As a fifteen-year-old studying for O Level in History some forty years ago, one of the topics I learned about was the League of Nations. This was an international structure established after the Great War to prevent more wars from erupting. It was a forerunner of today’s United Nations. I had to learn about the successes the League had, such as its work in suppressing slave trades and drug smuggling. The League even managed to prevent a few wars such as the one that was brewing between Finland and Sweden over the Aaland Islands in 1921. I also had to learn the reasons why the League failed. The League lacked a military force to separate combatants. The US was never a member due to its isolationism. Britain and France, to whom the task of upholding the League’s decisions fell, were reluctant to impose more than token sanctions against powerful transgressors for fear of provoking war. Thus, Japan grabbed Manchuria in 1932, Italy invaded Abyssinia in 1935 and Germany annexed the Sudetenland which gave Hitler the green light, along with a peace pact with Stalin, to invade West Poland in 1939. The rest as they say is history.
Though the League of Nations ended up in history’s dustbin, the idea of collective security did not. From the ashes of WW2 arose the United Nations which is regarded rightly as more effective than the League. All the world’s major powers are UN members and it has the capacity to raise peacekeeping forces from its member states. Like the League, it engages successfully in humanitarian work also. One of its humanitarian deeds was to establish the nation of Israel as a permanent refuge for Jews in response to centuries of persecution that had reached a grisly zenith in the Holocaust. Despite such a worthy start to UN-Israeli relations, the UN has since developed into one of the world’s most relentless critics of not only Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, but of its right to exist.
An infamous moment that demonstrates this was the passing of the 1975 resolution that ‘Zionism is racism’. The author of this resolution was none other than the Ugandan dictator and mass murderer Idi Amin. To add proverbial insult to injury, Amin’s success was celebrated by Austria’s Kurt Waldheim, the UN’s Secretary General at the time and one-time participant in Nazi-sponsored persecution of Jews.
It is shocking to note that Israel is the most frequently condemned nation at the UN, despite there being many other nations who deserve spade-loads of indignation such as China and North Korea. Take, for example, this statistic: since the creation of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2006, the number of resolutions passed condemning Israel nearly equals the number of reproving resolutions of all other nations combined. This criticism comes not only from hostile Muslim nations but also from nations not aligned with Israel. Yet, it is the same UNHRC that appointed Iran recently to the chairmanship of a UN human rights forum. As they say, you cannot make this up.
When the world was presented with first-rate evidence of Hamas’ genocidal lunacy on 7 October, the UN General Assembly had the opportunity to decry the atrocities. Surely, an organisation born out of a war fought partly to extirpate Nazism could manage the denunciation of its recrudescence? Not so. The proposition to reproach Hamas was voted down to ecstatic applause. The most important and powerful international body responsible for peacekeeping and preventing genocide has therefore legitimised Hamas’ terrorism against Israel and indeed all Jews. The signatories to the ‘The Declaration by United Nations’ (1942) must be spinning in their graves.
Having said that, Israel’s greatest ally, the US, provides billions of dollars of military aid and has regularly vetoed UN resolutions against Israel. Other nations, usually European ones, have expressed support for Israel at the UN. The question, however, that surely must haunt the Israelis is how long that support will continue. With leading academics at the West’s top universities expressing anti-Semitic views, large numbers of Islamists among Muslim populations in the West and many young people in thrall to woke ideology that regards Israel as a neo-colonial state, it looks as if future generations of Western leaders may be reticent to support Israel, and may even oppose Israel’s existence. The normal diplomatic relations Israel has with a small number of Arab nations will nowhere near compensate for the loss of Western support. If the West turns against Israel, it will be the loneliest nation on earth.
Peter Harris is the author of two books, The Rage Against the Light: Why Christopher Hitchens Was Wrong (2019) and Do You Believe It? A Guide to a Reasonable Christian Faith (2020).
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Zionism, Jewish nationalist movement that has had as its goal the creation and support of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews (Hebrew: Eretz Yisraʾel, “the Land of Israel”)
As the state of Israel was born (again) in 1948, this would seem to point to ‘Zionism’ being a redundant term.