- 11 Dec 2023
A sole arm raised in opposition of a ceasefire and another single arm paralyzed by fear of reprimand or maybe in solidarity with mutual goals. This was the scene at the emergency Security Council meeting led by the United Arab Emirates which took place on the 8th of December 2023 that saw the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres invoke the rarely used Article 99 of the UN Charter. The article, that sees the UN Secretary General becoming a political official rather than an administrative one, had to be used in an effort by the members to put an end to the Israeli bombardment which has resulted in massive carnage and has left Gaza teetering on the edge of complete collapse. The death toll of civilians has surpassed 18,000, at the time of writing this article, along with the displacement of 80 per cent of the population and levelling destruction of almost the entire enclave.
The opposing arm raised high in defiance of an immediate humanitarian ceasefire was an American one and the one suffering from paralysis, abstaining to vote for the respite of millions of helpless civilians, was that of the United Kingdom’s. The rest of the members hung their heads in disappointment but not disbelief as they listened to the United States' Special Political Affairs representative Robert A. Wood describe the request as being ‘divorced from reality’. Yet, reality lies in the numbers, the staggering statistics that have come from multiple humanitarian factions on the ground in Gaza, those same figures the United States President Joe Biden discredited in an eerily similar manner to then President George Bush Jr., when faced with the numbers of civilian deaths caused by his war on ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, promising a better future for the region alongside the carnage: one million Iraqi deaths. Wood continued to dehumanize the Palestinian people and diminish their suffering, sending a clear message to the rest of the members, by appearing to use his phone as Palestinian diplomat Riyad H. Mansour described the agony of his people.
Two months into this Israeli bombardment and the world has yet to receive a clear objective of Israel’s mission with regard to this outrageous catastrophe. It has become quite evident that Israel never had one to begin with. Eradicating ‘terrorism’ is one vague mission we have heard repeated in this region, yet history has shown that America and its Western allies have used this excuse to wage massive wars only to never actually achieve this so-called mission. No terror has ever been eradicated using this logic and with this type of force, on the contrary, it has only aided in empowering it by creating a more chaotic environment for it to thrive among the rubble.
The United States’ position has left its allies with the realization that not all alliances are created equal and that their generous support for America can instantly be rendered negligible and their political rapport diminished. This fails to come as a surprise since the US has forsaken its own ethics with regard to human rights and international laws and painted itself a hypocrite in the eyes of the world it had been preaching to. In all political endeavours the only sure way to governments’ longevity is through leading by example and indeed enforcing its beliefs no matter your alliances but that is a utopia the real world fails to offer us. And now, after Gaza, even the dreamers and the hopefuls seem to have opened their eyes to the harshness of this reality. There are moments chronicled in political history as pivotal in carving a new political path forward and this genocidal ‘defending of one’s state’ has become one of them. History will remember this war on Palestinian civilians and their displacement as the moment the world woke up to the Zionist plans of occupation and expansion. As a result, never again will the same rhetoric be sufficient in explaining the atrocities they are willing to perpetrate towards its attainment.
Wood’s single arm held up high did not just represent political arrogance, it has also shown a defiant America, an outcast stripped from its self-titled position as ‘the leader of the Free World.’ A United States that is alone in its blind support for Israel for the irony is clear for the world to see. That if it were any other country waging the kind of terror that is being broadcast for the world to see America would have rallied the troops towards an end to these war crimes and would have had Benjamin Netanyahu facing justice at The Hague. But this is not any other country, it is Israel, and the US is willing to wager its entire foreign policy status in its defence. Governments seem to be running out of options currently calling to invoke UN Resolution 377 which is also subject to be vetoed by the United States. One hopes now that governments become as stubbornly defiant and indifferent to the American logic as it has been to ours and take harsher steps to force the hand that has been reigning terror into submission, no matter the cost. For Palestine, first and last. For rebalancing the scales of justice and for the resuscitation of the people’s faith in a world that can provide freedom for all.
