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a shameful decision by the decrepit in chief that will reflect on the western world for decades....

On the eve of International Human Rights Day when invited to support the existing international rules-based order the United States’ leadership failed. Not only did their veto prevent a cease-fire in Gaza, but this powerful nation could not even offer an alternative path to protect humanity. Does the United Nations matter to the Australian Government? Will Prime Minister Albanese have the courage to confront Australia’s friend and ally about its diplomatic intransigence? 

 

By Margaret Reynolds

 

Sunday 10th December 2023 was the 75th Anniversary of United Nations Human Rights Day marking the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights finalised in Paris in 1948, one of the most important initiatives of the newly formed United Nations.

Australian governments must be proud of the significant role our nation played in founding the global institution to bring humanity and security to all nations after the devastating consequences of World War 2. Australia was one of 51 nations that ratified the UN Charter in 1945 and it was Jessie Street who lobbied for equal rights for women to be recognised in the United Nations Charter and for the establishment of the Human Rights Commission.

Minister for External Affairs in both the Curtin and Chifley governments, Dr H.V. Evatt was responsible for ensuring that smaller nations took their place in the United Nations General Assembly, and he was elected its president from 1948-1949.

Many eminent Australians have served the United Nations over seven decades and our Australian Peacekeepers have contributed to 62 missions over this period. Currently James Elder, Chief of Communications for the United Nations Childrens Fund is a lone Australian speaking up for an urgent Gaza ceasefire. “No ceasefire? No compassion” His example shames the Albanese Government which has failed to challenge breaches of international law.

There are disturbing indications that neither the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese nor Foreign Minister Penny Wong value our relationship with the United Nations as fundamental to Australia’s foreign policy and a significant indicator of our role as a reliable global partner.

In May 2023 Mr Albanese met with the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres and was reported as recognising
“A strong effective United Nations is the key to addressing global challenges .“

Of course, that is correct, but the United Nations can only be effective if its nation states work together within agreed processes to ensure that international law is central to government decision making about those global challenges.

However, there is such hypocrisy about how these challenges are interpreted. When Russia invaded Ukraine there was outraged condemnation, yet when Israel invades Gaza, our political leaders declare that of course “Israel has a right to defend itself”? Where is that right detailed within international law? What are the consequences for global security if any nation asserts such a right?

The Australian Government, Ignoring the long and complex history of both regions, immediately knows how to solve conflict, so we send military support to Ukraine and to Israel. The government also sends humanitarian aid because no one likes to admit that Australia is compliant in continuing warfare.

Is this what Australia has become? Can we only see ourselves as loyal foot soldiers of allies who have lost any understanding or commitment to the principles which saw the creation of the United Nations? As an independent middle power with a strong record of United Nations peacekeeping, Australia could be leading debate about the urgency of conflict resolution, negotiation and problem solving. Yet our official voices are silent as we meekly accept that war is inevitable, and Australia just needs to be on the winning side.

This acceptance of extremism was not the vision of Jessie Street or Dr. Evatt when they were part of a global movement to prevent gross breaches of human rights through the horrors of war and the Holocaust. The current Federal Government ignores the significant peacebuilding leadership of Foreign Minister Gareth Evans in Cambodia in 1991 and Prime Minister John Howard in East Timor in 1999. In 2023 the Australian Government is weak and compliant in its response to grave threats to the United Nations system which is being ignored and therefore its future role is being undermined.

Just one state of the 15-member Security Council, the United States used its veto power to prevent a ceasefire and already President Biden is heading to Congress to increase its defence budget to offer the Netanyahu regime more devastating weaponry.

The global community is shocked by the extremism of the Netanyahu government, and complicity of the Biden administration, which could be offering mediation and negotiation rather than increased military support to continue death and destruction.

The United States administration is always ready to promote its national view of an “international rules-based order”, but it pays little respect to the work of United Nations staff, international lawyers and government representatives who have patiently worked over many years drafting, debating and negotiating standards so that nations can cooperate in the interest of global peace.

On the eve of International Human Rights Day when invited to support the existing international rules-based order the United States’ leadership failed. Not only did their veto prevent a cease-fire, but this powerful nation could not even offer an alternative path to protect humanity.

Will Prime Minister Albanese have the courage to confront its friend and ally about its diplomatic intransigence?

The Australian Government must decide whether the United Nations matters or whether our nation is already so locked into the foreign policy priorities of the United States than we must remain timid bystanders, unable to champion or uphold international law. Many of those of us who value the historic record of Australia’s practical and principled commitment to the United Nations are disgusted that not only has our government traded our sovereignty, but it has also lost its moral compass and shows little sign of retrieving it.

https://johnmenadue.com/is-this-what-australia-has-become/

 

SEE ALSO: https://www.rt.com/news/588960-biden-zionist-military-aid-israel/

 

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USAggression.....

The nearly unanimous vote in the UN Security Council on Friday calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza is a moment of honour for the United Nations and shame for the United States. By voting to stop Israel’s war on Gaza by a vote of 13 yes, 1 no (US), and 1 abstention (UK), the vast majority put itself on the side of international law. The US stood alone against international law, with its sidekick and tutor in imperial brutality, the United Kingdom, dutifully abstaining.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres honoured the UN and human decency by invoking Article 99 of the UN Charter, calling for the UN Security Council to stop the killing in Gaza as a basic responsibility under the UN Charter. Each day, UN officials on the ground in Gaza heroically struggle to feed, shelter, and protect the population from Israeli bombs. More than 100 UN staff have been killed in the Israeli assault.

