The UN Security Council was handed a report on Tuesday by the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon about Israel’s campaign in Gaza and its targeting of UN facilities earlier this year. The report’s conclusions are damning: Israel’s actions “breached the inviolability of United Nations premises” and amounted in many cases to “recklessness”.
As usual, Israel retorted that the report was patently biased. In this matter, Israel is right: there are no two sides to the truth, and as UN investigators found out, the blame for disproportionate and thoughtless violence lies squarely with Israel.
What is sad, though, is Mr Ban’s recommendation. The most the man who should embody concern for international justice could do is ask Israel to reimburse the UN for the cost of the damaged facilities, even as dozens of Palestinians in search of safety were killed or injured there. Financial retribution does not start to repair the damage done to the presumed sanctity of the UN, and its chief needs to show more courage.
Israel will dismiss this type of condemnation as typical Arab whining and kicking. But the times are changing. The Arab world has shown considerable wisdom when it put forward the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002.
There are no longer calls for the rejection of Israel but rather a willingness to work towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians, as Egypt in particular has done in recent years.
Rather, it is Israel that is getting closer by the day to pariah status, not because of some international conspiracy or thoughtless anti-Semitic passions but because of its own actions. Its intransigence on settlements and peace with the Palestinians is met with increasing frustration and disbelief abroad. Even in the US where the voices urging Israel to wake up and smell the coffee are no longer on the margins.
The US vice president Joseph Biden, speaking at the annual conference of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby in Washington, offered the US vision for peace, whose end goal is at odds with the maximalist agenda of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu: “a two-state solution, with a secure Jewish state of Israel living side by side in peace and security with a viable and independent Palestinian state.”
Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff, offered an additional rationale when he linked the diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power to the necessity of establishing a Palestinian state. The US is breaking other taboos dear to Israel. On Tuesday, a US State Department official reaffirmed that getting Israel – and other countries – to join the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty was a “fundamental objective” of the US.
The US president Barack Obama will meet the Israeli prime minister in Washington in the coming weeks and then fly to the Holy Land for a much anticipated visit. This will be a time of intense discussion and bickering between two allies on a divergent course. Israel will try to deflect scrutiny of its policies by emphasising the Iranian nuclear challenge, as if simultaneous progress on the two fronts is impossible.
The US will respond that it seeks to stabilise a region always on the edge of war, and that Israeli concessions are fundamentally needed. US pressure on Israel will be key. Israel can ill afford antagonising its most powerful and reliable ally, but Israeli leaders are no stranger to overplaying their hand or using their friends in the US to push back. Only a principled and sustained commitment to peace can help Mr Obama stay the course. Maybe then Israel will realise how precarious its situation has become.
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