Israeli and US officials are in the process of jointly pre-empting Donald Trump’s
supposed “ultimate deal” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They
hope to demote the Palestinian issue to a footnote in international
diplomacy.
The conspiracy – a real one – was much in evidence last week during a visit to the region by Nikki Haley, Washington’s envoy to the United Nations. Her escort was Danny Danon, her Israeli counterpart and a fervent opponent of Palestinian statehood.
Danon makes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
look moderate. He has backed Israel annexing the West Bank and ruling
over Palestinians apartheid-style. Haley appears unperturbed. During a
meeting with Netanyahu, she told him that the UN was “a bully to
Israel”. She has warned the powerful Security Council to focus on Iran,
Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah, instead of Israel.
To
protect its tiny ally, Washington is threatening to cut billions in US
funding to the world body, plunging it into crisis and jeopardising
peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nation Nikki Haley (Source: Just Security)
On
the way to Israel, Haley stopped at the UN’s Human Rights Council in
Geneva, demanding it end its “pathological” opposition to Israel’s
decades of occupation and human rights violations – or the US would pull
out of the agency.
Washington
has long pampered Israel, giving it millions of dollars each year to
buy weapons to oppress Palestinians, and using its veto to block UN
resolutions enforcing international law. Expert UN reports such as a
recent one on Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians have been
buried.
But
worse is to come. Now the framework of international laws and
institutions established after the Second World War is at risk of being
dismembered.
That
danger was highlighted on Sunday, when it emerged that Netanyahu had
urged Haley to dismantle another UN agency much loathed by Israel. UNRWA
cares for more than five million Palestinian refugees across the
region.
Since
the 1948 war, Israel has refused to allow these refugees to return to
their lands, now in Israel, forcing them to live in miserable and
overcrowded camps awaiting a peace deal that never arrives. These
dispossessed Palestinians still depend on UNRWA for education, health
care and social services.
UNRWA,
Netanyahu says, “perpetuates” rather than solves their problems. He
prefers that they become the responsibility of the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees (UNHCR), which looks after all other refugee populations.
His
demand is a monumental U-turn, 70 years in the making. In fact, it was
Israel that in 1948 insisted on a separate UN refugee agency for the
Palestinians.
UNRWA aid to Palestinian refugees (Source: UNRWA)
UNRWA
was created to prevent the Palestinians falling under the charge of
UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. Israel was
afraid that the IRO, formed in the immediate wake of the Second World
War, would give Palestinian refugees the same prominence as European
Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel
did not want the two cases compared, especially as they were so
intimately connected. It was the rise of Nazism that bolstered the
Zionist case for a Jewish state in Palestine and Jewish refugees who
were settled on lands from which Palestinians had just been expelled by
Israel.
Also,
Israel was concerned that the IRO’s commitment to the principle of
repatriation might force it to accept back the Palestinian refugees.
Israel’s
hope then was precisely that UNRWA would not solve the Palestinian
refugee problem; rather, it would resolve itself. The idea was
encapsulated in a Zionist adage: “The old will die and the young
forget.”
But
millions of Palestinian descendants still clamour for a right of
return. If they cannot forget, Netanyahu prefers that the world forget
them.
As
bloody wars grip the Middle East, the best way to achieve that aim is
to submerge the Palestinians among the world’s 65 million other
refugees. Why worry about the Palestinian case when there are millions
of Syrians newly displaced by war?
But
UNRWA poses a challenge, because it is so deeply entrenched in the
region and insists on a just solution for Palestinian refugees.
UNRWA’s
huge staff includes 32,000 Palestinian administrators, teachers and
doctors, many living in camps in the West Bank – Palestinian territory
Netanyahu and Danon hunger for. The UN’s presence there is an impediment
to annexation.
On
Monday Netanyahu announced his determination to block Europe from
funding Israeli human rights organisations, the main watchdogs in the
West Bank and a key data source for UN agencies. He now refuses to meet
any world leader who talks to these rights groups.
With
Trump in the White House, a crisis-plagued Europe ever-more toothless
and the Arab world in disarray, Netanyahu wants to seize this chance to
clear the UN out of the way too.
Global
institutions such as the UN and the international law it upholds were
created after the Second World War to protect the weakest and prevent a
recurrence of the Holocaust’s horrors.
Today,
Netanyahu is prepared to risk it all, tearing down the post-war
international order, if this act of colossal vandalism will finally rid
him of the Palestinians.
A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.
Jonathan Cook
won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books
are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to
Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine:
Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.
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The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Jonathan Cook, Global Research, 2017
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