Israel’s New Arab Friends Should Stand Up for Peace at the UN

In 1991, the United Nations General Assembly repealed its infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism, but it did not dismantle two organizations it had set up at the same time: the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) and the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR). These are part of a network of organs within the UN whose primary purpose is to produce anti-Semitic propaganda. Richard Goldberg and David May write:

Another body with a special mandate to discriminate against Israel and promote Palestinian demands is the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Established in 1950 to care for Arabs who fled Palestine during Israel’s War of Independence, . . . UNRWA helps ensure that Palestinians continue to live in squalor and serve as political pawns in a 70-year campaign to undermine the legitimacy of Israel’s right to exist. At UNRWA schools, generation after generation of Palestinian children are raised to hate Jews and the Jewish state. [Moreover], UNRWA encourages extremism inside Sunni Arab monarchies, placing a giant target on Gulf leaders accused of abandoning the Palestinian cause.

If the goal of the Abraham Accords is to promote the “spirit of coexistence, mutual understanding, and mutual respect,” all the parties to the accords and their allies should prioritize the elimination or reform of multilateral organizations whose work only sows discord. The United Arab Emirates, for example, remains an observer at the CEIRPP. Having signed its own peace treaty with Israel, the UAE should renounce its observer status immediately, and others should follow.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which recently normalized relations with Israel by signing the Abraham Accords, nonetheless supported seven United Nations General Assembly resolutions singling out and condemning Israel this month. While Israeli-Arab rapprochement is racing forward, reconciliation is proceeding at a turtle’s pace at Turtle Bay. . . . It’s time for Arab countries to stop voting for anti-Israel resolutions and to start working with the U.S. and Israel to eliminate the UN’s institutional barriers to peace.

Read more at Washington Examiner

More about: Abraham Accords, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, United Nations, UNRWA

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF