With ban on aid agency, has Israel finally declared war on the UN after crying ‘bias’ for years?

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - GENEVA, Oct 30 — Israel’s long-thorny relationship with the United Nations erupted into what could be seen as a declaration of war this week, with lawmakers barring the UN agency for Palestinian refugees from the country.

Israel faces an international backlash after its parliament on Monday approved a bill banning UNRWA, which coordinates nearly all aid to the war-ravaged Gaza Strip, from working in Israel and annexed east Jerusalem.

The move plunged Israel’s already increasingly toxic relationship with the UN to new depths, after a year of escalating insults, accusations and attacks, and even questioning of the country’s continued UN membership.

“This is the culmination of a declaration of war,” an editorial in Swiss newspaper Le Temps said Tuesday.

‘Accomplice to terror’

Since Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack, the heat has been turned way up in a war of words that has raged between Israel and various UN bodies for decades.

There have been repeated accusations from within the UN system that Israel is committing “genocide” in its devastating retaliatory war in Gaza.

Israeli officials have meanwhile ramped up charges of UN bias and have even accused UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres of being “an accomplice to terror”.

Earlier this month, Israel went so far as to declare the UN chief “persona non grata”, banning him from entering the country, after he failed to immediately condemn an Iranian missile attack.

“Anyone who cannot unequivocally condemn Iran’s heinous attack on Israel does not deserve to step foot on Israeli soil,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz said, accusing Guterres of lending “support to terrorists, rapists, and murderers”.

That followed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fiery address to the UN General Assembly last month, when he described the UN as an “anti-Semitic swamp”.

Netanyahu also lashed out at French President Emmanuel Macron for suggesting Israel owed its existence to a UN resolution, and should therefore show more respect for its decisions.

Temperatures have risen further since Israel last month ramped up strikes on Hezbollah strongholds in Lebanon and sent ground forces into the country.

The UN peacekeepers positioned along the demarcation line between the two countries have reported “deliberate attacks” by Israel on its members and positions, sparking international outrage.

UN ‘betrayal’

In the past year, UN-linked courts, councils, agencies and staff have showered Israel with criticism over its actions in Gaza.

“We feel the UN has betrayed Israel,” Daniel Meron, the country’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, recently told AFP.

Israel began complaining of UN bias long ago, pointing for instance to soaring numbers of resolutions against it.

Since the creation of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006, more than a third of the more than 300 condemnatory resolutions have targeted Israel, Meron pointed out, describing this as “mind-boggling”.

Israel’s calls for Guterres to resign began just weeks after October 7, when he asserted that the attack “did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation”.

But it is UNRWA that has faced the harshest attacks.

The agency has seen more than 220 of its staff killed in Gaza in the past year — even as it has faced dramatic funding cuts and calls for its dismantlement amid Israeli accusations some of its workers took part in the October 7 attack.

‘Protracted impunity’

Critics highlight that from the time a General Assembly vote in 1948 paved the way for the recognition of Israel, the country has ignored numerous UN resolutions and international court rulings, without consequences.

Israel has always snubbed resolution 194, which guarantees the Palestinians expelled in 1948 from the territory Israel conquered the right to return or to compensation.

It has also ignored rulings condemning its forceful acquisition of territory and the annexation of East Jerusalem after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the continuing and expanding settlement policy in the West Bank.

By allowing Israel to remain in “non-compliance with international law, the West has been basically making the Israelis believe that they are above international law”, Geneva Graduate Institute political sociology professor Riccardo Bocco told AFP recently.

Francesca Albanese, the outspoken and controversial independent UN expert on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, agreed.

The “ongoing genocide” in Gaza, she said in a fresh report published Tuesday, “is doubtlessly the consequence of the exceptional status and protracted impunity that has been afforded to Israel”.

Albanese, whose dismissal Israel has demanded, warned last month that the country was rapidly becoming a “pariah”.

“Should there be a consideration of its membership as part of this organisation, which Israel seems to have zero respect for?” she rhetorically asked journalists. — AFP