2nd Argument for the PM’s Speech to the UN

1/ Here is a further line of argument that Prime Minister Netanyahu might wish to use in his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 26th. As in the previous article, the approach is to advance Israel’s strategic political position by asking questions that require convincing answers.

2/ Therefore, the second primary question that the PM could direct at the GA is this:

How can international law, peace and security be served by establishing a state that intends to destroy another state?

3/ The short answer is that it is self-evidently impossible that such a state could serve either international law or regional peace and security. Yet the UN and its legal arm, the International Court of Justice, support such a state.

4/ Therefore, rather than let this pass without comment, the PM could suggest that a fair-minded reaction from a fair-minded and legally observant UN and ICJ would have generated a storm of indignation and protest at the open calls of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas for the destruction of the Jewish state.

5/ Yet where is this indignation? Where is the UN hostility to these programs? Is the effective toleration of such programs by the UN and ICJ not the exact opposite of the prime purpose of the UN as expressed in its Charter:

To maintain international peace and security, (and) to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, (and) disputes which might lead to a breach of the peace; (Art 1 para 1)

6/ Instead, the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel bias of the UN and its leadership is now so extreme that they ignore their legal obligations and Palestinian intentions. Perhaps this state of affairs is largely because the UN is now composed of many states which are less than free or law observant, and which do not consider the termination of Jewish self-determination to be a moral or legal problem?

7/ The result is that the UN offers no criticism, no opposition and no demands that the Palestinians immediately end their eliminationist program. Nor does the UN show any sign of obeying its own Charter by taking effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace.

8/ Further, from the presentations at the recent ICJ Advisory Opinion hearings, it is evident that many states are consumed by the right of Palestinians to self-determination – as if this were an unconditional right which trumps everything else. But is this true? If it were, would this not give the right of any state to destroy another? Is this what the ICJ has come to? Of course, in reality there is no such legal right. Instead, the UN Charter specifies the following purpose:

To develop friendly relations (emphasis added) among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights (emphasis added) and self-determination of peoples, (Art 1 para 2)

9/ However, in contrast to the UN Charter, a recent GA Resolution (ES-10/23) declares:

. . . the State of Palestine (added emphasis) is fully qualified (emphasis added) for membership of the United Nations in accordance with Article 4 (emphasis added) of the Charter of the United Nations and should therefore be admitted to membership of the United Nations. (10 May 2024)

10/ Leaving aside that Palestine is not a state, Article 4 of the UN Charter actually says:

Membership of the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states (added emphasis) which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter,

11/ Therefore, can this mean anything other than that the GA deliberately ignores that the PA and Hamas live, breath and dream of the destruction of Israel, and cannot by any stretch of the Imagination be described as peace loving? Wouldn’t any fair assessment conclude that the Palestinians are absolutely not qualified for membership?

12/ As a result, in complete contradiction to the founding aspirations of the UN, the representatives of an openly eliminationist organization now sit in the GA as if they were not planning the illegal and non-peaceful termination of Israel.

13/ Further, to compound one distortion with another, the recent ICJ Advisory Opinion also ignored any mention of the lethal and illegal intentions of the Palestinians. This enabled it to ignore Israel’s security needs. It is as if neither the Jews of Israel nor Israel itself faced serious dangers. Of course, for the ICJ to have admitted as much would have meant admitting the source of those dangers – and its entirely one-sided case of blaming Israel would unravel.

14/ Likewise, in its attempt to blame Israel for denying Palestinian self-determination, the ICJ completely ignored multiple Palestinian rejections of opportunities for a state (eg. 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008). To have acknowledged these opportunities would have obliged the Court to account for these rejections – which would have ruined its accusation against Israel.

15/ It would also have directed attention to the fact that the Palestinian claim to the whole of Israel was a total denial of Jewish self-determination. This would have revealed the uncomfortable fact that by their insistence on an all-or-nothing/winner-takes-all approach, the Palestinians have engineered their own failure to achieve a state.

16/ Perhaps this is why the ONLY means of securing a peaceful and successful resolution of the conflict is also ignored by the UN and ICJ? By contrast, if they were to take their responsibilities seriously, in accordance with the UN Charter, they would condemn the eliminationist intentions of the Palestinians and immediately require them to jettison the Palestinian National Charter and the Hamas Covenant, and abandon their aim of eliminating Israel. Therefore, where are the resolutions from the GA to this effect?

17/ Without this measure, how can the failures of all previous peace ‘plans’ be avoided so that the conflict is not prolonged again? Without this measure, how can Israel possibly be expected to accept a state on its border devoted to its destruction?

18/ Furthermore, how can responsible and legally observant member-states accept such an illegal and dangerous outcome? How should they respond to these serial evasions of reality and distortions of the UN Charter? And how should they react to situations where the UN and its Court are so reflexively pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel that they are incapable of adherence to the founding principles of the UN?

19/ Therefore, by presenting these arguments to the GA and the international public, the aim of the Prime Minister’s speech should be to enlist those states not consumed by hostility to Israel to coordinate two core measures both inside and outside the UN:

To persuade or pressurize the Palestinians to abandon their lethal and illegal aims.
To engage with friendly and potentially sympathetic states to rescind their acceptance of Palestinian statehood in light of:

the prime aim of the UN being to maintain the peace between states,
the illegal and non-peaceful aim of the Palestinians to wipe-out Israel.

20/ As many UN member-states and their publics are shaky or quite ignorant of these issues, there is a great need to follow-up the PM’s speech with a political program of high-level engagement with states that are not overwhelmingly hostile to Israel. Therefore, as suggested previously, the PM should write to the appropriate state leaders to initiate such a program.

21/ In parallel, by repeatedly drawing attention to obviously relevant and important questions that require answers, our public diplomacy apparatus can ensure that in foreign media outlets these questions are expected from Israel and so become common knowledge. This makes it much harder for governments to ignore them. In this way, the usual direction of blame for the conflict can be reversed and the political standing of Israel enhanced.