BY GIDON BEN-ZVI, HARRY BEN-ZVI
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly in New York took last week took place in the Western world’s epicenter for the promotion, codification and implementation of institutional anti-Semitism.
After all, it is no coincidence that behind every conflict Israel has ever fought there has been a failed United Nations resolution.
Simply scrape the gloss off the noble sentiments expressed in the Charter of the United Nations and you will discover that the world body’s Near East policy has from its inception fanned the flames of Arab nationalism, perpetuating regional conflicts that have effectively preserved a status quo sympathetic to authoritarian Arab regimes, at the expense of Israeli security and sovereignty.
The die was cast by Great Britain, which had occupied modern-day Israel from the end of the First World War until the 1947 UN partition. The European-based realpolitik that catered to Arab nationalism and authoritarian rule came at the expense of historical Jewish claims and contemporary Jewish interests.
A decade later, following the 1956 Sinai War, the United Nations forced an Israeli withdrawal from the Peninsula by establishing an international peace keeping force to demilitarize the area. This state of affairs held sway until 1967, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded and received a UN withdrawal of said international peacekeeping force.
This unexplained retreat by the United Nations facilitated a massive Egyptian military buildup in the Sinai, and an eventual Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Teheran to Israeli shipping, an act of war that sparked the Six-Day-War.
Fast forward to the 1970s and you will find that since the UN was first charged with preserving peace in Lebanon, the country has degenerated from being the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ to a terrorist caliphate. Simply swap out ‘PLO’ for ‘Hezbollah’ and a disturbing historical trend emerges.
The UN peacekeeping force’s raison d’etre in Lebanon was to preserve ‘stability’ by facilitating a withdrawal of Israeli forces. With international peacekeepers filling the void created by the IDF’s exit, southern Lebanon would thus be demilitarized.