United Nations General Assembly. Diplomatic Security Service from Washington, D.C., United States of America, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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By Patrick Lawrence / Original to ScheerPost

United Nations General Assembly sessions, held each September since 51 nations convened in a Methodist church hall in London in 1946, come and go and mostly go without event. The General Assembly is set to begin its 80th session come Sept. 9, and it is difficult to imagine this one will go off uneventfully. To put the point simply, Israel has murdered, starved and terrorized too many Palestinians for this year’s gathering at the Secretariat in Manhattan to conclude without some conclusions. It remains only what these conclusions will be.

Several weeks ago a group of 15 nations — among them prominent members of the Atlantic alliance — stated their intention to announce their formal declaration of Palestinian statehood at this year’s session. This sets up various of Israel’s most important supporters for what is likely to prove a messy confrontation with “the Jewish state” and, naturally, the United States as Israel’s unfailing backer. 

This is not guesswork. It is already evident these new recognitions will dominate the Assembly session..Since the 15 nations declared their intent to recognize Palestine as a legitimate state, the Israelis have announced plans to mount a major new operation in Gaza City. On Aug. 25, the Zionist military staged one of those disgusting “double tap” attacks — strike, then strike again as rescue workers and journalists arrive — on a hospital in southern Gaza, killing 20 people and raising the death toll among journalists to 247. Less than a week later, Israel began the large-scale attack on Gaza City it had previously announced — an act of sheer defiance and impunity. 

Never to be outdone when an opportunity for outrage arises, the State Department announced Friday it will deny visas to all Palestinian officials who had planned to attend the General Assembly travel to the Secretariat — this “for undermining the prospects for peace.” I used the term “disgusting” in the above paragraph. This also qualifies, given the United States committed to allowing diplomats free access to diplomatic proceedings when it was agreed to locate the Secretariat on American soil. There is now talk of holding this year’s General Assembly in Geneva so that Palestinian representatives could attend. This will not happen, but the thought is a measure of the international mood.

I see only two likely outcomes as this storm gathers. In one, the better of the two, France, Britain and other pillars of the Western alliance will back their honorable diplomatic shifts with substantive action against the Zionists’ terror campaigns and rampant breaches of international law. That would change the diplomatic landscape significantly. In the other, these nations will do nothing, decisively discrediting their position on the Israel–Palestine question while putting the U.N.’s impotence on pitiful display. There will be no coming back from this latter eventuality. 

The question of power arises. 

If you do not know the flaw in the U.N. Charter that effectively disempowers the General Assembly, you should: Executive authority lies in the Security Council, whose permanent members hold veto power. Only the Council can pass legally binding resolutions and determine measures to enforce them. Apart from quotidian matters to do with housekeeping — the U.N.’s budget and so on — the Assembly is limited to voting on nonbinding resolutions.

OK, the Security Council is where the U.N. gets things done, or doesn’t, as is too often the case. You could argue that the General Assembly serves as a sort of suggestion box for what are now the U.N.’s 193 members, but this is to say nothing of note ever occurs in the Assembly, and that is simply not the case. I expect things of note this year. I cannot yet surmise whether these will prove things-of-note-honorable or things-of-note-disgraceful. 

A little history, maybe, to help U.N. skeptics.

Fidel Castro, a year and nine months in power, addressed the General Assembly in September 1960. The U.N. asks members to limit their time at the podium to 15 minutes; the fiery Fidel spoke for four hours, a nonstop rip into the history of U.S. imperialism and its abuses of Cuba since the 1959 revolution. The U.N. calls Castro’s speech “epic” and a “pivotal moment.” These are fair descriptions, in my view: It was an early announcement that Latin America intended thenceforth to speak up and stand up to los norteamericanos, just as it then learned to do.

Fourteen years later, Yasser Arafat delivered that famous speech to the General Assembly while wearing a pearl-handled revolver at his hip. The Assembly then passed two resolutions, 3236 and 3237, the former putting “the Question of Palestine” formally on the U.N.’s docket and the latter granting the Palestine Liberation Organization diplomatic recognition by way of observer status. A year after that came General Assembly Resolution 3379, which “determines that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It took the Israelis and Americans until 1991 to coerce a vote to repeal 3379. (I wonder how another vote now would turn out.)

Closer to our time, it was but a dozen Septembers ago that Hassan Rouhani, who had assumed Iran’s presidency just a few months previously, addressed the General Assembly and stunned us all when he extended his hand Westward to propose negotiations with the Americans and Europeans to limit the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programs. Pivotal, I would say. The agreement reached two years later endured until the beyond-belief Dummkopf who now serves his second term as president withdrew the United States from it. 

