Photo courtesy of AA
Racism has been a persistent challenge in human societies. Apart from the historical movements and the fight for justice and rights for marginalised groups, shrouded in open declarations of peace and unity, lies personal vendetta – proof of the racist undertones that govern the international system.
The United Nations UN has always been a revered institution in the world and, besides its many interventions and actions towards the maintenance of law and order, which many use as a justification for its long standing reputation as a bastion of peace, it often falls short, not in the eyes of the powerful, but from the lived experience of those who don’t have the means to make themselves heard.
The resolution, Responsibility to Protect (R2P), adopted in 2005, is one such political commitment states fail to uphold with a myriad of excuses, citing historical events to justify their actions, or lack thereof, hiding behind the past to rationalise gross human rights violations. The genocide in Gaza, as outlined by Amnesty International, committed by Israel, backed by the US and other superpowers, warrants scrutiny of the UN and its policies, for what is the purpose of international organisations if not to speak for the voiceless? But amid this dystopian reality, the world’s elite and powerful turn a blind eye to the human rights violations, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, revealing not only the racism that governs everyday life but the distinct power wielded by the privileged and what happens when these wielders are threatened with an alternate possibility – equality of all.
The failure of R2P
Located at a point of time when the states of the world regretted the genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans as well as the NATO military intervention in Kosovo in the 1990s, the primacy of the resolution stemmed from the mass loss of human lives. With more than 800,000 lives lost in the Rwanda genocide, the international community debated on “how to react to gross and systematic violations of human rights.” In 1999, Kofi Annan contemplated the “prospects of human security” while also “acting in defence of common humanity.” The issue stems from the problematic balance between sovereignty and human rights. Respect for the sovereignty of other states would then mean turning a blind eye to mass atrocities, for the protection of sovereignty directly implies the degradation of human rights. The resolution has been side-lined since the time Qaddafi was killed and Libya descended into political turmoil and chaos, where member states of the UN vowed never to “violate the sovereignty of a member state after humanitarian intervention in Libya evolved into a regime change operation.” Since then, civil wars in Syria and Yemen and genocides in Myanmar and Palestine have continued to ravage the lands, while the whole world continues to debate one’s sovereign rights but lives are lost every day, reduced to mere numbers in the headlines of the news.
Palestine: The world’s largest open air prison
Palestine is a pseudo-state in the eyes of the privileged majority or anyone who views the world in stark binaries where colour speaks louder than character and generations of racist sentiment dictate present conscience. It is not merely colour or the spatial location of these people but the narratives that have been crafted to construct the Palestinians as the other while news outlets, journalists, scholars, critics and politicians pass themselves off as impartial commentators. The privileged majority establishment’s espousal of Israel as a state that existed before Palestine turns on a rabid Jewish belief in the land being rightfully theirs on the grounds of religious sentiment and anyone who deviates from this belief is then branded anti-Semitic. Therefore, the Jewish identity is constructed in relation to the Palestinians – the people that are not Palestinians – where, through strict policing, they are able to create an us and them. Such thinking is an apt glaze for the naturally xenophobic worldview.
As a result, the harsh reality of what’s occurring on an everyday basis for Palestinians continues despite the gross human rights violations. Excuses and justifications, erasure of decades’ worth of history only to rewrite it from October 7, 2023, the open anti-Palestinian sentiment with the usage of Hamas as a scapegoat, a means to justify Israel’s genocide and apartheid shrouded with politically incorrect phrases, for Israel has the right to defend itself even if it means a complete erasure of an ethnic community. The genocide in Palestine is inherently political but this isn’t reason enough to legitimise ethnic cleansing and is precisely where the UN falls short. In the same breath, of course, those who wield power ignore and obscure the fact that an entire population of people, their culture and history are being erased based on their words and actions, which mandate the actions of an apartheid state regime like Israel.
