By Kathy Kelly, World BEYOND War, November 15, 2024
The Biblical Book of Job chronicles a string of catastrophes relentlessly plaguing the main character, Job, who loses his prosperity, his home, his health, and his children. Eventually, an agonized Job curses his own existence as well as the god that created him.
Numerous interpretations of the story exist, and more than one version has circulated through the ancient Near East. One version concludes with Job avowing repentance. “I know that my redeemer liveth, and so I repent in dust and in ashes.”
The Latin root for the word ‘repent’ is pensare – to think. ‘Repent” suggests an effort to rethink.
Job’s surprising repentance has been on my mind as calls increase, in 2024, for the United Nations to rethink its relation to Israel as a member state. Increasingly, civil society groups are pressuring Permanent Missions to the UN to eject Israel as a voting member of the General Assembly.
To paraphrase Pankraj Mishra, writing for the New York Review of Books, a stunned world has watched with disbelief as the United States provisions Israel with weapons enabling a mass murder spree across the Middle East.
Palestinians in the West Bank have recently urged all organizations demanding UN compliance with the International Criminal Court ruling of July 2024 to sign a letter available at World BEYOND War which urges Member States of the United Nations General Assembly to fulfill their duties.
Following up on the potential of this letter, a new coalition, “Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine” has issued a letter to His Excellency Mr. Philemon Yang, the President of the United Nations General Assembly asking him to convene an urgent meeting of the General Assembly to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire, establish and secure humanitarian aid corridors and ensure the complete withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
The letter additionally requests:
- The revival of the UN Committee Against Apartheid to address systemic violations of international law and human rights in the OPT.
- Consideration of targeted boycotts, sanctions, and divestments, particularly against illegal operations in the OPT.
- The establishment of an arms embargo on Israel.
- Exploration of suspending Israel from the General Assembly until it complies with international law.
To further support these efforts, the letter calls for the establishment of an unarmed UN peacekeeping mission in the OPT under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to ensure the safety and dignity of all civilians.
In a way, Israel has already removed itself from norms maintained by the UN Charter as it has consistently flouted UN treaties, Resolutions and Advisory opinions. We must not forget that Israel refuses to acknowledge to the UN its possession of nuclear weapons.
I felt startled, during an initial planning call held with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, when one of them spoke of the evacuation he and his family faced, that very day, and said, “We are facing the final solution. Israel is imposing the final solution on us.” Other participants spoke of having shuddered during bombings, day and night.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan, writes movingly in the Guardian of how absurd it is that the United Nations’ General Assembly agrees to seat Israel as a U.N. member nation.
Israel’s abusive repudiation of the very idea of the United Nations, its escalating and lethal violation of countless international norms, its repeated, lethal attacks on U.N. sanctuaries and peacekeepers justifies its expulsion. Hasan reminds us that Israel’s outgoing Ambassador to the United Nations shredded the UN charter while standing at the General Assembly podium. This is the Charter that declares the UN mission to eradicate the scourge of warfare for future generations.
It is time for the clouds to part above the burning lands of West Asia – for the suffering there to be comforted and their pitiless accusers rebuked by the gathered voice of humanity, by the agent that created Israel and can, when it wishes, “let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The work here is ours, and so let our United Nations demand, and not beg, humanity from Israel and from its imperial sponsor the United States.
5 Responses
Whether Israel likes it or not, the Creator created mankind. That mankind includes all, whether or not we like how they behave, each and everyone is a part of the same God. And there can only be one God, for there to be more than One, means none of them can be God, the Supreme Creator of all. Israel has insisted on attributing to themselves specialness, and in so doing have justified the massacre of others created by the same God.
How, in the name of the One True God can this behaviour of the Nethanhu government ever be justified?
It is so difficult for me to understand why, in 2024, we are still fighting wars and imagining that somehow that will make life better for anyone!
It is so incredibly obvious that Israel is acting in a manner that far exceeds any reasonable response to October 6th. The war and Genocide on the Palestinian people must be stopped at all costs! Not one more mother, child, or father should die at the hands of the Israeli military or the settlers or civilians! The time to stop is now!
I fully support this article and like commentators above, with no respect for UN or ICC decisions why on earth does Israel still have a place in these structures of international law that Netanyahu and his cabinet are flouting daily?
Humanity is here at the end of 2024C.E. in a time of combined madness, war and global technological overshoot as an outcome of great folly and the misuse of the power of states. We the people founded the
United Nations Organisation to bring our states together as members in the sane, humane and ecological purpose to leave our children hope in the fulfillment of the UN Charter. We the children of our UN founders who produced the Earth Charter in 2001 now face our old age with this call to produce a Sign: an olive branch of hope I imagine as a single dove above the flood bearing the olive branch of peace and universal laws of life on Earth embodied in these charters. Our children need that Sign now coming directly from a last-minute singular act of collective will in the name of uniting all nations under the UN rules our parents created to serve the laws of peace and life on what Kenneth Boulding called Spaceship Earth.
At this moment on this Small Blue Dot, as Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan communicated their love for the image of Earth from beyond the Solar System, we have this call from the great suffering today in West Asia to suspend a member state as the first act in collective repentance to return humanity to life under the collective rules of life our survivors of war and genocide achieved in their “earth charter” serving today as the rules-based U.N. order.
Let each of us who has life at this moment join together in this new beginning for the children of the Gaza genocide, and all all children suffering under cultures of violence in the region and everywhere. This is about enacting the laws of life on planet Earth.
Israel’s suspension from the UN table is a sign that the U.N. flame of life, hope and freedom is not extinguished. I hope to see this sign of civil life on Earth before January 20th 2025.