On Friday, December 8, the United Nations Security Council met under Article 99 for only the fourth time in U.N. history. Article 99 is an emergency provision that allows the Secretary General to bring to the Security Council any matter which “may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.” The provision was previously used during the Belgian invasion of the Congo in 1960, the hostage crisis in the U.S. Embassy in Iran in 1979, and Lebanon’s Civil War in 1989.
Secretary General António Guterres, at the meeting, demanded an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza because “we are at a breaking point,” with a “high risk of the total collapse of the humanitarian support system.” The United Arab Emirates drafted a ceasefire resolution that quickly garnered ninety-seven cosponsors.
The World Food Program reported recently that Gaza is on the brink of mass starvation, with nine-out-of-ten people spending entire days with no food. By early December, Rafah was the only one of Gaza’s five districts to which the United Nations could deliver any aid at all.
The Secretary General stressed that “The brutality perpetrated by Hamas can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people . . . . International humanitarian law cannot be applied selectively. It is binding on all parties equally at all times, and the obligation to observe it does not depend on reciprocity.”
Mr. Guterres concluded, “The people of Gaza are looking into the abyss . . . . The eyes of the world—and the eyes of history—are watching. It’s time to act.”
The Council voted thirteen to one, with the United Kingdom abstaining, to approve the resolution. But the one vote against by the United States—one of the five veto-wielding permanent members of the Security Council—killed the resolution, leaving the Council impotent to act.
This was the sixteenth veto in the Security Council by the United States since 2000—fourteen of those vetoes have been to shield Israel, and/or U.S. policy on Israel and Palestine, from international action or accountability. While Russia and China have vetoed resolutions on a variety of issues around the world, from Myanmar to Venezuela, the United States is alone in using its veto primarily to provide exceptional impunity to a single other country.
The consequences of this veto could hardly be more serious. As Brazil’s U.N. ambassador, Sérgio França Danese, told the Council, if the United States had not vetoed a previous resolution that Brazil drafted on October 18, “thousands of lives would have been saved.” The Indonesian representative, Arrmanatha Nasir, asked, “How many more must die before this relentless assault is halted? 20,000? 50,000? 100,000?”
The consequences of this veto could hardly be more serious.
Following the October 18 U.S. veto of a ceasefire resolution at the Security Council, the U.N. General Assembly took up the global call for a ceasefire. The resulting resolution, sponsored by Jordan, passed by 120 votes to 14, with forty-five abstentions. The twelve small countries who voted with the United States and Israel against the ceasefire resolution represent less than 1 percent of the world’s population.
The isolated diplomatic position in which the United States has put itself should have been a wake-up call, especially coming a week after a Data For Progress poll found that 66 percent of Americans supported a ceasefire, while a Mariiv poll found that only 29 percent of Israelis supported an imminent ground invasion of Gaza.
After the United States torpedoed the Security Council resolution on December 8, the desperate need to end the massacre in Gaza returned to the U.N. General Assembly on December 12. An identical resolution was approved by a vote of 153 to 10, with thirty-three more yes votes than the previous resolution in October. While General Assembly resolutions are not binding, they do carry political weight–and this one sends a clear message that the international community is disgusted by the carnage Israel has wrought in Gaza.
Another powerful instrument the world can use to try to compel an end to this massacre is the Genocide Convention, which both Israel and the United States have ratified. It only takes one country to bring a case before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) under this convention. While cases can drag on for years, the ICJ can take immediate preliminary measures to protect the victims.
On January 23, 2020, the Court did exactly that in a case brought by The Gambia against Myanmar, alleging a genocide of its Rohingya minority. In a brutal military campaign in late 2017, Myanmar massacred tens of thousands of Rohingya and burnt down dozens of villages. More than 750,000 Rohingyas fled into Bangladesh, and a United Nations-backed fact-finding mission found that the 600,000 who remained in Myanmar “may face a greater threat of genocide than ever.”
