The United Nations General Assembly voted 124-14 on Wednesday to strip Israel of the right to self-defense in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.
The test of the resolution was based on the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion in July that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory was illegal.
The resolution also calls on member states not to sell arms or military equipment to Israel that would be used in Gaza, the West Bank, and east Jerusalem.
Among the 43 countries that abstained were Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom. Some 12 of the 27 European Union countries abstained, including Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Sweden.
Whilst I disagree with your earlier point about expelling Israel from the UN (or anybody else: the whole point of the place is as a diplomatic talking shop for everybody) I wholehartedly agree with this one.
Except Artsakh and Tigray and Rojava and … Cause UN membership has been coerced to be used as some “proof of sovereignty” while it’s not even in UN’s own founding documents. So a non-UN member state won’t get accepted to UN (cause everybody voting likes their elevated status through such a situation) and additionally can be militarily attacked, even wiped out, and everybody acts as if that were normal, while, again, even in the UN charter it’s not.
I’d argue the harm from that is bigger than the purpose you named. After all, diplomats can already talk wherever they want and they do.
I don’t disagree with your criticisms of the UN. They’re not a perfect organization, and UN membership shouldn’t be some standard of sovereignty. However, diplomats have always been able to talk whenever they want, the problem that the League of Nations and then the UN tried to address was all the backrooms conversations nations used to have that were part of the causes that lead up to the first world war. Having an international platform every nation needs to at least listen to is better than the alternative. Arguably, untill now the UN has succeeded, there hasn’t been a WWIII.
It sounds a lot like you’re letting Perfection be the enemy of Good Enough.
Should there be no UN because in a small proportion of situations it’s actually shit and is it really realistic to have no talking shop like that at all for as long as it takes for the World to somehow get together and make a perfect entity for that?
I’ve given some thought to it over the years and I think that the UN still does more good than bad, even whilst being shit at some things and having no real power other than that of influencing nations in general and the World’s public opinion.
Further, even if in the balance of things tearing down the UN and creating something better turned out to be the best thing to do, I don’t quite see how arbitrarily kicking countries from the UN that were deemed “badly behaving” at the moment would help us create the something better since those countries would need to be there too (it would certainly help tear down the UN, just not help with the actual primary purpose of getting something better to replace it).
A talking shop for everybody using the penalty of kicking members out only ever succeeds in turning itself into an exclusive club, and at the time when the only thing that existed were such clubs (which were naturally made up of nations allied with each other) was before and at the start of WWI and lead to it and to WWII.
That small proportion of situations is those where it was simply impossible to live oppressed, because there only were options to fight or die. A much larger proportion of people in this world live oppressed.