US vetoes 30 UN resolutions on Israel

By Jessica McCallin in Jerusalem

Palestinians are, understandably, scathing about aspects of the United Nations. Though well aware that many UN agencies have fed, clothed, housed and educated them for generations, they are bitter about the staggering double standards of the UN’s political agencies, namely the Security Council.

Israel has ignored Security Council resolutions, they tirelessly repeat, as the world, or at least the US and the UK, drone on about Iraq’s non-compliance. It’s been in material breach of resolution 242 – which called for Israel to withdraw from territories, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip, captured in the 1967 war – for 35 years.

Israel has weapons of mass destruction and threatens it neighbours. In fact, it’s currently occupying and colonizing the territory of three of its neighbours.

So why the double standards?

It’s a question you get asked all the time in the Occupied Territories.

“How can you expect us to have faith in the international community’s commitment to ending our suffering when even the UN can’t do anything?,” is another one. More recently, Palestinians’ feeling that the UN is powerless to stop Israel was confirmed when Kofi Annan dropped a fact finding mission to investigate the levelling of the Jenin refugee camp in April 2002.

The fact that the UN sends peacekeepers to places like Bosnia and Kosova but won’t send them to keep the Israelis out of the Occupied Territory has long been a wound on the Palestinian consiousness.

But the frustration does not extend to all UN agencies or all countries which make up the Security Council. Many have an astute understanding of the political machinations of the UN and blame the US for the UN’s inability to stop Israel.

They are keen to point out the estimated $3bn to $6bn Israel gets in civil and military aid from the US every year enables it to ignore UN resolutions, giving it the money to fund settlements and the guns to surpress resistance, but say it goes further than that. They are referring to the fact that many other UN Security Council resolutions would have been passed against Israel had the US not vetoed them. In the past three decades, America has vetoed 30 resolutions against Israel.

As such, watching the US use Iraq’s non-compliance with UN resolutions as a justification for attacking it is met with deep contempt, cementing Palestinians’ already strong conviction that the US will never work towards their interests.