed by a targeted Israeli strike on their tent outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital, on Aug. 10. Israel’s brutal policies reflect the fanatical approach to warfare used by the Crusaders who believed they were justified in killing everyone, regardless of their innocence, in 1209. (AFP/AFPTV/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October 2025, pp. 34-35, 37

United Nations Report

By Ian Williams

AS THE COMMITTEE to Protect Journalists (CPJ) had warned, the “most moral army in world” murdered a whole Al Jazeera Television team in Gaza—a manifest war crime. Israel claimed that Anas Al-Sharif was a “member” of Hamas, and they genuinely seemed to expect international applause for killing him, puzzled that so many in the rest of the world questioned their right to kill reporters the Israeli army had alleged to be “terrorists.” It begs more questions than a season of “Jeopardy.” 

The assumption, largely unquestioned by Western media and politicians, is that it is perfectly acceptable to impose the death penalty on a “terrorist,” even though after decades of wrangling by international lawmakers, the definition has yet to achieve the precision of “heresy” or “witchcraft.” Additionally, it is presumably acceptable to kill the whole team in the vicinity of “the terrorist” even if your hasbara operatives couldn’t even be bothered concocting spurious cases against them, and even though your courts have officially abandoned the death penalty since inflicting it on Adolf Eichmann for, coincidentally, genocide. Almost subliminally hasbara has made execution without due process the norm for “terrorism.” 

Even more disturbingly, Western and Israeli governments that welcomed Nazi Party members and KGB operatives, like Konrad Adenauer and Vladimir Putin, with open arms now accept that anyone connected with the political party that won the last (and only) free elections in Gaza is ipso facto a terrorist—liable to arbitrary execution. 

Israel had reasons for thinking it could get away with killing the Al Jazeera team, as I discovered when I went on international television to talk about Al-Sharif’s murder. “But Israel says he was in Hamas,” the CNN anchor interjected, allowing me to point out that Israel’s “evidence” was unconvincing, not least because its representatives have been exposed as recidivist liars, over and over again, and that Israel had already killed 270 journalists in the Gaza Strip, or above all that it should not matter whether he was, as they claimed, a “member” of Hamas, any more than if he were a registered Republican. 

In fact, even a street sweeper employed by the Hamas-controlled municipality is thus a “member” of Hamas—and a terrorist—and by extension, if employed by UNRWA, that makes the U.N. agency a “terrorist” organization. In fact, the killing of avowed card-carrying Hamas members would also still be illegal if they were  engaged in civilian and not combat activities at the time of their killing.

Al-Sharif was posthumously “lucky,” in that the CPJ, to which all the major media and journalists’ associations pay lip service, had made these points and the U.N. and other organizations had already reiterated that the military targeting of journalists (let alone dismembering them with aimed rockets) was a war crime. Personally gratifying but publicly disturbing were the many people on social media who thanked me for being a rare Western journalist “speaking out.” There are of course many others—but the commentators suggested that few made it to CNN and predicted a short career for the producer who had allowed me on!

All these media bosses go the annual awards dinners of the CPJ, which deserves accolades for speaking truth to the Israel lobby. But while they excoriate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murder of journalists, they avoid actual criticism of Israel, even if they have qualms about actually condoning it. Such reticence is not just about reporters who are relatively privileged in their martyrdom. Media commentators aspire to “Benefit of Clergy” that in medieval times allowed priests to avoid the punitive torture, death and indignity inflicted on laity. While I have a personal and professional interest in forbidding the targeting of journalists, I think that slaying mothers, kids, babies and health workers merits indignation. Indeed, killing even adult male civilians is not good.

Anas Al-Sharif set high standards. Despite threats from the Israeli military, he continued showing what was happening inside this modern equivalent of the Warsaw Ghetto. But many media have been brainwashed to applaud summary execution for “terrorism.”

In fact, when the media mention “terrorism,” there should be a presumption that they are not carrying out reporting, but rather pejorative stenography, parroting government allegations. 