The situation in Gaza is as clear as it is brutal. The State of Palestine, recognised by 139 nations, has long suffered from the brutalities of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Gaza has been called the world’s largest open-air prison by Human Rights Watch. After the Hamas-led horrific terrorist attack on October 7, in which 1,200 Israelis died, Israel began to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Legal specialists at the Center for Constitutional Rights regard Israel’s actions as a genocide.

To date, more than 17,400 Gazans have been killed, and an unfathomable 1.8 million Gazans have been displaced. Tens of thousands are at risk of imminent death. Last month, Guterres warned that “Gaza is becoming a graveyard for children.” Israel pushed the population from northern Gaza to the south, and then invaded the south. Israeli authorities told Gazans to flee for their life to zones within the south, and then bombed the places to which the Gazans had been directed.

The US is more than a protector of Israel. It is an accomplice. The US supplies, in real-time, the munitions Israel uses for mass murder, even as US authorities pay lip-service to Gazan civilian lives.

The President of Israel Isaac Herzog justifies the slaughter by declaring that there are no innocent civilian Gazans: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” The Israeli government’s biggest lie is that Israel has no options other than the mass killing of Gazans, supposedly to defeat Hamas.

The fact that Israel was lulled by its arrogance into letting its guard down on October 7 does not make Hamas an existential threat. Hamas has only a tiny fraction of Israel’s military might. October 7, like 9/11 in the US, was a colossal security blunder that should be immediately corrected by stepped-up border security, not an existential threat that in any remote manner justifies the killing of thousands or tens of thousands of innocent civilians, with women and children constituting 70% of the victims. The killing frenzy is being led by the very same politicians who were responsible for the October 7 security failure and who now manipulate the deepest anxieties of the Israeli population.

There is a larger and far more important point. Hamas can be demobilised through diplomacy, and only through diplomacy. Israel and the United States need finally to abide by international law, accept a sovereign state of Palestine alongside Israel, and welcome Palestine as the 194th member state of the UN. The US needs to stop arming the Israeli operation of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and stop protecting Israel’s rampant violations of basic human rights in the West Bank. Fifty-six years after its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, and after decades of illegal settlements in the occupied territories, Israel needs finally to withdraw from the occupied Palestinian lands.

With such steps, peace between Israel and the neighbouring countries could and would be secured. On that basis, UN peacekeepers, including both Arab and Western troops, would in turn secure the Israel-Palestine border for a needed transition period. At the same time, all international flows of financing to anti-Israel militants would be choked off by joint and coordinated actions of the US, Europe, and Israel’s Arab and Islamic neighbours.

The diplomatic route is open because the Arab and Islamic countries (including Iran) have once again reiterated their long-standing desire for peace with Israel as part of a peace agreement that establishes Palestine along the 1967 borders and its capital in East Jerusalem.

The real reason for Israel’s war in Gaza is that the Government of Israel rejects the two-state solution, and points to extremists on the other side rather than to the Arab and Islamic states, which want peace based on the two-state solution.

Israeli zealots, including several in the cabinet, believe that God promised them all of the lands from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean. This belief is fatuous. As Jewish history should make clear to religious Jews, and as all human history should make clear generally, no group, whether Jewish or otherwise, has an unconditional “right” to any land. For rights to be secured and internationally respected in our day, governments need to abide by the international rule of law. In the case of Israel and Palestine, international law, as expressed repeatedly by the UN Security Council, holds that two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine, have both the right and responsibility to live side by side in peace according to the 1967 borders.

Not only Israel, but even perhaps more so the United States, has lost its way. The deep reason was clear to Senator J. William Fulbright sixty years ago, when Fulbright was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and wrote the magnificent book, The Arrogance of Power. Fulbright pointed to arrogance as the deep cause of America’s reckless war in Vietnam in the 1960s. In its ongoing arrogance, the US military-security state repeatedly ignores the will of the international community and international law because it believes that weapons and power enable it to do so. US foreign policy is based heavily on covert, illegal regime-change operations and on perpetual warfare that caters to the US military-industrial complex.

We must not become cynical about the UN. It is currently blocked by the US, the country that led its creation under America’s greatest president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The UN is doing its job, building international law, sustainable development, and universal human rights, step by step, with advances and reverses, over the opposition of powerful forces, but with the arc of history on its side. International law is a relatively new human creation, still in the works. It is difficult to achieve in the face of obstreperous imperial power, but we must pursue it.

It is important to note that opposing Israel’s war crimes has absolutely nothing to do with antisemitism. This point has been made eloquently in an open letter by dozens of Jewish writers. Netanyahu doesn’t speak for Judaism. The Israeli Government violates the most sacred of all Jewish injunctions, to protect life (Pikuach Nefesh) and to love your neighbour as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). The message of Jewish ethics is found in the words of the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 2:4) inscribed on a wall directly facing the United Nations: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

Republished from Common Dreams on December 11, 2023.

https://johnmenadue.com/united-nations-honour-united-states-shame-in-gaza/

 

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