As tanks today reach the outskirts of Gaza, the spat that emerged last week between Israel and the United Nations shows no sign of abating. UN officials explicitly criticised Israel’s assault on Gaza, while Israel’s UN Representative Gilad Erdan called for the resignation of Secretary-General António Guterres after Guterres said that the Hamas atrocities of 7 October did not “occur in a vacuum” and drew attention to Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian land.
Relations between Israel and the UN are unlikely to improve anytime soon, as diplomats and resolutions strive to contain and limit the conflict. Meanwhile, UN agencies are struggling to supply relief to Gaza, with thousands breaking into aid depots at the weekend in what the organisation described as a “worrying sign of civil order starting to break down”.
Israel’s tempestuous relationship with the UN is usually linked to the notorious “Zionism is racism” resolution adopted by the General Assembly in 1975, but really it stretches deeper, reaching even into the pre-history of the Jewish state.
However fraught Israel’s relations and membership within the UN may be, it is unlikely to disintegrate completely. This is not only because both the history and fate of Israel and Palestine are so intertwined with the history of international organisation, but also because the end of the conflict is likely to deepen the UN’s role in Gaza and perhaps the region more widely.
When the British Empire took over the government of Palestine following the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, it was as a mandate territory of the world’s first global inter-state organisation, the League of Nations, on whose behalf Britain committed to steer Palestine as a “sacred trust of civilisation”.
The League mandate system was part of the slow process by which functions of imperial ordering in international affairs were slowly but steadily transferred from national capitals to international organisations over the course of the last century. On the eve of Israel’s independence and the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948, Palestine was a trust territory — the UN version of the League’s earlier mandate system.
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