And so to General Assembly No. 80, which is to run three weeks and conclude Sept. 29.  

There is no question of this year’s session voting to send Blue Helmets into Gaza and the West Bank to protect Palestinians from the Zionist state’s daily terrors, or that it will impose an appropriately unbearable regime of sanctions against said entity, or that U.N. peacekeepers will surround and embargo all those illegal West Bank settlements. One wishes it would but it cannot, as just noted. 

No, I argue that the diplomacy that has taken place in the runup to this year’s General Assembly is significant and that diplomacy — all the discredit the Western powers have brought upon it in recent years notwithstanding — still comes with consequences, at least sometimes, and we will see consequences of one or another kind next month.

Before going any further we interrupt this program with an important question, trivia-like but not trivial. Will Bibi Netanyahu attend this year’s General Assembly? He customarily does, rarely missing a chance to denounce the Assembly and the whole wide world represented there as a horror show of anti–Semites — his murderers-as-victims act. But this repulsive man is wanted under international law for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

However this turns out, it will be notable either way. If Netanyahu walks the halls of the Secretariat next month we will have to accept the near-total impotence of the courts that adjudicate international law; the Western powers will have completed their disemboweling of another of the institutions that mark out our international public space. If Bibi stays away, well, we will be pleased to say international law counts for something after all, and we can look to bigger things from there.

As widely reported in recent weeks, Israel’s starvation operation in Gaza, which began March 2, has proved a barbarity too far, and it has been in consequence that numerous Western nations — “even Israel’s longtime allies,” as Western media like to exclaim — have pledged to recognize Palestinian statehood at this year’s Assembly. A document known as the New York Call, signed July 29, commits the 15 above-noted nations to formal recognition. 

These 15 will join 147 U.N. members that have already recognized Palestine as a legitimate state, some going back to the 1990s. But this is more than a matter of numbers. Finland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal: These are among the signatories of the New York Call, and good enough. The bigger deal here lies in the bigger names: France, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and, as of Aug. 11, Australia. The first two of these count among what people of a certain age commonly call the major Western powers. Turning this another way, the whole of the Anglosphere other than the United States — and the whole of the Security Council, too — is about to commit to recognizing Palestine.

So what? It is our obvious question.  

“It’s important to recognize the state of Palestine,” Francesca Albanese — the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories —  said in an interview with The Guardian published Aug. 13. “It’s incoherent that they’ve not done so already.” 

“Incoherent” is a well-chosen word, but that is only part of the argument Albanese makes. Her  bigger, passionately stated point is that stopping the genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank remain the No. 1 imperative, and we ought not consider the doings at the General Assembly as more than a step toward this. 

This is precisely how one should spectate the General Assembly’s proceedings in a few weeks’ time. OK, the majority of the Western powers save the United States will go on the record in support of a Palestinians state. What will they make this mean on the ground? 

There is plenty to suggest as little as possible. If this proves the case, the significance of the General Assembly this year will lie in the demonstrated insignificance of the General Assembly. But let us reason the matter out before drawing conclusions. 

Straight off the top, the United States has already made it plain it stands against these various pledges to recognize. On Aug, 25, Washington’s just arrived ambassador to Paris, Charles Kushner, published an open letter to Emmanuel Macron complaining of “the dramatic rise of antisemitism in France” and asserting that the French president’s decision to recognize Palestine will “embolden extremists, fuel violence, and endanger Jewish life in France.”

Kushner, an assertive Zionist whose son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, is plainly playing the tiresome old antisemitism card, just as Netanyahu has done in response to the New York Call. Both seem especially sensitive to the French, and for good reason. French President Charles de Gaulle, a strong supporter of Israel at its founding in 1948, turned against it after the Six–Day War in 1967. He soon barred French arms sales, backed a Palestinian state and called Israel’s occupation of land seized in the war an imperialist adventure. 

Macron, let us not forget, has long nursed dreams of Gaullist grandeur. The General Assembly offers him a superbly dramatic opportunity to strut his stuff in this line, and it will be interesting to see if he does. (I am not offering odds on this one.) 

The wayward Macron aside, the signatories of the New York Call document will effectively widen the already evident rift in the trans–Atlantic alliance when they declare their support for Palestinian statehood in a couple of weeks. As Britain, France and the others cannot possibly miss this point, we can conclude that the Europeans are now willing very gradually to assert their autonomy in matters of state after eight decades of subservience to the United States. (I will have more to say on this point in another column.) 

