Israel’s devastating onslaught on Gaza, now approaching the one-year mark, and increasing settler outrages in the West Bank are giving fresh urgency to moves to suspend the Jewish state from the United Nations General Assembly.
Palestinian civil society has long been calling for such a step, and the Gaza war, along with the two major pronouncements from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) about Israel this year, have given the initiative new traction.
The idea is to use the same mechanism against the Jewish state that was used in 1974 to freeze apartheid South Africa’s participation in the General Assembly. The action contributed to the white minority government’s isolation and its eventual collapse.
It was the new, democratic South African state that brought the genocide application against Israel in the ICJ, resulting in an interim judgment by the court in January broadly supporting South Africa’s case.
Then in July, the court — responding to a General Assembly request — delivered an advisory opinion finding that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories amounted to colonization, racial discrimination and apartheid.
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) is leading the drive for Israel’s suspension, Maren Mantovani, the international outreach coordinator of the Stop the Wall campaign, told PassBlue. The organization is based in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank.
“There is an ongoing, concerted effort by Palestinian civil society to push the UN to uphold its mission . . . and to define and enact the precise modalities to end Israel’s crimes and violations,” Mantovani said.
Saleh Hijazi, a BNC adviser on apartheid-free policy, said he expected calls for Israel’s suspension to intensify next month with the opening of the 79th session of the General Assembly. UNGA, as it is known, begins on Sept. 10.
(The Palestinian delegation at the UN said on Aug. 22 that it was also planning to soon initiate an “actionable resolution” in the General Assembly, “demanding within a time frame the end of this illegal occupation and all other issues contained” in the ICJ advisory opinion.)
“I have been in a number of international forums over the past few months, including a joint meeting between the Organization of Islamic Co-operation and the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, where sanctions, including diplomatic [measures] and suspending Israel from UNGA, were a big part of the discussion,” Hijazi said by email.
“Indeed, civil society organizations, movements and grassroots groups the world over support such a call and see it as necessary.”
Among those who have expressed support is Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.
“I hope that the Global South . . . increases pressure for meaningful action to stop the genocide in Gaza, end the occupation of Palestine and ensure that perpetrators of grave crimes are brought to justice,” he said in an email. “One of those actions could very well be based on the precedent set by the action taken against apartheid South Africa.”
Craig Mokhiber, an international human rights lawyer who formerly worked for the UN, wrote in a message to PassBlue that “it would be hard to imagine a country more deserving, as a minimum, of suspension from the UNGA.”
“The precedent of the suspension of apartheid South Africa is well established,” he noted. “The UNGA should move at once to suspend Israel, and to direct the Organization to use its resources and mechanisms to combat Israel’s apartheid and gross violations of human rights, just as it did in South Africa.”
He added that no country had more consistently violated the principles of the UN Charter than Israel.
“Israel is today on trial in the World Court for genocide, its leaders are the subject of arrest warrant requests in the ICC [International Criminal Court] for crimes against humanity, the ICJ has found it is perpetrating apartheid and that its decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territory is unlawful,” he said.
The council of the League of Arab States resolved at a meeting in Cairo in July to pursue the idea of suspending Israel, but so far no UN member state has taken any formal steps to do so.
The South African government, which has placed Palestinian solidarity front and center of its foreign policy, has yet to discuss the suspension issue, said Clayson Monyela, the spokesperson for the Department of International Relations and Cooperation.
Nevertheless, South African nongovernmental organizations are confident that Pretoria would be in the vanguard of the effort.
“We expect South Africa would fully support it at all levels,” Bram Hanekom, a board member of Africa4Palestine, said in a phone interview with PassBlue. “It’s a domestic issue for us, it speaks to morality, it speaks to justice, it speaks to our own history.”
But South Africa is heavily dependent on its trade relations with the United States and needs to avoid alienating lawmakers in Washington even more than it has already — not only by bringing the genocide case, but also by failing to condemn Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine and by maintaining close ties with Iran and China.
So pushing for Israel’s suspension would come with “serious risks,” Hanekom said. “We’re doing this incredible balancing act as a country.”
The Mideast analyst Mouin Rabbani cites Washington’s global clout when he says the Palestinian campaign might have symbolic importance, but it is unlikely to result in its proclaimed goal of another victory like the one against South Africa in 1974.
“There are fundamental differences between the situation you had with South Africa in the 1970s and the situation with Palestine now,” Rabbani said in a phone call.
“The South African suspension came in the context of the Cold War, where you had very clear voting blocs and any anticolonial resolution had a virtually automatic majority,” he added. “The situation now is very different, where there aren’t really solid blocs the way you had in the 1970s, and an additional consequence of that is that individual governments are much more susceptible to US and European lobbying.”
Moreover, Washington is far more invested in Israel than it was in South Africa 50 years ago and would be “much more energetic” in opposing moves to suspend the Jewish state, Rabbani said.
“Another factor is, you don’t have the kind of universal global revulsion against the very existence of the Israeli regime the way you had towards the white minority regime in South Africa — its very existence was seen as beyond the pale in most of the world. I don’t think we’ve yet reached that situation with Israel.
People tend to put a lot of blame and responsibility on [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, or this Israeli government, and the realization that the problem here is one of the regime, rather than of an individual leader, still has some ways to go.”
Mokhiber described Israel as holding “the world record for breaching UN resolutions.”
