Each week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel as its leaders try to expand the state’s borders through violence.
In Gaza, Israel appears to have launched its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the devastated and traumatized people of northern Gaza into the southern half of their open-air prison.
Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to profit-seeking developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.
On October 21 and 22, Israeli cabinet ministers and settler movement leaders held a rally on the other side of the fence, with the sounds of combat in the background, to demand that all of Gaza be handed over to them. May Golan, Israel’s Minister for Social Equality, explicitly called for “another Nakba.”
In Lebanon, millions of people are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in an offensive that bears striking resemblance to the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia wonder who among them will be next.
Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have agreed to in the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions.
In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the U.N. Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions, or even the use of force.
Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking UNIFIL, the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.
On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters before forcibly driving two tanks through its gates. On October 15, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what peacekeepers described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting U.N. missions is a war crime.
This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under Israeli attack. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted U.N. peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria, and China.
The South Lebanon Army (also known as the de Facto Forces, or DFF), Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more UNIFIL soldiers, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have killed peacekeepers. More than 300 U.N. peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon (which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place). UNIFIL has the highest death toll of any of the fifty-two peacekeeping missions conducted by the United Nations around the world since 1948.
Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal, and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated."
Israel’s assault on U.N. agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The vulnerable, unarmed civilian agency, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys, and personnel.
UNRWA was created in 1949 by the U.N. General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the U.N. partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the U.N. plan had allocated to forming a Palestinian state.
When the United Nations recognized the Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.
Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” instead of solving it and called for its elimination.
After the attacks on October 7, 2023, Israel accused twelve of UNRWA’s 13,000 on-the-ground personnel of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a U.N. report found that Israeli authorities had not provided “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations, every country that had funded UNRWA, with the sole exception of the United States, has restored its funding.
Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to U.N. workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, members of the Israeli parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.
U.N. Secretary General António Guterres recently warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster” would follow.
Israel’s relationship with the United Nations and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the United Nations a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the United Nations is not an alien threat from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.
Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the United Nations from even entering the country. On October 1, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the U.N. Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and U.N. officials.
Over the years, the United States has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the United Nations, using its veto power in the Security Council forty times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.
U.S. obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the United States’s unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict.
While the rest of the world is looking on in horror, many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the U.N. system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.
A U.S. arms embargo on Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the U.N. Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.