My Take | Israel has no place among the family of nations at the UN
Given its murderous attacks on UN staff in Gaza and declaration of its chief as ‘persona non grata’, it’s about time to invoke Article 6 of the UN Charter to expel the rogue state
Suppose you are a member of a club that you hate and despise so much you have denounced some of its staff as criminals and started killing them en masse. You have denounced the club president as a non-person and theatrically shredded a copy of its constitutional charter on stage at a general meeting for all members.
The question is not so much whether you should have been expelled already as a minimal response from the club, in addition to calling the police. Rather you should ask yourself why you want to stay and pay your dues as a member at all.
These questions have been raised by prominent journalist Mehdi Hasan in a new op-ed in The Guardian and a legal analysis by Saul Takahashi, a human rights professor at Osaka Jogakuin University and former deputy head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights in Palestine.
“Why has it [Israel] not yet been expelled from an organisation that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining?” Hasan wrote.
“Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have ‘refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions’. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself ‘persona non grata’.”
Hasan was referring to the killing of a record 228 UN employees over the 12 months Israel has invaded Gaza in ongoing military operations that saw the bombing of UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps. No country has managed to kill more UN staff in a single conflict during the international body’s entire existence.
