The Blogs: Exposing the sound of silence: the UN weeps

The news has been so bad recently, I haven’t been able to find the energy to write about it. Maybe some stray thoughts will eventually find their way here, once the smoke clears.

But I do want to respond to Tuesday’s speech to the United Nations Security Council by Tom Fletcher, the UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.

Fletcher, for the record, is British, as was his predecessor, Martin Griffiths. He previously served as Global Strategy Director of the UN’s Global Business Coalition for Education (2015-2019) and led work for former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on refugee education. He served also served as UK Ambassador to Lebanon (2011-2015), as Foreign and Development Policy Adviser to three prime ministers (2007-2011), and as the PM’s mediator on Northern Ireland.

Now aged fifty, he was Head of the Middle East Peace Process at the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London (1997-1998), as Second Secretary at the British Embassy in Nairobi (1998-2002), as Chief of Staff for Africa, Caribbean and Commonwealth at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London (2002-2004) and as First Secretary in the British Embassy in Paris (2004-2007).

As if that was not enough – and it is hard for someone as out of the system as I am to understand how such a torrent of achievement could pour out of any single individual – he is also currently Principal of Hertford College, Oxford (since 2020) and Vice-Chair of Oxford University’s Conference of Colleges (since 2022).

That’s all fascinating and shows, if nothing else, that as well as being a high-flier, he is evidently an operator (though never got as far as studying for a doctorate). And did I say, he served as Visiting Professor at New York University (2015-2020) and at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy (2016-2019) and has a good working knowledge of Arabic and Swahili? What used to be known as an Arabist, then.

Mr Fletcher took to the floor and delivered a 15-minute speech, the structure of which was: how would we be able to look at ourselves, and at the next generation, if we merely told ourselves “we did our best” and didn’t take the steps necessary to stop Israel’s “genocide” against the Palestinians, and rescue 2.1 million Gazans from imminent famine and a fifth of that number from malnutrition.

In the words of the UN Palestinian Rights Committee, it was “a powerful and urgent address” – and so it was. Deeply felt, deeply urgent, deeply emotional. One didn’t have to have been the UK’s ambassador to Lebanon, and Head of the Middle East Peace Process at the FCO, and a Visiting Professor at the Emirates Diplomatic Academy, and an Arabic and Swahili linguist to have been touched by the drama of what he said, and the moral thrust of his message.

That goes without saying. But what also went without saying was anything about the one-sidedness of his outrage. Of course it is right to feel anger at what seems to be egregious and casual killing by the IDF – assuming that that is what it is – but what is also shocking was the silence about the violence committed against Israel.

I have searched and found nothing that Tom Fletcher said about the events of October 7, or the barbarism of what was meted out to the kibbutzim and those attending the Nova Music Festival. He said nothing about the use of sexual violence, as far as one can see. And nor did anyone else from his UN office.

Pramila Patten, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, also did not feel moved to say anything, or report on the stripping and raping and torturing and killing of women at Kibbutz Re’im and Kibbutz Kfar Aza, until shamed into doing so by protests from individuals in the Jewish community, and then took four months to come out with a cautious and guarded statement that was remarkable precisely for lacking the emotion that Mr Fletcher showed on Tuesday.

And that, in short, is what was really powerful about Mr Fletcher’s speech: its demonstration of the difference between the outpouring of sympathy and support for the Gazans and West Bankers and the silence about decades of systematic and racist dehumanising of Israel.

Which crime is worse: what the ultra-nationalists in the Israeli government are doing to the Arabs of Gaza, or what the Arabs and their supporters have done to undermine the ideal of Zionism over the years, or how “the international community” has wept for one side and not the other?

Here’s a quiz question that you can offer to your friends: let’s imagine that Israel and the Arabs decided, jointly, to start a war that would not end until one party had wiped out the other. If the result was inevitable, and the success of one meant the annihilation of the other, who would you want to be the victor? I think we know who the UN would choose – and that is exactly why the thugs of Netanyahu’s government are motivated to be doing what they’re doing.

It’s dreadful but it’s not without context.