WALTER L. HIXSON
Fijian U.N. soldiers retrieve the remains of 106 Lebanese refugees burned in the Israeli artillery shelling of the United Nations compound in Qana, Lebanon, April 18, 1996, where hundreds of civilians had taken refuge during Israel’s “Grapes of Wrath” offensive. (JOSEPH BARRAK/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2020, pp. 16-17
History’s Shadows
By Walter L. Hixson
THE UNITED NATIONS is marking its 75th anniversary this year, though the global pandemic will no doubt produce a muted celebration. It was a far more hopeful time 75 years ago, as survivors of the most widespread and destructive war in human history created a new international organization to keep the future peace. The new organization went on to define and decry the crime of genocide and to lay out a vision for the expansion of human rights and human freedoms.
The country that played the dominant role in forging the U.N., supplied it with the most funding and prestige, and the country where it was located—the United States of America—could take justifiable pride in the preeminent role that it played. As many Americans of the time were keenly aware, the failure of the League of Nations to keep the peace after the First World War had been due in part to the U.S. refusal to join the League, even though its creation had been the brainchild of the American President Woodrow Wilson. The same mistake would not be made in 1945.
However, today, the country that did the most to bring the U.N. into being is the country that is doing the most to undermine it. President Donald Trump’s de-funding of the World Health Organization (WHO), on the heels of his defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), and officially withdrawing from UNESCO and the U.N. Human Rights Council (2017 and 2018 respectively), marks the low point in the history of the U.S. relationship with the international agency that it did so much to spawn.
When we turn to the history of the Palestine issue, it becomes apparent that the United States has betrayed the U.N. and its mission from the outset. By appeasing Israel rather than backing U.N. efforts to resolve the Palestine issue, the United States for decades has undermined the U.N. and sabotaged its international peacekeeping role.
A HISTORY OF REJECTIONISM
While the Zionist movement welcomed the partition of Palestine in 1947, and Israel readily joined the U.N. the following year, from that point forward Israel has shown nothing but contempt for the international peace and human rights organization. Few, if any, countries in the world have been more defiant and contemptuous of the U.N. than the Zionist state.
The virulence was vividly displayed within months of Israel’s creation when Zionist extremists, led by a future Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir, assassinated the U.N. mediator, Sweden’s Count Folke Bernadotte—a man who had worked during the war to rescue Jewish refugees from the Nazis. As mediator, Bernadotte was again working on behalf of displaced and starving refugees, but this time they were Palestinians, evoking the ire of the Zionist zealots who shot him to death, along with a French official, at a Jerusalem roadblock on September 17, 1948.
No one was ever charged over the political assassination of an international mediator, a murder from which Israel benefited, as the Bernadotte Plan, which offered a framework for a reasoned settlement over borders and refugees, crashed into the iron wall of Israeli rejectionism. Already under the influence of the Zionist lobby, the Truman administration appeased Israel’s rejection of the U.N. plan amid the 1948 presidential election campaign.
One of Bernadotte’s unforgivable sins, as far as the militant Zionists were concerned, was his desire to carry out the U.N. policy of establishing Jerusalem as an international city. Under the partition agreement as well as U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 (December 1948), Israel had agreed to a “permanent international regime for the Jerusalem area,” but David Ben-Gurion and his colleagues had no intention of abiding by the U.N. resolutions.
Initiating an aggressive war in June 1967, Israel seized control of East Jerusalem and made it clear that it had no intention of ever leaving. On July 4, the U.N. General Assembly voted 99-0 with 20 abstentions—the latter including the United States—in favor of a resolution that condemned Israel for actions designed to “alter the status of Jerusalem.” Today, in the era of wholesale appeasement of Israel and the Israel lobby under Trump, the United States has recognized occupied-Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
In the wake of the June 1967 war Israel labored tenaciously—just as it had done in the wake of the Sinai war a decade earlier—to preclude a reasoned U.N.-brokered settlement of the Middle East conflict. In 1968, with the ardent Zionist Arthur Goldberg orchestrating U.S. policy from his post as ambassador to the U.N., the Johnson administration sided with the Israeli argument that U.N. Security Council Resolution 242—under which Israel was to withdraw from the territories occupied in the war in return for peace—did not apply to all of “the” territory seized by aggression.
From that point forward, Israel began to flood the occupied territories with illegal Jewish-only settlements in blatant violation of international law and myriad U.N. resolutions. The U.S. sided with Israel—sometimes against all of the other nations of the world—as it almost invariably opposed and vetoed resolutions attempting to restrain Israel’s illegal settlements.
THE ISRAELI WARFARE STATE
One of the primary purposes of creating the U.N., of course, was to prevent war and to contain the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Rather than use its considerable financial leverage over Israel to force the Zionist state to sign the U.N.-sponsored Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968), the United States rewarded Israel’s introduction of nuclear weapons into the Middle East, in violation of international law, by increasing its massive annual military assistance to Israel (far exceeding that to any other nation). While in recent years Iran proved amenable to a negotiated agreement to contain its nuclear research program, Israel has shown such contempt for international nuclear non-proliferation that it does not even admit to possessing the weapons of mass destruction.
As Israel is, at its essence, an aggressive warfare state—armed and aided throughout its history by the United States—it has hardly worked to keep the peace. Israel launched wars in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1982, 2006, 2009 and 2014. These are only the major wars, to say nothing of myriad borderland conflicts, state-orchestrated assassinations (the most by any country in the world), and routine police-state repression against Palestinians of all ages. In addition to the wars, Israel has committed countless atrocities, including targeting the U.N. compound at Qana, Lebanon, on April 18, 1996, killing 106 Lebanese civilians, nearly half of them children, and injuring 120, including four U.N. peacekeepers.
By appeasing Israel throughout this prolonged history of aggression, the United States has badly compromised the United Nations and the cause of universal human rights that Americans originally championed in the wake of World War II. With the Middle East and many other international conflicts unresolved, and with the desperate need, underscored by the current pandemic, to strengthen rather than weaken the WHO, there has never been a more important time to support the U.N.
Unfortunately, the U.S. consistently has chosen instead to side with the militant little Zionist state and against the cause for which the U.N. was created—the pursuit of a more just and peaceful world.
History’s Shadows, a regular column by contributing editor Walter L. Hixson, seeks to place various aspects of Middle East politics and diplomacy in historical perspective. Hixson is the author of Israel’s Armor: The Israel Lobby and the First Generation of the Palestine Conflict (available from Middle East Books and More), along with several other books and journal articles. He has been a professor of history for 36 years, achieving the rank of distinguished professor.
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