Israel, the devil incarnate

Israel isn’t just the embodiment of evil, but its sum total in the world. And if you believe otherwise, you may find yourself on the wrong side of the UN.

Since its founding, that august organisation has passed twice as many resolutions against Israel as against the rest of the world combined. For example, between 2015 and 2023 that score stood at Israel, 154, all other countries, 71.

It so happens that the Russian aggression against the Ukraine started in 2014 and escalated to a full-blown invasion in 2022. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have since been murdered for their audacity of being Ukrainian.

If you follow the events there as closely as I do, you are familiar with hundreds of speeches in which Russian chieftains have denied that a legitimate Ukrainian nation exists and claimed that Ukrainians are racially inferior.

To prove their own racial superiority, the Russian invaders have been razing Ukrainian cities, murdering, torturing, looting and raping civilians. And whom does the UN consider the greatest villain during that period? Why, Israel, of course.

Some 10 million people have been murdered in Central Africa over the past few decades. That, as far as the UN is concerned, is a minor peccadillo compared to the unspeakable audacity of Israel’s attempts to survive in the face of Muslim brutality.

Over 2.5 million have perished in Sudan’s civil war, which is still raging. That’s most regrettable, the UN seems to think. But not as criminal as Israel’s self-defence.

However, until now the UN has had in its sights mostly Israel herself and those other countries that assisted her in any way. Now that guardian of world peace has narrowed its focus to target private companies that do business with Israel, however tangentially.

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Caterpillar, our own BP, Barclays and University of Edinburgh and countless others have been named as culprits for benefitting from “the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide.”

One implication is that one of the world’s most advanced economies celebrated for its contribution to technology and science depends for its survival on “illegal occupation”. The author of the document can’t even do diatribes properly.

The indictment’s conclusion is damning: “Genocide, it would seem, is profitable.”  

I’m sure the board members of the guilty companies will start wearing hair shirts under their Savile Row suits. Their own black hearts have been bared for the world to see. There they were, trying to do the best they could for their customers and shareholders, only to find out they are complicit in genocide.

And their governments are complicit with the companies, making the circle truly vicious. Only the other day, our Parliament voted (385 for, 26 against) in favour of proscribing the direct action group Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. One nay vote was cast by Diane Abbott censured by her own Labour Party for anti-Semitism.

Last month, members of Palestine Action broke into an RAF base in Oxfordshire and sprayed two planes with red paint, the latest crime in its history of using or threatening violence or serious damage to property to advance a political cause.

The vote makes the Mother of All Parliaments complicit in genocide. Britain’s membership in the UN, including its Security Council, has to be incompatible with such evil.

Now, according to Al Jazeera, hardly a pro-Israel source, since the Hamas massacre of 1,195 Israelis on 7 October, 2023, about 1,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s subsequent attempt to protect her citizens. If this is genocide, the Israelis are rather poor at it. Perhaps they should take an advanced course in Russia or Rwanda.

The UN has 193 member states. And only one of them, Israel, has its legitimacy denied by most other members. This is odd, considering that Israel came into existence as a result of Resolution 181 adopted by the UN on 29 November, 1947.

One could be forgiven for wishing the UN got its own act together before castigating a heroic nation, the sole oasis of civilisation in the Middle East. Brushing up on the definition of genocide wouldn’t go amiss either.

International organisations in general span the full range from useless to pernicious. The UN is both, and has never been anything but.

I was a boy when I first began to follow the UN, specifically its 1961 fiasco in the Congo. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld tried to intervene in the ongoing massacre, only to die in a plane crash that the CIA believed was engineered by the KGB. The carnage proceeded unabated.

Since then, every attempt by the UN to mitigate similar massacres all over the world has only succeeded in making them worse. Kashmir, Cambodia, Somalia, Burundi, Rwanda, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Burma, now the Ukraine – take your pick.

To single out one typical event, in 1995 the Serbs murdered more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica, the UN-declared safe zone. As the genocidal massacre went on, UN troops were looking on in sheer impotence.

What is the UN actually for, other than providing sinecures for bureaucrats superfluous in their own countries? It’s nothing but a talking shop, with most of the talk being anti-Western invective. The UN has no legal or moral authority, and venting anti-Israeli vitriol seems to be its principal raison d’être.

Israel is an easy target because she is the focus of two pet hatreds prevalent among UN members: Muslim (and other) anti-Semitism and anti-Western, anti-capitalist animus. And if Israel is the target, the UN is the firing range.

If there were any justice in the world, that malignant organisation would be kicked out of New York and Geneva and moved to, say, Kashmir or Ramallah. All civilised nations would walk away, leaving the UN to its own devices: sputtering spittle at Israel and other Western countries – and supporting itself by its own fundraising in Central Africa.

Alas, there is no justice in the world, so those beasts will continue to bite the hand that feeds them: all those capitalists profiting from genocide.