Beyond this, those newly committed to recognition now risk falling into a hole they have themselves dug. You cannot be surprised if this turns out to be the case, given how practiced the Euros are at this. They tumble into one called “Ukraine” as we speak. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the about-to-recognize nations now face themselves with but one choice: They either signal at the General Assembly they intend to take the kind of action recognition implies, or impotence and fecklessness will mark them more or less indefinitely.

John Whitbeck, the international attorney long engaged on the Palestine question, put it as follows on Aug. 13 in his privately circulated blog. I admire the lateral thinking here:

It would be intellectually and diplomatically incoherent to extend diplomatic recognition to a state, particularly when its entire territory is illegally occupied by another state, and then not to take meaningful and effective actions to end that occupation — and, if important Western states like France, Britain, Canada and Australia, as well as other Western states, all extend diplomatic recognition to the State of Palestine next month, principles-based courage may be more easily found in numbers.

In addition, after imposing more than 20 rounds of sanctions on Russia, explicitly with a view to collapsing its economy, for occupying a relatively modest portion of a state that they recognize, how could Western governments justify to their own increasing horrified people imposing no sanctions at all against a country which is occupying the entire territory of a state that they recognize and which is publicly proclaiming its intention to intensify its ongoing genocide of that state’s people?

Principles-based courage: I share John Whitbeck’s thought, if not as confidently, that such virtue hangs delicately in the balance as the General Assembly opens. I am simply not in the habit of putting “principles” and “courage” in the same paragraph as “Western states like France, Britain, Canada and Australia.” There is a depressing possibility that the big event at the General Assembly next month may consist of Western nations other than the United States embarrassing themselves on a grand scale.  

For one thing, the New York Call and various statements individual nations have made declare, no exceptions, support for a two-state solution, a Palestinian nation next to an Israeli nation (or a Jewish nation, as the Zionists have it). This is simply impossible — impossible because all that is left for the Palestinians by way of land are dots on maps in the fashion of Bantustans, impossible because the Israelis are perfectly clear they will not accept a Palestinian state, impossible because (this from accounts I hear from the West Bank) the escalating savagery and sadism of Israeli soldiers and settlers has in all likelihood rendered coexistence beyond reach.

What are you doing when you declare support for something that will never come to be? Supporting something while supporting nothing? There is an argument that the raft of new recognitions is, indeed, nothing more than performative, an exercise in sheer cynicism.   

For another, the major signatories of the New York Call document, notably Britain, France and Australia, have been suppressing popular support for the Palestinian cause from the first days after the events of Oct. 7, 2023. Nowhere is this contradiction more graphic than in the British case. On Aug. 9, the London police arrested 532 demonstrators for supporting Palestine Action, a group dedicated to nonviolent action against the genocide in Gaza. Palestine Action is now designated a terrorist organization; those arrested in Parliament Square are charged under the U.K.’s Terrorism Act of 2000 and face up to 14 years in prison. 

And this is the same Britain that pledges to recognize the state of Palestine at the General Assembly in a few weeks’ time? It simply does not square. 

But rank hypocrisy of the usual sort is too easy an explanation for this kind of thing. Since Israel’s starvation operation began producing page 1 photographs a few weeks back, Western leaders other than Donald Trump and his crew of misfits have been acutely aware that they will enter the record on one side or the other of this human atrocity. There are memoirs to write; the historians hover. Stretching the point — and I am having a hard time finishing this sentence but I must — John V. Whitbeck’s “principles-based courage” may indeed figure in the proceedings at the U.N. Secretariat next month. 

To my mind, those 500-plus people arrested in the London protest make the best case that substantive action may follow the coming spree of diplomatic recognitions. They will not be the last 500 to hit the streets, after all. Public disgust with the Israelis is obviously on the rise. Given that those purporting to lead the Western post-democracies have corrupted the institutions intended to express the popular will, the prospect of widespread unrest will be very real to them — a threat to these elites, a source of promise for the rest of us. 

Let us not forget the incessant demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s. The Vietnamese won the Vietnam War, a point I insist we remain clear about, but the antiwar movement did a great deal to change minds in the corridors of power in Washington and the European capitals. There is no conducting a war without a domestic consensus that favors it — this was the great lesson for the elites that prosecuted the Vietnam War. Neither is there any supporting a genocide and the apartheid state committing it if it brings large numbers of demonstrators into the streets. 

Francesca Albanese is entirely right to assert that we must not let a raft of diplomatic recognitions distract us from the suffering and loss of life among Palestinians and the urgent imperative to stop both. The inverse seems just as true to me. The Western powers are plainly in no hurry to abandon wholesale their support of the Zionist state. No, the road to that is long. But those about to lend their support to Palestinian statehood will take a step on it, gingerly as this may  prove.

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Patrick Lawrence

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. 

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