Instinctively, you might think, the great bulk of critical UN resolutions would be directed at the brutal autocracies and theocracies which surround it, but the opposite is true. As lawyer Anne Bayefsky noted at a 2003 UN conference on anti-Semitism: “Every year, UN bodies are required to produce at least 25 reports on alleged human rights violations by Israel, but not one on an Iranian criminal justice system which mandates punishments like crucifixion, stoning and cross-amputation.”
In recent years, new Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories have raised tensions considerably.
The UN, together with most international legal opinion, considers them illegal, but Israel disputes this in some cases and ignores it in others.
Under the populist right-wing administrations of the last decade, their number has ballooned, with more than 100 such outposts now established on the West Bank alone.
It may feel like a long time ago, but things did start well between the nascent Jewish state and the UN.
The adoption in November 1947 of Resolution 181 by the United Nations’ General Assembly was one of the first acts of the UN, and it set in motion the creation of Israel through the partition of British-run Mandatory Palestine. Churchill had handed over the job to the UN, having had more than a few of his own run-ins with the Stern Gang.
The two-state solution the UN proposed – independent Jewish and Palestinian states, plus a special international administration for Jerusalem – was welcomed by almost all Jewish organisations at the time. And on May 14, 1948, the day on which the British Mandate expired, Israel declared its creation within the borders defined in Resolution 181.
Yet the following day, the first Arab-Israeli war broke out when Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq sent in their armies, with additional firepower coming from Saudi Arabia and Yemen.
Tension as Israel expands
Although the resolution had been voted on and passed in the UN with a two-thirds majority, Arab nations voted against it and never accepted the result. They felt it gave too much land to the Jews, who were a smaller population.
A month before the vote, Azzam Pasha, the general secretary of the Arab League, told the Egyptian newspaper Akhbar al-Yom: “Personally, I hope the Jews do not force us into this war, because it will be a war of elimination, and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades.”
It was from this point on that Israeli-UN relations soured. An early application for Israel to join the UN as the war raged was supported by the US and the Soviet Union but scuppered by others on the Security Council, including Britain, France and Canada, who abstained.
Despite this, Israel won what was a bloody nine-month clash, dramatically expanding its territory beyond the original UN blueprint in the process.
The Arab offensive, far from improving the lives of Palestinians, resulted in more than 700,000 fleeing their homes in what they refer to as the great Nakba, or catastrophe. In the three years following the war, close to a million Jews migrated from around the world to settle in Israel, including many from surrounding Muslim countries.
Israel was finally granted UN membership after the fighting had stopped in May 1949, although Britain again abstained. Further, Israel’s membership was made conditional on its implementation of borders outlined in Resolutions 181 and 194, the latter of which says: “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid.”
The Arab states originally voted against Resolution 194 - fearing demands for compensation from Jewish refugees - but soon became its strongest advocates.
Israel, for its part, has never moved to implement either resolution despite initially promising to do so. The return of the Palestinian refugees “will never happen in any way, shape or form”, said former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir in 1992, echoing many similar statements before and since.
Refugee rights
Virtually all clashes between Israel and the UN in the last 70 years can be traced back to this basic dispute over land and refugee rights in one way or another.
A particular low point came in 1973 when the UN General Assembly passed a resolution about apartheid, which condemned “the unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, apartheid and Zionism”. A subsequent resolution, passed in 1975, stated “that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination”.
The US described the passing of the resolution as an “infamous act”, and Israeli ambassador Chaim Herzog said it was based on “hatred, falsehood and arrogance; Hitler would have felt at home listening to the UN debate on the measure”, he added.
So to borrow a phrase, it was not into “a vacuum” that the UN secretary-general blundered on Tuesday with his statement on the October 7 massacre; a statement that could be read as suggesting there were factors which could somehow mitigate Hamas’ bestial actions.
And then there was his silence, and the silence of so many UN organisations, about the violence we see across the rest of the world year in and year out.
A study published by the UN Association of the UK reviewing the language of General Assembly resolutions about Israel between 1990 and 2003 put it like this: “Resolutions adopted … by the General Assembly were far more explicit in their condemnation of Israel ... Violence perpetrated against Israeli civilians, including the use of suicide bombers, is mentioned only a few times and then in only vague terms. Violence against Palestinian civilians, on the other hand, is described far more explicitly.”
Some, including Anne Bayefsky, see this tendency not as an oversight, but as a “demonisation of the Jewish state”.
