MAGAZINE Voices Anand Neelakantan Sumeet Bhasin Ravi Shankar Utkarsh Amitabh Shampa Dhar-Kamath Mata Amritanandamayi Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment NEW DELHI November 10 2024 SUNDAY PAGES 12 A man carries his wounded son in Gaza Do We Need the UN? The global humanitarian body responsible for maintaining world peace is failing its task. With a hostile Trump presidency, is it time for a new chapter? W By Ravi Shankar e’re watching your votes.” Donald Trump in May 2018 to the UN after relocating the US embassy to Jerusalem. The once formidable United Nations looks suddenly vulnerable in the Age of Donald Trump. The world body’s flagrant anti-Israel stance on the war in Gaza and Lebanon is unlikely to be missed by the new American president. On May 14 2018, the Trump administration moved the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, to the fury of Palestinians who believe it is the capital of a free Palestine state. A UN resolution against relocating the embassy was promptly vetoed by America. In his last term Trump had threatened to withhold hundreds of billions of dollars in funding to the UN. “We’ll save a lot. We don’t care. But this isn’t like it used to be where they could vote against you and then you pay them hundreds of millions of dollars,” he had announced. “We’re not going to be taken advantage of any longer.” In his second term, this old warning does not bode well for the organisation, which ostensibly is the conscience captain of the world. But it seems to be a biased conscience. The latest outrage is an exhibition of paintings on the walls of the UN building in New York, which call for the destruction of the Jewish state. “I demand the immediate removal of this shameful exhibition,” Danny Danon, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN insisted. The preferential stand taken by UN chief Antonio Gutierrez isn’t doing the organisation any favours with the new US President in place. Trump’s position on the positions he takes is historical: “I don’t care. It is my call.” Will that call sound the death knell for the UN? Though India and other member states have paid up this year, deadly foes America and China have held on to their membership cheques in a game of one-upmanship over who dominates the organisation. Which begs the question, ‘does the world need the United Nations?’ It is a new world order. The right wing anti-immigrant, nationalist and protectionist wave sweeping Europe and America will have politics and economies looking inward: America First and Europe First. Italy has swung right. So has the Netherlands. Germany is next. By the time this decade is over, there could well be a Trumpian Europe. This realignment will divide the world into two halves: the Radical Left and the Aggressive Right. Trump, in spite of all his extreme positions and behaviour often regarded as uncouth by US allies, won on a simple message: “You are either with us, or against us.” That philosophy will rule America and the world for the next five years. The ‘us’ and ‘you’ may change periodically, but he has created a global order that will mirror this simplistic format: Us versus Them. The United Nations, in Trump’s world, will struggle to find a place. Or will have no place. It has only itself to blame. The war in Gaza and Gutierrez’s pro-Palestine stance could cost the UN dearly Donald Trump has made . no bones about his Islamophobia: on May 14, he told donors about his plan for dealing with pro-Palestine campus protests: deport the protestors. “One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country . You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave.” When police rounded up pro-Palestinian demonstrators, who had laid siege to Columbia University, Trump called it “a beautiful thing to watch”. He had said earlier, “These are radical-left lunatics, and they’ve got to be stopped now.” When crowds roaring ‘From the River to the Sea’ slogans clogged America’s bridges, squares and roads waving Palestinian flags and assaulting Jews, one of 20 promises Trump made at the Republican National Convention this year was to “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again”. The UN will be boxed into a corner; Trump has deviated from the organisation’s founding values; a position he is likely to stick to, and delight ally Israel, which desperately needs the validation. Trump’s attitude towards the UN policy is well known. 1. His attack on crucial UN institutions during his first presidency was unambiguous. He pulled America out of the Human Rights Council, and swore not to return until real reform is enacted. 2. He accused the International Criminal Court (ICC) of arrogance by claiming “near-universal jurisdiction over the citizens of every country, violating all principles of justice, fairness, and due process. We will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy”. ICC has issued warrants for two Trump buddies: Israel’s Netanyahu and Russia’s Putin. 3. The US withdrew from UNESCO, which Trump accuses is prejudiced against Israel. 