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, the U.N. Security Council set up a counterterrorism committee which invited member states to respond on the definition of terrorism and to detail their responses to it. The Chinese ambassador used to annoy British representative Sir Jeremy Greenstock, the committee’s first chair, with attempts to shoehorn “separatist activities” into the remit. From another point of view, the Iraqi Baathist report on its activities in the global war on “terrorists” was quite illuminating: It reported that the state executed them. The closest the U.N. committee came to reaching a conclusion or to codifying the terrorism offense reflects the confusion of the debate. 

In the light of “human rights lawyer” Keir Starmer criminalizing Palestine Action as a terrorist plot for splashing paint on the planes that he was using to support genocide, one cautionary paragraph in the 2024 brief issued by the committee warns against exactly what Starmer has done: “This could then see the offense used, for example, to prosecute those who have spray-painted slogans on buildings during protest actions.” One could be forgiven for asking if this is where Starmer got the idea to proscribe  even verbal support for Palestine Action.

Thirty years later, the still sitting committee has not yet come to any definitive conclusions on what “terrorism” is.  Clearly reflecting its state-sponsored origins, it concentrates on violence “with the intention of intimidating the public, or a segment of the public, with regard to its security, or compelling a person, a government or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act.” Sheer nihilistic revenge is not included. Driving up to a building with a truck bomb is terrorism; crushing it with a tank or bombing it from the air is an exercise in self-defense.

Presumably using the current Israeli definition, derived from Humpty Dumpty, the accusation means just what they wanted it to mean, neither more nor less, particularly when summed up by Mr. Hasbara Dumpty’s sign-off. “The question is, which is to be master—that's all.” Blatant threats to political and media careers for anyone who steps beyond the linguistic demarcation lines show who are the masters.

I used to quip that it would take World War III to reform the U.N. since it took World War II to reinvent the League of Nations as the United Nations Organization. The international security system built around the U.N. was an (albeit highly) qualified success until the U.S. began bending the rules—mostly but not exclusively on behalf of Israel. The core principle was that the Charter had not declared boundaries to be immutable, but it did forbid unilateral attempts to change them. Indeed, still literally nursing the wounds of World War II, it enjoined member states to take military action to counter any aggressions. Hence the push to recognize a Palestinian state.

Arguments about legal technicalities are often diversionary. People get bogged down in debates about whether Israel’s (or Serbia’s or Russia’s) actions meet the technical definitions that would trigger the Genocide Convention—or whether Palestine constitutes a state. Of course these issues should be addressed, not least because Israel and its supporters are so obsessed with such Talmudic or Jesuitical small print appendices. But that should not sideline the most salient point, which in this case is that Israel is committing mass murder. The rest is commentary. The obvious response to a war crime is to prosecute the criminals, and U.N. members labored hard and long to build institutions that would replace the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. But the prosecutor and staff are under sanctions by the United States. 

Apart from the laudable aim of irking the Israelis, the purpose of demanding recognition of a Palestinian state is to provide legal tools under the U.N. Charter for economic or even military action against Israel. In the complex reflexive world of politics, such resolutions give leverage to persuade governments to do the right thing, and of course we support that. But in almost all countries, the population is now demanding that their governments act more strongly. However, too many nations now belatedly turning to recognition of a Palestinian state see it as a means of getting popular pressure off their back—or even a means of keeping the Zombie of Oslo and the two-state solution shambling on well past its half-life.

It is useful to exploit the Uniting for Peace resolutions in the absence of a hard-to-secure Security Council resolution, but in the end these governments would have more effect if they unite to apply Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Global revulsion and isolation signaled the end of apartheid in South Africa, and that regime never went as far as Israel has. Imagine if it had attacked Bantustans the way that Israel attacks the Palestinian version of them, for example with the nuclear weapons they collaborated on? A Sharpeville a day surely calls for a stronger response from the rest of the world.

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U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is president of the Foreign Press Association of the U.S. He is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).