While disease, hunger and death continue to stalk the Gaza Strip and the West Bank remains occupied, United Nations’ committees deliberate on how to address this hideous state of affairs.
While committee resolutions may seem like insipid gestures, marked by ineffectual chatter, they are making Israel more isolated than ever.
The Second Committee (Economic and Financial) of the UN approved two resolutions on November 13. The first requested that Israel take responsibility for prompt and adequate compensation to Lebanon, and associated countries including Syria, affected by an oil slick arising from the destruction of storage tanks near the Lebanese Jiyah electric power plant.
The strike took place in July 2006, during Israel’s previous war against Hezbollah that resulted in, to quote Lebanon’s then-Environment Ministry director general Berge Hatjian, “a catastrophe of the highest order for a country as small as Lebanon”.
According to Lebanon’s UN representative, the oil spill damage hampered the country’s efforts to pursue the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030.
Israel gruffly rejected the premise of the resolution, which received 160 votes in its favour, citing the usual argument that it has been unfairly targeted. Other adversaries such as the Houthis, which had been attacking ships in international waters, had been left unscrutinised by the committee. The issue of environmental damage had been appropriated “as a political weapon against Israel”.
The second resolution, introduced by the Ugandan representative, entitled “Permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and of the Arab population in the occupied Syrian Golan over their natural resources”, expressed pointed concerns about Israel’s continued efforts to exercise brute force control over the territories.
There was concern for “the exploitation by Israel, the occupying Power, of the natural resources of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and other Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967”.
Ditto the “extensive destruction by Israel … of agricultural land and orchards in the Occupied Territory” and “widespread destruction” inflicted upon “vital infrastructure, including water pipelines, sewage networks and electricity networks” in those territories.
Concerns also abounded about unexploded ordnance, a situation that despoiled the environment while hampering reconstruction, and the “chronic energy shortage in the Gaza Strip and its detrimental impact on the operation of water and sanitation facilities”.
The Israeli settlements come in for special mention, given their “detrimental impact on Palestinian and other Arab natural resources, especially as a result of the confiscation of land and the forced diversion of water resources, including the destruction of orchards and crops and the seizure of the water wells by Israeli settlers, and the dire socioeconomic consequences in this regard”.
There are also remarks about needing to respect and preserve “the territory unity, contiguity and integrity of all Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”, a situation increasingly compromised by the unchecked zealotry of thuggish Israeli settlers, emboldened by lawmakers.
The vote on this occasion — 158 in favour — was unusual for featuring a number of countries that would normally be more guarded in adding their names, notably in the context of Palestinian sovereignty.
Their mantra is that in the absence of Israeli participation backing an initiative openly favouring Palestinian self-determination over any specific subject would do little to advance the broader goals of the peace process.
Australia, for instance, backed the resolution, despite opposition from the United States and Canada. It was the first time it had favoured a “permanent sovereignty” resolution.
This was done despite the Australian delegation’s disappointment that the resolution made no reference to other participants in the conflict, such as Hezbollah.
A spokesperson for Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong stated that the vote reflected international concerns about Israel’s “ongoing settlement activity, land dispossession, demolitions and settler violence against Palestinians”. Such conduct undermined “stability and prospects for a two-state solution”.
As for the United States, Israel’s firmest sponsor in arms and inexplicable good will, the words “Palestinian” and “sovereignty” grated.
The fiction of equality and parity between Israel and the Palestinians, a device used to snuff out the independent aspirations of the latter, had to be maintained.
Nicholas Koval, US Mission to the UN, said Washington was “disappointed that this body has again taken up this unbalanced resolution that is unfairly critical of Israel, demonstrating a clear and persistent institutional bias directed against one member state”.
The resolution, in its “one-sided” way, would not advance peace, he said. “Not when they ignore the facts on the ground.”
While Koval is correct that the claimed facts in these resolutions are often matters of illusion or omission, Israel’s war since October last year shows that Palestinians are no longer merely subjects of derision.
Palestinians are to be subjugated, preferably by some international authority that will guard against any future claims to autonomy. Their vetted leaders are to be treated as amenable collaborators, happy to yield territory that Israel has no right to.
Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich hope that eventually the Palestinian problem will vanish before forcible annexation, erasure and eviction.
At the very least, resolutions such as those passed on November 14 provide some record of resistance, however seemingly remote, against the historical amnesia that governs Israeli-Palestinian relations.
[Binoy Kampmark lectures at RMIT University.]