Anton Ferreira
PassBlue / August 28, 2024
In the United Nations General Assembly, the Israeli ambassador at the time, Gilad Erdan, used a paper shredder to destroy pages of the UN Charter, saying that countries who back Palestine’s bid to join the UN are “shredding the UN Charter with your own hands,” May 10, 2024. Meanwhile, a push by some Palestinian civil society groups to suspend Israel from the UN lacks a key element: A country to lead the initiative. Yet, the calls to oust Israel may intensify during the opening session of the General Assembly in September.
Israel’s devastating onslaught on Gaza, now approaching the one-year mark, and increasing settler outrages in the West Bank are giving fresh urgency to moves to suspend the Jewish state from the United Nations General Assembly.
Palestinian civil society has long been calling for such a step, and the Gaza war, along with the two major pronouncements from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about Israel this year, have given the initiative new traction.
The idea is to use the same mechanism against the Jewish state that was used in 1974 to freeze apartheid South Africa’s participation in the General Assembly. The action contributed to the white minority government’s isolation and its eventual collapse.
It was the new, democratic South African state that brought the genocide application against Israel in the ICJ, resulting in an interim judgment by the court in January broadly supporting South Africa’s case.
Then in July, the court — responding to a General Assembly request — delivered an advisory opinion finding that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories amounted to colonization, racial discrimination and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is leading the drive for Israel’s suspension, Maren Mantovani, the international outreach coordinator of the Stop the Wall campaign, told PassBlue. The organization is based in Ramallah, the Palestinian capital in the West Bank.
“There is an ongoing, concerted effort by Palestinian civil society to push the UN to uphold its mission … and to define and enact the precise modalities to end Israel’s crimes and violations,” Mantovani said.
Saleh Hijazi, a BNC adviser on apartheid-free policy, said he expected calls for Israel’s suspension to intensify next month with the opening of the 79th session of the General Assembly. UNGA, as it is known, begins on September 10.
(The Palestinian delegation at the UN said on August 22 that it was also planning to soon initiate an “actionable resolution” in the General Assembly, “demanding within a time frame the end of this illegal occupation and all other issues contained” in the ICJ advisory opinion.)
“I have been in a number of international forums over the past few months, including a joint meeting between the Organization of Islamic Co-operation and the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, where sanctions, including diplomatic [measures] and suspending Israel from UNGA, were a big part of the discussion,” Hijazi said by email.
“Indeed, civil society organizations, movements and grassroots groups the world over support such a call and see it as necessary.”
Among those who have expressed support is Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.
“I hope that the Global South … increases pressure for meaningful action to stop the genocide in Gaza, end the occupation of Palestine and ensure that perpetrators of grave crimes are brought to justice,” he said in an email. “One of those actions could very well be based on the precedent set by the action taken against apartheid South Africa.”
Craig Mokhiber, an international human rights lawyer who formerly worked for the UN, wrote in a message to PassBlue that “it would be hard to imagine a country more deserving, as a minimum, of suspension from the UNGA.”
“The precedent of the suspension of apartheid South Africa is well established,” he noted. “The UNGA should move at once to suspend Israel, and to direct the Organization to use its resources and mechanisms to combat Israel’s apartheid and gross violations of human rights, just as it did in South Africa.”
He added that no country had more consistently violated the principles of the UN Charter than Israel.
“Israel is today on trial in the World Court for genocide, its leaders are the subject of arrest warrant requests in the ICC [International Criminal Court] for crimes against humanity, the ICJ has found it is perpetrating apartheid and that its decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territory is unlawful,” he said.
The council of the League of Arab States resolved at a meeting in Cairo in July to pursue the idea of suspending Israel, but so far no UN member state has taken any formal steps to do so.
The South African government, which has placed Palestinian solidarity front and center of its foreign policy, has yet to discuss the suspension issue, said Clayson Monyela, the spokesperson for the Department of International Relations and Cooperation.
Nevertheless, South African nongovernmental organizations are confident that Pretoria would be in the vanguard of the effort.
“We expect South Africa would fully support it at all levels,” Bram Hanekom, a board member of Africa4Palestine, said in a phone interview with PassBlue. “It’s a domestic issue for us, it speaks to morality, it speaks to justice, it speaks to our own history.”
But South Africa is heavily dependent on its trade relations with the United States and needs to avoid alienating lawmakers in Washington even more than it has already — not only by bringing the genocide case, but also by failing to condemn Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine and by maintaining close ties with Iran and China.
So pushing for Israel’s suspension would come with “serious risks,” Hanekom said. “We’re doing this incredible balancing act as a country.”
The Mideast analyst Mouin Rabbani cites Washington’s global clout when he says the Palestinian campaign might have symbolic importance, but it is unlikely to result in its proclaimed goal of another victory like the one against South Africa in 1974.
“There are fundamental differences between the situation you had with South Africa in the 1970s and the situation with Palestine now,” Rabbani said in a phone call.
“The South African suspension came in the context of the Cold War, where you had very clear voting blocs and any anticolonial resolution had a virtually automatic majority,” he added. “The situation now is very different, where there aren’t really solid blocs the way you had in the 1970s, and an additional consequence of that is that individual governments are much more susceptible to US and European lobbying.”
Moreover, Washington is far more invested in Israel than it was in South Africa 50 years ago and would be “much more energetic” in opposing moves to suspend the Jewish state, Rabbani said.
“Another factor is, you don’t have the kind of universal global revulsion against the very existence of the Israeli regime the way you had towards the white minority regime in South Africa — its very existence was seen as beyond the pale in most of the world. I don’t think we’ve yet reached that situation with Israel.
People tend to put a lot of blame and responsibility on [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, or this Israeli government, and the realization that the problem here is one of the regime, rather than of an individual leader, still has some ways to go.”
Mokhiber described Israel as holding “the world record for breaching UN resolutions.”
“[It] has been found responsible for gross and systematic violations of human rights and humanitarian law by successive UN commissions of inquiry and independent special procedures. Worse, it has killed more UN staff than any party in history (and by a wide margin), has detained and tortured UN staff, and has regularly attacked, slandered and obstructed the Organization and its duly-mandated operations.”
Neither the Israeli mission to the UN nor the Palestinian delegation responded to requests for comment.
Anton Ferreira worked for 23 years as a correspondent and desk editor at Reuters