China vetoed a referral to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the U.N. Security Council, so The Gambia—itself recovering from twenty years of repression under a brutal dictatorship—submitted a case to the ICJ under the Genocide Convention.
That opened the door for a unanimous preliminary ruling by seventeen ICJ judges that Myanmar must prevent genocide against the Rohingya, as the Genocide Convention required. Since the Court may not reach a final verdict on the merits of the case for many years, it also ordered Myanmar to file a report with the Court every six months to detail how it is protecting the Rohingya, signaling serious ongoing scrutiny of Myanmar’s conduct.
“The ICJ directed Myanmar to prevent genocide, and this could have a real impact in protecting the 600,000 Rohingya who remain in the country,” said Param-Preet Singh of Human Rights Watch. “Additionally, the ICJ process means Rohingya survivors and activists have a platform for their experiences to be recognized.”
Which country will step up to bring an ICJ case against Israel under the Genocide Convention? Activists are already discussing that with a number of countries. Roots Action and World Beyond War have created an action alert that can be used to send messages to ten of the most likely candidates (South Africa, Chile, Colombia, Jordan, Ireland, Belize, Türkiye, Bolivia, Honduras, and Brazil).
There has also been increasing pressure on the International Criminal Court to take up the case against Israel. The ICC has been quick to investigate Hamas for war crimes, but has been dragging its feet on Israel. After a recent visit to the region, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan was not allowed by Israel to enter Gaza, and he was criticized by Palestinians for visiting areas attacked by Hamas on October 7, but not visiting the hundreds of illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and refugee camps in the occupied West Bank.
With U.N. action stymied by U.S. vetoes, the economic and diplomatic actions of individual countries may have more impact than their speeches at U.N. headquarters in New York.
Historically there have been about two dozen countries that have not recognized Israel. But, in the past two months, Belize and Bolivia have severed ties with the country, while others—Bahrain, Chad, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Jordan, and Türkiye—have withdrawn their ambassadors.
Which country will step up to bring an ICJ case against Israel under the Genocide Convention?
Other countries are condemning Israel and the United States publicly, but maintaining their economic, military, and political connections with both.
Egypt’s long-standing role as Israel’s partner in the blockade of Gaza, and its continuing role, even today, in restricting the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza through its own border crossings, make it complicit in the genocide it condemns.
Bahrain and the UAE signed on to very strong statements in the Security Council, and yet they have yet to renounce the so-called Abraham accords, under which they conduct mutually profitable commercial relations and hundred million dollar arms deals with Israel.
Many experts compare the apartheid system in Israel to the 1948-1994 apartheid system in South Africa. Speeches at the United Nations may have helped to bring down South Africa’s apartheid regime, but change didn’t come until countries around the world embraced a global campaign to economically and politically isolate it.
The reason Israel’s die-hard supporters in the United States have tried to ban, or even criminalize, the campaign for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) is not that it is illegitimate or antisemitic. It is precisely because boycotting, sanctioning, and divesting from Israel may be an effective strategy to help bring down its genocidal, expansionist, and unaccountable regime.
U.S. Alternate Representative to the United Nations Robert Wood told the Security Council that there is a “fundamental disconnect between the discussions that we have been having in this chamber and the realities on the ground” in Gaza, implying that only Israeli and U.S. views of the conflict deserve to be taken seriously.
But the real disconnect at the root of this crisis is the one between the isolated looking-glass world of U.S. and Israeli politics and the real world that is crying out for a ceasefire and justice for the Palestinian people.
While Israel is killing and maiming thousands of innocent people with U.S. bombs and howitzer shells, the rest of the world is appalled by these crimes against humanity. The grassroots clamor to end the massacre keeps building, but global leaders must move beyond non-binding resolutions and investigations to direct actions, including boycotting Israeli products, putting an embargo on weapons sales, breaking diplomatic relations, and other measures that will make Israel a pariah state on the world stage.