4. Iran is in Trump’s crosshairs. “The dictatorship used the funds to build nuclearcapable missiles, increase internal repression, finance terrorism, and fund havoc and slaughter in Syria and Yemen,” is his view. 5. The Trump administration shut off the tap to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the nodal organisation dedicated to protecting and campaigning for displaced Palestinian refugees. The US was UNRWA’s biggest benefactor till then, with an annual allocation of over $350 million. In April 2024, Biden resumed the funding. It seemed to be a terrible mistake. In Gaza, three humanitarian agencies are active, of which two are UN related: UNRWA, United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFL) and third, The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). Last week, Israel banned UNRWA from operating in Israel and Gaza. Tel Aviv has warned it will arrest and prosecute any of its employees with terrorist connections. Photos and videos showed dozens of UNRWA officials and staffers directly participating in last year’s October 7 pogrom in southern Israel. Mohammad Abu Itiwi, who led the carnage and kidnapping of Israelis hiding in a roadside bomb shelter, was an UNRWA employee since July 2022 while also serving as a Nukbha commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion: he was killed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) last week in Gaza. Fateh Sherif Abu el-Amin, leader of the Hamas in Lebanon headed the Lebanon’s UNRWA teachers’ union; he was a school principal with 65 schools and roughly 40,000 students under his control—last week, he too was eliminated by IDF in Gaza. UNRWA’s Abu el-Amin was the coordinator of terror activities between Hamas and Hezbollah. He acquired weapons, recruited terrorists and used social media to provoke attacks on Jews. The IDF has unearthed terrorist infrastructure inside and around UNRWA schools, hospitals and offices. The IDF also discovered a Hamas underground data centre under UNRWA’s HQ in Gaza City which was powered by electricity from the UN agency’s building. The UN has been crying hoarse that the IDF is stopping the distribution of humanitarian aid to starving Gaza civilians. This, in spite of Hamas seizing hundreds of supply trucks entering Gaza every week; the food and medicines are sold by the terrorists on the black market to desperate civilians at Antonio Gutierrez and Donald Trump With a weak chief in Antonio Gutierrez, the United Nations, in Trump’s world, will struggle to find a place. Or will have no place. It has only itself to blame extravagant prices. According to Western intelligence, Hamas has seized an estimated $500 million in foreign aid so far. Communications between two Hamas terrorists reported overflowing humanitarian aid warehouses in Gaza. “We’ve got trucks filled with goods alongside the diesel trucks,” one operative is heard saying. “At this point, we have everything... The warehouse is at full capacity . We’re just waiting for the green light to start transferring.” To circumvent the hijacks, IDF roped in Gaza-based merchants to distribute food and medicines; it stopped after Hamas commandeered 20 per cent of the merchants’ profits. An example: UNRWA distributed supplies from only 225 trucks Israel sent for Gazans out of the 400 sent on May 2. “What really should be shocking is how anyone can pretend Hamas, with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency collaboration, hasn’t been impeding or diverting aid delivery for months,” Saif Richard Goldberg, Senior Advisor of think tank FDD said. The other agency which is being accused for its pro-Hamas bias is the International Committee of the Red Cross. The ICRC supposedly stays neutral in any conflict. But it has not in Gaza. The Geneva-based monitoring group, UN Watch, has flagged the partiality; of 187 tweets on ICRC accounts, including those by its president Mirjana Spoljaric Egger and director-general Robert Mardini, 77 per cent blasted Israel and just seven per cent of the tweets censured Hamas. On October 17, the ICRC backed Hamas’s fake news that Israel attacked and “destroyed” Al-Ahli hospital. It was “shocked and horrified” to know “hundreds were killed”, including “patients killed in a hospital bed”, and doctors “losing their lives trying to save others”. It turned out later that the explosion was a result of a misfired rocket attack by Hamas-ally Islamic Front on the parking lot of the hospital. The ICRC did not even issue a correction. “By refusing to condemn Hamas’s repeated and unprovoked aggression, and by systematically glossing over the suffering of Israelis subjected to 11,000 rockets in the past two months alone, including the suffering of 3,00,000 displaced Israelis, the ICRC and its leaders have effectively validated and encouraged Hamas’s cynical tactics to exploit and trample the laws of war,” alleged Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch and an international human rights lawyer. The Red Cross neither did visit the Israeli hostages held in Gaza, nor monitor their state of health, it did not try to get them released either. Even as medical aid streams into Gaza and is hijacked by Hamas, the Shurat Hadin NGO of Israel which champions Jewish victims of violence said the ICRC did not even “try to supply the medicines required to the hostages”. During Jewish New Year in 2018, Trump informed community leaders that he told the Palestinians, Turn to page 2