The recent vote at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), in which 158 countries supported two resolutions related to the Israel-Palestine conflict, is extremely distressing. One resolution called for an “immediate, unconditional, and permanent ceasefire.” The other expressed support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). India’s decision to support these resolutions is even more depressing.
Both resolutions are preposterous. The first one smacks of moral equivalence. The very phraseology is malevolent, mischievous, and misleading. It talks about “all parties,” as if the combatants are on the same moral footing. For there is Israel, which suffered an unprovoked, barbaric attack on October 7, 2023, leading to the death of 1,200 people, over half of whom were civilians, including women and children. Women were violently raped. About 250 hostages were taken by the Hamas attackers.
On the other hand are the murderous Hamas, a terrorist organization which uses women and children as human shield. It often operates from hospitals and schools, so that civilian casualties are maximized in case of conflict.
The call for the “unconditional release of all hostages” is outrageous, as it equates the civilian hostages taken by Hamas attackers on October 7, 2023, with the terrorists captured by the Israeli soldiers in various operations.
India’s decision to back the two resolutions shows that the Nehruvian influence on the foreign office is still considerable, Narendra Modi’s antipathy towards India’s first prime minister notwithstanding.
The second resolution supporting the UNRWA underlines the fact that the agency is infested with Islamists, including jihadists. In fact, many jihadists have infiltrated the UNRWA. Even the anti-Israel mainstream media is forced to admit that there are many problems with the UNRWA. The New York Times reported on December 8 that “interviews and an analysis of the records shared with The Times by the Israeli military and foreign ministry indicate that… at least 24 people [were] employed by UNRWA—in 24 different schools—who were members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, another militant group. Before the war, the agency was responsible for a total of 288 schools, housed in 200 different building compounds, in Gaza.” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/08/world/middleeast/hamas-unrwa-schools.html)
The NYT report further said, “A majority were top administrators at the schools—principals or deputy principals—and the rest were school counselors and teachers, the documents say. Almost all of the Hamas-linked educators, according to the records, were fighters in the Qassam Brigades.”
Therefore, the infiltration not only helped jihadists indoctrinate the impressionable youngsters about their vile ideology but also use school buildings as their Hamas safe houses. “The documents also list two schools in particular that were to be used as redoubts where fighters could hide and stash weapons in a conflict.”
Residents of Gaza said in interviews that the idea that Hamas had operatives in UNRWA schools was an open secret, the report said. “In other instances, the agency did not fire Hamas operatives after tunnels were discovered under or adjacent to its schools.”
Jihadist indoctrination in UNRWA schools has been known for quite some time. An article in Foreign Policy on November 5, 2021, said, “Textbooks depict Jews as enemies of Islam, glorify so-called martyrs who have died while committing terror attacks, and promote jihad for the liberation of historic Palestine…” FP quoted a “comprehensive report released in June, financed by the European Union and conducted by the Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research.” A 5th grade Islamic education lesson “asks students to discuss the ‘repeated attempts by the Jews to kill the Prophet’ and then asks them to think of ‘other enemies of Islam.’” (https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/05/unrwa-palestine-israel-refugees-united-states-funding-corruption-education/)
In fact, this was not first NYT story showing the jihadist infiltration of the UNRWA; on September 12, it published another one detailing how in mid-January UNRWA Philippe Lazzarini was first informed about that, resulting in the freezing of funds for the agency by its most Western funders. (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/12/magazine/unrwa-gaza-war.html)
The real problem is with the United Nations, which is run by the radical Left. The UN has followed O’Sullivan’s First Law: All organizations that are not actually Rightwing will over time become Leftwing. In an article, John O’Sullivan, a conservative journalist and Margaret Thatcher’s speech writer, wrote in 1989, he said that of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Ford Foundation, among others, followed O’Sullivan’s First Law.
Therefore, as I wrote earlier, “UN bodies’ conception of human rights is the antithesis of the actual one: they find violations of human rights where none exist (as in Gaza), and none where atrocities against religious minorities rise by the day (as in Bangladesh).” (https://www.news18.com/opinion/opinion-india-us-unlikely-to-tolerate-yunus-duplicity-for-long-9148666.html)
For UN czars, the evilness of Israel is an article of faith. Moral equivalence, downplaying the unconscionable behavior of Hamas terrorists, jihadist indoctrination in schools run by the UNRWA, and demonization of Israel follow naturally. If anyone from within resists any of this, they are discarded. The Kenyan peacemaker Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide since November 2020, learnt this at her own expense. She refused to call Israel’s war against Hamas genocidal. Last month, the UN refused to renew her contract.
Hopefully, the world and our foreign office will soon take these facts into account.