UN Security Council not implementing its laws, failing to protect rights of Palestinians to their land: Expert

By Leila Nezirevic

LONDON (AA) - The UN Security Council passed a series of resolutions after Israel seized the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip during its aggression on Palestine in 1967, demanding that Tel Aviv return to the territorial lines that existed prior to the onset of the war.

But the US, already known as Israel’s protector, abstained from the major resolutions.

In February this year, the Security Council expressed its “deep concern and dismay” over Israel’s settlement activity in a presidential statement which replaced a draft resolution and condemned illegal Israeli policies.

In the statement, all 15 members of the council including the US also stressed the “obligation of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to renounce and confront terror.”

The council warned that ongoing Israeli settlement activities “are dangerously imperiling the viability of the two-state solution based on the 1967 lines.”

Nader Hashemi, the director of the Center for Middle East Studies and a Middle East and Islamic politics professor at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies, told Anadolu that this symbolic measure is a great idea but only in theory, as in reality, it is “extremely difficult” to reform the composition of the UN Security Council because of the way it was structured back in 1945.

Despite the previous agreements, international law and UN Security Council resolutions are not implemented due to the council’s decision to give “five countries a permanent right to veto any resolution” that comes before the council, said Hashemi.

In his opinion, this makes it difficult for any reforms to be passed.

He said the dozens of UN Security Council and UN General Assembly resolutions that have been passed throughout the UN’s history dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict need “to simply be enforced” before even considering any future reforms.

Under international law, Israel does not have a legal right to build settlements on the territory that was occupied after the 1967 war, and yet it continues to do so.

The countries in the international system, especially the US, must back and enforce those resolutions “with serious consequences on Israel” for its longstanding law violations, argued Hashemi.

A shift in US policy in the direction of enforcing international law could open the door for serious negotiations and “possibly a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict,” he said.

- ‘Ship has sailed’

International law demands that a just resolution of the conflict be based on a two-state settlement, which was defined essentially by UN Security Council Resolution 242.

However, many are suggesting that this “ship has sailed” as there are simply too many Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory.

Instead, there is now what is called a “one-state reality,” where Israel effectively controls all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, Hashemi pointed out.

The problem is that there are “unequal sets of laws and structural discrimination that treat Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs very differently,” he added.

Mark McDonald, an outspoken critic of Israel and a former British member of parliament, told Anadolu that the two-state solution is still a possibility if there is “a political will on both sides.” However, he believes that Israel is not open to it.

While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in power and as long as “the settlers have the right to control the government of Israel,” the two-state solution will not happen, said McDonald.

For Hashemi, an ideal solution is a binational state where Palestinians and Israelis are treated equally under the law.

This way, they would be able to live a life of “dignity where their own cultural, national and religious identities are respected in the confines of a single state where both communities are represented,” he said.

“This is not something difficult to imagine. We have many states in the world that are binational states that represent linguistic, religious and ethnic interests of multiple parties but within the framework of a nation state,” he added.

However, the two-state solution is a stepping stone before “we can make that huge leap” and “move in the direction of something much better,” according to Hashemi.

He warned that this will only be possible if the US, “which has an incredible amount of leverage over Israel,” is willing to use that leverage to get Israel to make the type of territorial concessions that it must to get to a two-state settlement “or perhaps something much better.”

- US ‘in its corner’

Netanyahu was always only interested in a set of policies that favor “Israeli settler colonial expansionism,” said Hashemi.

He can behave in this “outrageous manner, violating international law every day, dehumanizing and discriminating against Palestinians and really perpetuating this conflict” because he knows that Israel has the “United States in its corner.”

According to Hashemi, public opinion in the US has shifted as support in favor of Palestinian rights is growing day by day, while the US government is reluctant to change, largely because of “the strength of the pro-Israel lobby.”

In any debates across the country “it’s almost impossible to see any mobilized and authentic support in defense of Israel today because Israel now is basically an embarrassment,” but this has not filtered its way up the political ladder to lead to a shift in American policy.

The Republican Party is an authoritarian party in the US and has always been openly pro-Netanyahu, while the Democrats are still “very reluctant to do anything of substance, to even contemplate a shift in US policy, because I think they fundamentally fear the backlash from this pro-Israel lobby,” Hashemi pointed out.

Netanyahu continues to violate international law because he is of the view that there will be no shift in the American policy, that the US aid will not be affected, and that the US will continue to veto resolutions at the UN that are critical of Israel, said Hashemi.

“So basically what we have here is, I think, a classic case of a spoiled child, where the US is effectively the parent and Israel and Netanyahu are the child.

“But support for Israel in the US is slowly cracking, as after years of campaigning, we are starting to see a shift among the lower-rank politicians and some courageous members of Congress,” he said.

This was evident when in 2021, US Congresswoman Betty McCollum introduced legislation calling on the US to reconsider its military aid to Israel, which had been shielded from any criticisms by Republicans and Democrats.

Hashemi pointed out that while those are important breakthroughs, in his opinion, politicians at the senior level must speak up.

They must be willing to go to Washington, D.C. and “not be cowed into staying silent just because you have a very powerful pro-Israel lobby that is willing to enforce their opinion on elected officials,” he said.

“That is I think the obstacle. That’s why we don’t see change in the US policy,” he argued.

And until we see the change, “we’re going to see many innocent people die in the coming months and years because of the status quo, which favors Israelis against Palestinians,” according to Hashemi.