The UN: Still Willfully Blind After All These Years

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The Gatestone Institute’s Bassam Tawil recently reminded us of the UN’s long support of jihadist genocidal antisemitism: “United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres is still pushing for the establishment of a Palestinian terror state next to Israel. There are only three ways to read Guterres’s position: he is completely clueless; he wants to see Israel eradicated; or he is happy to oblige his constituents at the UN who would apparently like to see Israel eradicated.”

This hoary solution to a conflict born in Islam’s jihadism and the Koranic sanctioned hatred of Jews, relies on the feckless, arrogant but useful Western idealism that followed the First World War. As Guterres recycles the stale cliché, “The two-State solution with Israelis & Palestinians living side by side in peace & security,” is the only viable path to a just and lasting peace. Guterres wrote this week, “The occupation must end. The inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be realized. International law must be respected.”

Yet it has been obvious for decades that the “two-state solution” is not about a “nation,” but about creating another “final solution.”

The most obvious evidence that the Palestinian Arabs aren’t killing Jews in order to win a nation comprises the multiple times Israel has offered territory for a state. As Bassam Tawil reminds us, “The Palestinians and their Arab brothers have already voted against a two-state solution many times, starting in November 1947. . .The UN had offered a partition plan dividing then Mandatory Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem as an international city. . . Rather than accept the offer, the Arabs attacked Jewish civilians and looted Jewish shops, setting them on fire with the apparent aim of terrorizing Jews in order to prevent a Jewish state in any part of the land.”

So how do we explain the UN’s refusal to take “no” for an answer? The answer lies in what we call the “rules-based international order,” a vision of foreign policy that began with the Versailles Treaty after World War I––a reflection of the Western enlightenment and the rise of science, and the notion of progress through technology and global trade. Also significant was secularization––the weakening of faith and religious explanations of a flawed human nature and sinful actions. But religiosity still exists among Muslims, though few commentators follow Gatestone in acknowledging Islam’s religiosity and its sanctified violence.

One ambition for the human sciences––material progress, and improvement of human life––was described by Immanuel Kant’s influential 1795 essay “Perpetual Peace.”  The “endless progress” of reason, Kant writes, could create a “federation of free states” that could ensure and maintain global peace and order by transcending the zero-sum interests of different states and peoples, and ensure “perpetual peace.”

This ideal, Kant continues, is not a “chimera, but a problem of which time, probably abridged by the uniformity of the progress of the human mind, promises a solution.” The assumption of a uniformity of aims among different nations, cultures, ethnicities, and peoples that follow the progressive march of science and reason across the globe, characterize the subsequent history of foreign policy idealism to this day––the most important being the United Nations, which is the stepchild of the failed League of Nations that followed World War 1.

The weakness of both the League of Nations and the U.N.––both idealisms derived from Kant’s model of the “world parliament” and “federation of free States” ––is the failure to take into account the complex diversity of flawed human beings and cultures.

Yet the West, from which these and many other ideas derived, became the default model for all humanity–– despite Kant’s neglect of the wisdom of realism that acknowledges irrationalism and evil impulses which haunt all humans. The Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian foundations of the West are filled with such realism and interests which was memorably expressed by George Washington: “It is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.”

Finally, we must remember one of the greatest failures of the UN––a failure that rejected its founding assumptions going back to the League of Nations’ feckless idealism that ignored human nature and the eternal priority of national self-interest among diverse nations.

In 1947, the newborn UN created Resolution 181, which called for Mandatory Palestine to be divided into an Israeli and an Arab nation––the origins of the “two-state solution.” The “solution” was, in fact, a stalking horse for jihadist terrorist murder of Jews living in their ancestral homes–– which happened the following year when five Arab nations, four of them members of the UN, invaded Israel seeking to undo by force the UN’s resolution, and thus besmirching its principles of “nonviolence” going back to their beginning in Kant’s and Woodrow Wilson’s fever dreams that ended in a new form of violent antisemitism.

Rather than punishing those Arab violators of the UN’s principle, the UN became a facilitator of antisemitism, demonizing Israel and targeting it as a global menace to “human rights,” while letting actual enemies of justice sit on tribunals staffed with communists and terrorists.

Finally, for too long this country has squandered trillions of our tax-dollars on resorts for bureaucratic grifters and global busy-bodies at the UN. Our Founders, who gave us the Constitution declaring us free and equal, must be spinning in their graves.