When justice becomes a punchline
This only exposes the deep contempt of the privileged majority for the Palestinians. This is precisely what fuels the disgust at anyone who speaks out openly against Israel with politically correct terminology to refer to them as an apartheid state regime where genocide is approved by the superpowers of the world. These terms are then negated with buzzwords like anti-Semitism and racism. It is one thing to be racist but the usage of the term in this context exposes not only the folly in their entire narrative building but also the reality of power politics in the world.
It is those who wield power that get to choose how the story plays out and thus the scaremongering about terrorist groups like Hamas, that they could subvert regimes like Israel due to extremist religious sentiment. All this is to say that Hamas, or any freedom fighters for that matter, are labelled and an identity assigned to further the pro-Israel narrative, which is then backed by states that act as paragons of democracy, which millions consume every day from large scale news outlets (as if the “greatest” democracy in the world hasn’t committed its fair share of atrocities but who is keeping track?)
Sovereignty vs. human rights: A global dilemma
To be or not to be, that is the question. But in this case and countless other cases, the question has always been on walking the tightrope between sovereignty and human rights. To the layman, it may seem obvious – people are dying, prioritise life. But if life were as simple as this, many of the world’s problems today wouldn’t exist. Because human nature, at its essence, is base and vile, even more so when one exists within the centres of power, and the lived experiences of those who don’t would never be a reality for many of them. The doctrine of sovereignty throughout history has been controversial and this is due to the interplay between the concepts of state and government and of independence and democracy. That is to say, that an already complex term now needs a re-evaluation with the combination of human rights. In sociology and anthropology, human rights is yet another abstract term, one that seems to assume that all people and cultures are inherently the same and therefore come under the purview of international law and, by extension, universal human rights. Setting aside the abstract and difficult nature of these concepts, it is safe to say that every human has the right to live, whatever culture, spatial or temporal locality, every human deserves to live out their lives and when an apartheid regime takes away the most basic human right, it does warrant a closer look at the issue.
Therefore, when member states of the UN and the UN in itself fail to protect the most basic human rights, it renders the institution ineffective and futile. True, that previous intervention in the Libyan civil war has resulted in a failed state and a site of an international proxy conflict that further destabilises the nation. This is just one of the many reasons that is used by member states of the UN as a necessary realpolitik, and therefore the US primarily has vetoed many resolutions since October 7 for a ceasefire. (Of course, this is yet again shrouded in personal vendetta and power politics of the AIPAC and ADL.) But embedded in here is the idea that going ahead with a ceasefire would mean a reinstatement and recognition of Palestine as a state, and according to the privileged majority, it is not (even though the two state solution points to anything but) and therefore the Palestinian people have to live as human shields because Hamas is the only group at play here and Israel is only reacting (disproportionately) to the October 7 attacks.
The UN: A legacy of peace or a relic of hypocrisy?
All of this points to one thing only: the failure of the UN. It is a dramatic statement, in every sense, but in substance even a cursory glance at the UN and its operations reveals not an institution that ushers in full-throated universal rights for all, irrespective of colour, history, ethnicity or culture but a partisan establishment that appears to be running based on system inertia. Most tellingly, the UN promises to be a bastion of peace and equality but falls short with the macedoine of conflicting interests, party politics and implicit racism. Ideally, resolutions like the R2P should have been used to stop the full-throttled invasion and eradication of the Palestinian state and its people by Israel and although South Africa filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice on December 29, 2023 accusing Israel of violating the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in its assault against Gaza and the ruling went in favour of South Africa, Israel has continued with the erasure of the Palestinian people.
What this also means is that if and when any substantive change fails to materialise for the Palestinian people, particularly in their right to live without fear of threat to their existence, as will certainly be the case under the continued adherence to international law and human rights, the organisation risks the revered name it has established for itself. This will also leave ample space for offenders of international law to continue operating as threats to all those who don’t fall within the centres of power. Such a reality spells a definitive end to entire races and populations because of the inaction of organisations like the UN. But for anyone sickened by the privileged majority’s hypocrisy, moments such as the ICJ case filed by South Africa are a fleeting treat for the other, which is then violently snatched away with the cold reality of the balance of power in the world.