On a day when an indicted war criminal and the author and Kommandant of an ongoing genocide gets to speak from the rostrum of the world’s most august and authoritative governance body… We should ask whether this tradition of coddling and endlessly appeasing the leaders of a brutal settler-colonial project in Palestine dates back, indeed, to the founding years of the United Nations and the decision an earlier UN General Assembly took in November 1947 to partition historic Palestine and assign to that small proportion of its residents who were participants in the Zionist settler project, their own independent ethno-state state and to allocate to it, moreover, a wildly disproportionate amount of Palestine’s fertile land and other resources.
Today, at a time when Israel’s government and military continue their genocide in Gaza– and their ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank… and their continuing aggressions against Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and even a small unarmed flotilla of humanitarian activists– we should ask whether this two-year-long orgy of Israeli violence is now bringing down not just the global power of its main backer in world affairs (whose own foundation as a “nation” lay also, lest we forget, in a settler-extremist rebellion against the metropole), but also the United Nations itself.
Continue reading “A Jewish State in Palestine: The UN’s Original Sin?”