“[It] has been found responsible for gross and systematic violations of human rights and humanitarian law by successive UN commissions of inquiry and independent special procedures. Worse, it has killed more UN staff than any party in history (and by a wide margin), has detained and tortured UN staff, and has regularly attacked, slandered and obstructed the Organization and its duly-mandated operations.”
Neither the Israeli mission to the UN nor the Palestinian delegation responded to requests for comment.
We welcome your comments on this article. What are your thoughts on efforts to suspend Israel from the UN?
Anton Ferreira worked for 23 years as a correspondent and desk editor at Reuters. He started in Hong Kong and later worked long-term assignments in the Mideast, Latin America, New York City, Washington and South Africa. Ferreira is now based in South Africa.
nothing would be more appropriate….
It is the same anti-semitic logic that Israel uses to oppress and continue genocide against the Palestinians. I support the move to suspend this Jewish state that’s getting its high from killing civilians.
Another act of anti-Semitism pushed by ignorant or mean people that have zero knowledge of history and facts. To those mean people: anti-Semitism is racism!
So is islamophobia and hatred of Palestinians. But you should also know there are hundreds of thousands “antisemitic” Jews around the world, including some prominent Jewish historians and academics, with “zero knowledge of history” probably.
I very strongly believe that one of the BRICS should again take the lead after South-Africa launched the successful ICJ process against Israel, and as this is an opportunity to end the Unipolar World and move to a Multipolar World where JUSTICE, EQUALITY, EQUITY, DEMOCRACY AND MUTUAL RESPECT will be the FONDAMENTAL RULES in a United Nations without a Security Council.
The Palestinian people, along with the international solidarity movement, are called upon to unify and intensify their efforts to dismantle Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid system and establish a single democratic state for all its citizens, from the river to the sea.
Since 1948, Israel’s policies and practices of settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and genocide against the Palestinian people have persisted unabated. These entrenched policies and practices in occupied Palestine constitute clear violations of international law and norms, amounting to crimes against humanity and war crimes. Such conduct not only undermines regional and global peace and security but also calls into question Israel’s legitimacy within the international community.
In the modern era, the world has united to decolonize occupied peoples and territories, defeat fascism, segregation, and apartheid, and prevent genocide against indigenous groups. Once again, the global community must come together to decolonize Palestine and bring an end to Israel’s settler-colonial apartheid system.
These measures/suggestions need urgent and decisive implementation.
I object to articles in which civil society and academic experts pour water on a very important step that can be taken to isolate Israel and hold it accountable for its war crimes and breach of international laws. The step of suspending Israel from the UN could very well also come with recognition of censure and penalties of those states supporting Israeli apartheid, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid. Further, it could be an opportune moment for the UN to consider and make sound reforms if it is to survive into the next 2 or 3 decades into this century as global economic relationships evolve. This constant pandering to the US’ economic might fails to take into account that the US poses a similar threat to any country in the global South should it wish to.
The hand wringing on the part of civil society must stop. There are so many unique aspects of Israeli apartheid against Palestine that are unique and indeed stronger re SA’s apartheid. The cold War has ended but the global South and global South divide has created new subversions. There is a global youthful population that engages the world in terms of its own realities and thus its future. Global North youth are eschewing western colonial dominance; global South youth are not blindsided by comprador politics and are more circumspect about blind ideological affiliation to black run national governments that police them in colonial ways. Both want more and have more to contend with–a dying planet in which their very survival into the future they will have to find real solutions to. It is not only decolonial nationalism that is taking centre stage this century but a new internationalism based on planetary rights. A youthful generation have social media at their disposal and AI with which to factor into their strategies for struggle, which includes Palestinian and Jewish youth. Social media has created a new sense of democracy and democratic values that are boundless in many new ways. I do not think their parents generation can imagine or feel motivated and inspired in waging struggle the way post-colonial-decolonized youthful minds understand and envisage it. Old institutions cannot fathom new struggles and new ways of struggle. It is my hope that youth in the global South and global North take up the call of suspending Israel from the UN as a first critical step to reforming and/or challenging the UN re its illegitimacy as a state bound by international laws and rights.
Roshila Nair (Global South Against Xenophobia based in South Africa and members of the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign (PSC) but commenting in my individual capacity)
Anton Ferreira’s article unfairly equates Israel with apartheid South Africa, pushing for its UN suspension based on a flawed analogy. This oversimplifies a complex conflict, ignoring Israel’s security concerns and the Palestinian leadership’s role in prolonging the strife. Rather than promoting peace, suspending Israel would deepen tensions.
Israel is an apartheid state as has been pronounced by the UN itself, no matter what your take on it is. Apartheid Israel supported apartheid South Africa. Post liberation South, in its foreign policy model, adopts a conflict resolution model as per its reconciliatory democratic basis and thus follows international processes to hold Israel accountable for its apartheid, etc. while also standing in solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine to gain their liberation and to recover the lands stolen from them via Israeli ethnic cleansing, settler colonialism, apartheid and genocide. There is nothing complex about Israeli apartheid and it is an insult to state that South African apartheid was simpler. It is a non-solution to expect the Zionist Israeli state, which contains all the oppressive systems and strategies I have mentioned above, to continue to exist in the region. A one-state solution with a government that delivers on the equal rights of all citizens is the only feasible solution. Zionist colonialism will not survive its latest culmination of settler violence, and it only has itself to blame for its politics. Finally, there is nothing unfair about the right of liberation by oppressed groups to use all necessary means to dismantle the settler-colonial state. Zionist politics was and always will be unethical in the same way that white settler colonial apartheid was in South Africa.