Why is the UN powerless in Gaza?
Why is the UN powerless in Gaza?
In 1956, armed United Nations peacekeepers were deployed for the first time in history. Their destination was Sinai and the Gaza Strip - then controlled by Egypt - in response to a joint British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt’s Suez Canal.
As Israeli atrocities in Gaza mount and the UN prepares for its 80th General Assembly, many are asking what the international organisation can do in Gaza now, and why it isn't doing more.
Although the Suez Crisis is vastly different from Gaza, the UN Emergency Force’s deployment carries relevant lessons for today on how the UN can act.
The US has provided unconditional backing for Israel’s assault on Gaza, which a growing chorus of legal experts and scholars says is a genocide. It has used its veto power, as it did again on Friday, at the UN Security Council at least six times to block resolutions calling for a ceasefire and unhindered access of aid to Palestinians.
But in 1956, the UN Security Council was also deadlocked because two aggressors - Britain and France - held veto power. The UN General Assembly bypassed the Security Council by invoking the 1950 resolution, “Uniting For Peace”, to deploy peacekeepers over their objections.
The UN Security Council has the power to mandate the deployment of peacekeepers and impose sanctions under Chapter VII of the UN Charter.
To be sure, one factor working in the General Assembly’s favour in 1956 was strong US backing. US President Dwight Eisenhower opposed the joint British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt.
The UN also had a swashbuckling secretary general, Dag Hammarskjold, who was able to lobby non-aligned General Assembly members to deploy peacekeepers, which Egypt willingly accepted.
But Israel and the US are loath to internationalise Gaza in such a way, diplomats and experts say.
The lesson for Gaza today is that the UN General Assembly can work around the Security Council if it has the political guile and the will. In the end, however, it is only as effective as its member states, experts say.
Genocide
The UN’s member states collectively have a bad track record when it comes to preventing genocide.
“It is mixed at best,” Martin Shaw, an Emeritus professor of Sussex University and genocide expert, told Middle East Eye.
In the case of genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the UN only declared officially that genocides took place after the fact.
In Rwanda’s case, the lack of action was particularly glaring because Romeo Dallaire, the commander of a lightly armed UN peacekeeping mission in the country at the time, warned repeatedly that a genocide was about to occur, but the UN failed to respond.
At least 65,000 Palestinians, mainly women and children, have been killed by Israel’s onslaught since the Hamas-led 7 October attack on southern Israel, according to Palestinian Health officials.
The enclave has been reduced to rubble, with Israel’s finance minister openly bragging about Israeli bombings and the demolition of Palestinian homes, clearing a path for a real estate development and the resettlement of Gaza.
The UN’s top investigative body on Palestine and Israel ruled on Tuesday that Israel is guilty of the crime of genocide in Gaza, in the most authoritative pronouncement to date.
Shaw said this is one of the key differences between the genocide in Gaza and others in modern history.
“Gaza is different because it's not that the UN has been slow to recognise genocide. It is the fact that the US is effectively a participant, with arms and political support,” he told MEE.
The UN fails to stop genocides for two reasons, experts say.
On the one hand, there is a lack of interest among big and small powers to intervene in foreign lands. Such was the case in Darfur in the early 2000s when the Sudanese government and its ally, the Janjaweed, slaughtered non-Arab ethnic groups.
The US was actually quick to recognise that a genocide was occurring - issuing a statement in September 2004. Then, the US’s interest waned. It did not prevent intervention, but neither did it help.
With the major powers distracted, one might have expected this to be the prime opportunity for the UN to intervene.
In the end, the African Union deployed a few hundred peacekeepers by the end of 2004. The UN didn’t officially authorise a peacekeeping mission until 2006, once the atrocities started to abate.
Divided General Assembly
Alexandra Novosseloff, an expert on UN peacekeeping at the Centre Thucydide in Paris, told MEE that previous examples of ethnic cleansing and UN intervention underscore the importance of nation-states.
“It is not the UN as an organisation that fails, but the UN member states. The UN offers a full spectrum of options; it can sanction and it can make a coalition of the willing for a peacekeeping operations,” she said.
'It is not the UN as an organisation that fails, but the UN member states'
- Alexandra Novosseloff, expert on UN peacekeeping
As Israeli attacks in Gaza escalate with a devastating offensive underway in Gaza City, the response from member states as a whole, Novosseloff said, has been mixed.
The highest profile action set to be taken at the General Assembly next week regarding the Palestinians will be the push by France - a Security Council member - and Saudi Arabia to get members to recognise a Palestinian state.
“Of course, action on Gaza is hindered by the threat of a veto in the Security Council by the US and its allies, but you also have the General Assembly. So far, there has not been a resolution put forward for concrete action there,” she said. "The General Assembly is divided."
One lesson from history, however, is that without the intervention of great powers using military force, it is very difficult for the UN to respond to genocide.
In Bosnia, for example, the US mobilised after the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. The UN had already imposed an arms embargo on Serbia that failed to stop the killing of Muslim Bosnians.
In 1995, the US and its allies started arming Christian Croatians and Bosnian Muslims to fight back against the Serbians. The Nato alliance then began air strikes on Serbia, invoking a UN Security Council mandate.
Doug Bandow, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, said the blame for Israeli atrocities in Gaza does not fall on the UN, but Israel’s closest backer, the US.
“The UN has no force on its own. It couldn’t stop the genocide in Rwanda, the mass murder in Sudan or slaughter in Liberia, so there is no reason to expect the UN on its own to stop what is going on in Gaza,” he said.
“Almost the entire blame for Gaza falls on the US, which provides the weapons and support for Israel. The US number one underwrites Israel and number two undermines the UN from acting,” he said.
