The UN is useless in preventing genocide and protecting the Palestinians

Two Special Advisors to the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Adama Dieng and Jennifer Welsh, have added their voices to the insignificant, lamentable chorus of concern. Speaking in relation to the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect respectively, Dieng and Welsh meticulously stressed the necessity of upholding distinctions as stipulated in international law, while retaining a self-imposed right to distortion of facts in order to uphold Israel’s fabricated narrative.

In their statement, Dieng and Welsh relied on the usual conjectures that cast doubt over the atrocities committed by Israel, while issuing an unequivocal condemnation against Palestinian resistance. The paraphrased comments, published as a UN press release, insist that “the high number of civilian casualties, particularly among the Palestinians, could [my emphasis] demonstrate disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force by the Israeli Defence Forces. At the same time, the launching of rocket attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups into Israeli residential areas constitutes indiscriminate use of force.” This would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious.

Furthermore, Dieng and Walsh also diminished the horrendous incitement to violence against Palestinians, including the calls for extermination of the indigenous population through use of language that emphasised the indefinite in favour of Israel. Despite the escalating rhetoric advocating for the murder of Palestinian mothers and elimination of Palestinians in Gaza as a political strategy, the Special Advisors stated that such incitement “could be dehumanising”, instead of insisting that it is an undisputed fact.

It is, perhaps, convenient, that the UN and affiliated organisations’ primary competency is the issuing of reminders. These can be issued to “all parties” while evoking illusions of “impartial investigations” to arrive at the conclusion that protecting the Palestinian population in Gaza is as simple as “an end of hostilities, the creation of a humanitarian corridor and lifting of the blockade of Gaza which has created further suffering.” All of which can be achieved, according to Dieng and Welsh, by “serious negotiations that will end the cycle of violence and achieve a stable, just and durable solution to this longstanding conflict.”

The discourse of “conflict” adds to ambiguities which are necessary to protect the UN’s deceitful existence and propaganda which refuses to demand the dismantling of Israel’s settler-colonial state. This omission is also reflected in the UN’s definition of “civilian population”; it’s applied extensively to include a settler population that participated wilfully in Israel’s colonial project, creating the foundations for colonial violence to flourish. If this distinction is not adequately addressed, it stands to reason that the UN is unwilling to address the actual targeting of civilians, Palestinian civilians, whose lives have been considered repeatedly by the imperialist organisation to be of lesser value as a strategy to encourage a widespread massacre.

Expecting the UN and its advisors to acknowledge the legitimacy of Palestinian armed resistance is pie in the sky. In UN vocabulary, an “impartial investigation” is equivalent to the intended suppression of Palestinian resistance by insisting upon further monologues disguised as “negotiations” intended to consign the liberation of historic Palestine to the dustbin. Decades of increasing subjugation have imparted a decisive stance to the Palestinian population: liberation can never be achieved through compromised international channels. Hence, the issue of legitimacy with regard to Palestinian resistance derived from history and memory, away from the manipulative charters determined by imperialist diktats.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.