The relationship between Israel and the United Nations has always been strained. But the war in Gaza has pushed it to breaking point.
Now as pressure grows on UN agencies in Gaza, so do fears over the permanent bypassing of the United Nations.
Will that deal a blow to the multilateral system, at a time when the UN is already reeling from severe financial crisis, not to mention questions over its very relevance?
“Israel’s sidelining of UN agencies in Gaza – particularly in the delivery of aid – offers a chilling glimpse of what a world without a functioning United Nations might look like: starving people being shot while queueing for food and malnourished medical staff too weak to treat civilians,” Christine Ryan, director of the Prevention of Crimes against Humanity Project at New York’s Columbia University, told RTÉ News.
For nearly eight decades, the United Nations has been engaged on the issue of Israel and Palestine.
After all, it was a UN resolution in 1948 to partition the former British mandate into Jewish and Arab states, that sparked the first Arab-Israeli war.
The Security Council, the UN’s highest decision-making body, still regularly meets, as it did this week, to discuss the conflict in the Middle East including what is still called “the Palestinian Question”.
Palestinian women queue in front of a flour distribution point set up by the independent Save Youth Future in coordination with the UN World Food Programme in Gaza
At that meeting, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations confirmed that the head of the UN’s humanitarian agency (OCHA) in Gaza and the West Bank would be ejected at the end of this month and the visas of other international staff restricted.
“We will no longer allow anti-Israel activity under the guise of humanitarianism,” Israel’s Ambassador Danny Danon told the Security Council.
This appears to be part of a pattern.
Last year, Israel accused UNRWA – the UN’s Palestinian Refugee agency that has housed, fed and educated Palestinians for the past 70 plus years – of complicity with Hamas and banned it from operating on Israeli soil or having any contact with Israeli officials.
The UN’s peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon – UNIFIL – similarly faces deep opposition from Israel’s government.
The test for the blue-helmets force will come at the end of next month when the UN Security Council is due to renew its mandate. It remains to be seen whether all five permanent members of the body – including Israel’s staunchest ally the United States – will vote in favour.
In New York, the United States continues to shield Israel from UN action and scrutiny.
The acting US Ambassador to the UN Dorothy Shea told the Security Council that accusations of genocide against Israel made by other council members were “politically motivated and categorically false”.
“They are part of a deliberate, cynical propaganda campaign as Hamas attempts to win symbolic victories to compensate for total defeat in war,” she said.
Earlier this month, in an unprecedented move, the Secretary of State Marco Rubio sanctioned the UN’s special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, accusing the independent expert of spewing “antisemitism” and “open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West”.
That seemed to have a chilling affect.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN Danny Danon
Just a week later, all three members of a UN Commission of Inquiry set up to investigate alleged violations of international law in Israel and Palestine suddenly quit. Their resignations were applauded by the Israeli mission to the UN.
And then, there is the deliberate bypassing of UN aid mechanisms in favour of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – a US and Israel-backed venture widely condemned by other member states over mass killings of starving Palestinians near aid distribution sites
Israel said the GHF was necessary to prevent aid being hijacked by Hamas. UN officials maintain there is no evidence of widespread diversion.
But UN-distributed aid has been limited to a trickle, as famine conditions set in.
“I think it’s important to underscore that the UN and UNRWA in particular, is the only organisation that can deliver services at scale in Gaza,” said Ciarán Donnelly, senior vice president of crisis response at International Rescue Committee.
“Everything that we do as humanitarian NGOs is incredibly important but ultimately is a complement to the basic services of water, of shelter, of food distribution, as organised by the UN,” he told RTÉ News.
“So, if the UN isn’t able to operate, then it simply makes our job exponentially harder in terms of trying to deliver the impact that we’re focused on”.
UN experts fear the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation could set a precedent for aid distribution not just in the Middle East, but in other parts of the world.
This week, Taoiseach Micheál Martin said he was “very disturbed by the undermining of the UN and the relief organisations,” and called for the “primacy of the United Nations” to be restored.
It’s a tall order in the current climate, as the world’s major powers sit across from each other at the UN Security Council in scornful disagreement.
Diplomatic paralysis in the face of war in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere has raised serious questions about what the UN stands for.
Meanwhile, the United States – hitherto global champion of the international rules-based order enshrined in UN multilateralism, since the end of the Second World War – abruptly ditched it in favour of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy.
The Trump administration pulled out of UN bodies including World Health Organisation, the Human Rights Council and UNESCO, slashed funding to agencies like UNICEF and the World Food Programme and dismissed the values championed by the UN, especially on things like gender and diversity, as “woke”.
“There’s no question about the fact that the UN is being actively undermined,” said Anjali Dayal, associate professor at New York’s Fordham University, “and is, in a real way, facing an existential crisis”.
“But I would argue that that’s largely financial at the moment,” she said.
The UN Secretary General António Guterres directed officials to cut the UN workforce by a fifth, while staff at UN agencies have already been laid off in their thousands.
Although some UN insiders welcome the financial jolt which they hope may usher in much-needed and long-overdue reform.
And it’s not just Washington tightening the pursestrings. A pivot to defence spending has prompted Europe to claw back cash from multilateral institutions and international aid.
“The UN might not survive the loss of this degree of funding,” said Ms Dayal.
UN Security Council meeting on Middle East
Indeed, “very senior international officials” speculate that the UN may go the way of the League of Nations – the UN’s ill-fated predecessor – according to Richard Gowan, UN Director of the International Crisis Group.
But some experts – perhaps the more optimistic among them – believe the current crisis may reinvigorate global commitment to the United Nations.
“If you had asked me a few months ago, I would have probably spoken about the UN being at a breaking point,” said Ms Ryan.
“But the horror wrought by this private aid organisation in place of UN agencies has made the relevance of the UN front of mind,” she said.
There was “no clearer warning to states, donors and civilians” on why the UN remains critical, she added.
On Thursday, the French President Emmanuel Macron announced that France would recognise Palestine at the United Nations General Assembly in September – the first G7 country to do so.
The fact he chose the UN – and not, say, the Elysée Palace – as the forum for this grand gesture is notable.
The UN’s annual jamboree will follow the conference on the two-state solution for Israel and Palestine, co-chaire by France and Saudi Arabia, due to kick off this Monday.
That confab was postponed in June after Israel and the United States bombed Iranian nuclear sites.
Israeli government officials have slammed the conference as a “reward for terror,” while the United States issued a diplomatic cable to UN member states ahead of the June-scheduled dates, warning them not to attend.
But countries appear to be undeterred. 40 government ministers are expected to turn up in New York next week to take part – a sign, perhaps, that the UN is still viewed as relevant in many capitals around the world.
Asked how a UN conference had any hope of breathing life into a two-state solution that has failed for decades, is bitterly opposed by the Israeli government and while war continues to rage, a French diplomatic source said: “Sometimes from the darkness, the light can emerge.”
