The US veto of the draft resolution calling for a ceasefire in the Gaza war will go down in history as one of the most ignominious ever cast in the Security Council, writes Hussein Haridy
According to health officials in Gaza on 10 December, the number of Palestinians who have lost their lives under Israeli bombs, supplied by the US, over the last two months has reached almost 18,000, without counting those unaccounted for under the rubble throughout the Gaza Strip.
In addition to the thousands of victims, there are 50,000 injured, most with severe and handicapping injuries. A foreign health official operating in Gaza said last week that Gaza would be a “place of amputees” after the war, pointing out that had there been enough medicine and medical supplies thousands would have been spared these amputations.
Due to the deterioration in the humanitarian situation in Gaza, particularly in the south where the Israeli aggressors have been bombarding and putting under siege Khan Younes, the second-largest city in the Strip after Gaza City in the north, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter for the first time in more than three decades.
The article gives the secretary-general the power to bring to the attention of the Security Council any question that he deems a threat to international peace and security.
The Security Council then held a special session on 8 December to vote on a draft resolution introduced by the UAE, the Arab member of the council, sponsored by 97 members of the UN.
The draft called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and the unconditional release of all the hostages held by the Palestinian resistance movements in Gaza. It also called for speeding up and increasing humanitarian assistance to Gaza.
When the draft was put to the vote, 13 members were in favour, the UK abstained, and there was one shameful veto that will go down in the annals of the organisation as one of the most ignominious ever cast in the Security Council since the establishment of the UN in 1945.
The US delegation vetoed the draft resolution.
The alternate US Permanent Representative Robert Wood, in explaining the US veto, said that “this is not only unrealistic but dangerous. It would simply leave Hamas in place, able to regroup and repeat what it did on October 7.”
He wrongly added that it would “only plant the seeds of the next war”. He also called the draft submitted by the Emirati delegation “rushed” and lacking consultation. Moreover, it did not condemn the Hamas attacks on 7 October, he said.
This was the third time in the last two months that the US has vetoed a UN draft resolution calling for a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. However, this third veto came as a rebuke, and an official one, of the positions held and defended by the so-called Arab allies of Washington.
The joint Arab-Islamic Ministerial Committee that was established by the joint Arab-Islamic Summit hosted two weeks ago by Saudi Arabia was in Washington on the same day that its American hosts vetoed the draft resolution at the Security Council. The irony is that its mission was to persuade the US of the urgent need for a ceasefire, a humanitarian one at that, in order to save innocent Palestinian lives in Gaza.
The foreign ministers on this commission that dismally failed in its mission included those of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Palestine, Egypt, and Indonesia.
The saddest part is that not only did the US administration gave them the cold shoulder, but also, in a highly provocative gesture, it approved an arms shipment of tank shells to Israel worth $105 million the same day the visiting foreign ministers were meeting with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The US thus gave 13,000 more pieces of tank ammunition to Israel. This comes as no surprise from the country responsible for the Mai Lai Massacre in the Vietnam War and the country that turned the whole of Vietnam into killing fields.
The Israelis are now repeating the same atrocities against millions of innocent Palestinians that have been living under Israeli occupation since 1967 and witnessing their land being annexed gradually and systematically amidst an Israeli campaign to dehumanise the Palestinian people.
The aforementioned arms shipment, according to a State Department notification sent to Congress on 8 December, “has been put on an expedited track.” It is intended to kill more Palestinians, more Arabs, and more Muslims.
When the Japanese attacked the US naval base at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941, then US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it a “day of infamy.”
From an Egyptian and Arab point of view, the US veto on 8 December is another day of infamy, this time not of Japanese but of US foreign policy in the Middle East and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Relations with the US must be reassessed, for we cannot continue to be allied with a country that keeps supplying weapons to Israel to mow down innocent Arabs including Palestinians.
There are no grounds or joint interests with Washington to speak of anymore, even those fanciful “strategic partnerships” between some Arab countries and the United States. The US veto on 8 December has laid bare the unfounded myth of so-called strategic partnerships with Washington.
The writer is former assistant foreign minister.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 14 December, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
Short link: