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Touro Talks are timely conversations engaging college students, thought leaders and experts from around the world on academic and contemporary issues. Hosted by Touro University president, Dr. Alan Kadish.
Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg. If you would like to sponsor, please email tourotalks@touro.edu
[SUMMARY] In this episode of Touro Talks, Dr. Alan Kadish, President of Touro University, hosts a crucial discussion on the role of the United Nations in past and current conflicts between Israel and its neighbors.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[Dr. Alan Kadish] It's a pleasure to be here tonight to discuss several important topics. And I want to welcome two Touro professors, David Luchins, a long-time political science professor at Touro, and Anne Bayefsky who directs a Touro NGO, a Nongovernmental Organization on human rights. And we'll begin a discussion with both of them in just a moment.
The topic of tonight's presentation is Israel and the United Nations. But it turns out that it's particularly timely because there have been two major events in the last week that have reflected on the relationship between Israel and the United Nations.
The first, of course, is the complicated decision of the International Court of Justice last Friday that did not order Israel to stop the Gaza war, but did order it to report back in 30 days about certain measures that Israel has taken to prevent civilian casualties. And I should say issue a ruling rather than order because that's one of the things we'll talk about is what power the International Court of Justice has.
And secondly, the accusation that members of the United Nations Relief Organization designed to serve Gaza and Palestinian refugees actually participated in the October 7 attacks. And both of these events have led to major issues in the Middle East today and have significant impact on what will happen to what's become a very complicated and difficult situation going forward.
And of course, the situation has become even more complicated because of the deaths of three American servicemen in an attack by Iranian-sponsored rebels a couple of days ago. So we're dealing with a very volatile situation, and we're happy that you all joined us to gain some perspective on it.
Before we begin discussing the specific issues that I've just raised, I thought it would be helpful to have a bit of background. So Israel's relationship with the United States-- United Nations has been complicated. And I thought we'd turn to David Luchins to give us perhaps a 10-minute summary of that history, how the United Nations actually created the state of Israel in some ways, and what the relationship has been like in the ensuing years, which has been fractious at times.
So Professor Luchins, please begin with a bit of introduction. And then we'll hear from--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
[Dr. Alan Kadish] --and then talk about these issues.
[David Luchins] David Luchins. I've been-- this is my 100th semester teaching at Touro. It's been my professional home. And I'm delighted and honored to be able to join Dr. Kadish and Professor Bayefsky tonight.
I worked while teaching a Touro-- over 20 of those years, I worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, ultimately as a senior advisor. He, of course, was the American Ambassador to the United Nations during the infamous battle over the Zionism racism resolution in 1975. He subsequently wrote a book about the United Nations called A Dangerous Place. Nothing has happened since to give the impression that it's less dangerous, certainly not the events that Dr. Kadish spoke to over the weekend.
I want to focus on three events, three things that happened to the United Nations in its formative years that I think are important as background to tonight's discussion. The first event, which Dr. Kadish hinted to, was November 29, 1947, when the General Assembly of the United Nations voted 33 to 13 to divide Palestine, to partition it into a Jewish state and an Arab state.
Now, I brought a prop with me tonight. This prop is a pocket diary of the Orthodox Union from 1976. And this is-- why am I showing you this? Because it's hard to imagine today the degree to which our community considered Israel very much a product of the United Nations and the United Nations system.
If you look at Sunday-- Saturday, Shabbat, the 29th of November, 1975, it says United Nations Palestine Day in big, broad letters. Then in smaller print, Shabbat Hanukkah.
Then it says at the bottom, the United Nations on November 29, 1947, voted to partition Palestine and set up a Jewish state. This climaxed many years of Zionist efforts and brought great joy to all Jewery. The next year, Zionism racism passed that November. The next year, that paragraph was missing from the OU diary and hasn't appeared since.
Betrayed by all the nations of the world, the Jewish people found faith and solace in the international system. The draft constitution of the state of Israel submitted by David Ben-Gurion to the Knesset-- thank god never approved-- on December 10, 1948, before the first Knesset elections even, Article 11 said the state of Israel will accept the rules of international law as part of the municipal law of Israel and the decisions of international organizations.
Israel had this romance almost with the United Nations in its early years. It was the United Nations as its godfather, if you will, to a large degree. And many of us, certainly the American Jewish Committee, bought into that. I remember in day school we used to have December 29 assemblies. We used to-- I remember arguments. Why don't we say halal today? There were people who said. We didn't.
The second date I want to talk about is a year later. A year later in December of 1948, the United Nations General Assembly voted, with the Soviet bloc abstaining, voted otherwise unanimously to create UNRA, to create the United Nations Relief Organization designated to assist the Palestinian people.
Now, contrary to what some people think, this was not done in an anti-Semitic fury. Israel was a co-sponsor of the resolution. Now again, UNRA was hijacked, and hijacked very quickly, because within two years the United Nations General Assembly had passed a resolution granting Palestinian refugees and only Palestinian refugees the status of eternal refugee status.
Let's look back again to that partition vote for a moment. The Jewish state created by that partition vote did not include Beersheba, or Ashdod, Ashkelon, or Yafo, or Zefat. It didn't even include Jerusalem. Jerusalem would be internationalized. Jews danced in the streets and thanked Karl Marx or God, depending on their beliefs.
Five Arab armies bent on genocide invaded Eretz Yisrael. I don't know if the Arabs in Palestine-- the Arabs would have accepted it or not, the people who lived there. They weren't asked. They were told to leave their homes. Yes, some Israelis helped them leave too. But the vast majority, as far as we know historically, were chased out.
And many of them ended up in Gaza, because here's the-- the Arab armies invaded Palestine, Eretz Yisrael. Captured 80% of the land that had been promised to the Arab state and promptly annexed it. Transjordan became Jordan. East Jerusalem became part of Jordan. Gaza was administered by Egypt.
The first map of the PLO issued in 1954 in Cairo does not include Jerusalem. East Jerusalem doesn't include the West Bank. That's not Palestine. That's part of Jordan. Doesn't include Gaza. That's not Palestine. That's part of Egypt.
Palestine became, by definition-- the mythic definition, the land that Israel, the Jews occupied. And anyone from that land was designated unto-- for all time as a refugee to be supported by as a ward of the international community. With all that implications, they became poster children, these people in Gaza. No one should be a means on to an end, Immanuel Kant said. They became a means to an end, first of the Arab states that didn't want to delegitimize and destroy Israel.
Then of the Soviet bloc, the Soviet Union, which was the mastermind behind the Zionist racism resolution, which manipulated the United Nations in the '70s and '80s till Anwar Sadat got sick of it and said-- he told Walter Mondale at Camp David, I'm tired of my children dying for someone else's foreign policy. And he flies to Jerusalem, makes peace, and gets his land back.
And now the third event, the event which I don't think we appreciate how much it's impacted on Israel and the United Nations. It involves a little pimple on the side of India called Goa, G-O-A. Goa was settled by Portugal in 1520, long before the first British officers or sailors reached India. Goa was a Portuguese colony from 1520 to 1961.
In fact, in 1955, Portugal made Goa part of India, part of-- made Goa part of Portugal. Hawaii can be part of the United States. Goa can be part of Portugal.
Britain, of course, conquered in the 17th and 18th century the Indian subcontinent and turned it into a British-- a vast British colony, the crown jewel in the empire. When Britain finally gives independence and partitions Pakistan, India, India expects Goa back. Portugal says, we've nothing to do with Britain. We were here first. Goa's ours.
And years of futile negotiations get nowhere. And on one fine July day in 1961, the Portuguese-- the Indian army invades Goa, ruthlessly slaughters the Portuguese garrison, and conquers Goa.
The United States was furious. Adlai Stevenson, our ambassador [INAUDIBLE] Security Council of the United Nations, and gave a speech in which he compared the India of Nehru and Gandhi to Benito Mussolini invading Ethiopia, to Japan invading China, and to Hitler marching into the Rhineland.
He finished speaking. The foreign minister of India, who had flown in for the occasion, asked for the floor. His name was Krishna Menon. Acid-tongued, long-winded. Everyone expected a long speech. He said four words. Four words. "Colonialism is permanent aggression." "Colonialism is permanent aggression."
He sat down to a standing ovation from the majority of the room because by 1961, a majority of the members of the United Nations were from Africa and Asia, and they were obsessed with ending the colonial era. As the Ottoman Empire ended, the United Nations focused most of its attention in the General Assembly to ending colonialism.
And when the major colonies, one by one-- finally in 1975, Portugal gets rid of its colonies. Then there was South Africa and Rhodesia, and now there's only one left. There's only one colony left, only one settler state, only one place in the non-European world where it is perceived that a European colonial colony exists, and that place is Israel.
So to these people, and this-- even though the mainstream Arab states have made peace, even though after the Abraham Accords, Saudi Arabia was on the verge of peace. But the rejectionists led by Iran, certainly including Hamas and Hezbollah, are dedicated to stopping that. They are still obsessed.
And unfortunately, as they have captured so much support in the college campuses within the sense that the Palestinian cause is part of the cause of all under third-world people, the same as with the United Nations. So that's my introduction. Those are the three events I would put in context.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Thank you, Professor Luchins. Professor Bayefsky, can you tell us a little bit about the International Court of Justice? What is it exactly? How does it operate? And what rules does it work under, in a very general way?
[Anne Bayefsky] And thank you for having me. I'm going to, I think, back up a bit because I think we need some context in order to understand where we are today. There are 193 UN member states. 2/3 of them belong to the so-called developing world, sometimes called the Global South, and so on. Sometimes called the non-aligned, even though they're really not aligned against Western countries and against the United States in particular.
And of those, the largest single voting bloc within this 2/3 majority voting bloc-- the NAM, as it's called-- is the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Islamic states. So Islamic states have a controlling interest in what goes on at the United Nations by controlling the 2/3 majority.
So what about the United States? In the General Assembly, of those 193 countries, the United States is one state with one vote. So there's one vote for the world-- for the country that has the third largest population in the world, and there's one vote for another country that has 12,000 people in it. There is one vote for the United States, despite the fact that it pays approximately a quarter of the bill, and one vote for countries that pay 0.0001% of the bill.
So what we have is-- and that's the General Assembly. In the Security Council, the United States has a veto, along with four other countries. But the veto for Russia and China means, in effect, that the United States is essentially doing defense. There's very little it can do progressively because of that standard.
So that what we've got is the voting blocs, the lack of US control, the blank check that Americans tend to give to the United Nations, and the conceptual view held by many Americans that everything international is good and the opposite is domestic, parochial, and inward-looking, narrow-minded. And that outlook means that the membership of major UN bodies has taken the following form.
The Human Rights Council, its top human rights body, is composed of countries like China, Cuba, Qatar, currently Somalia. And even though they rank at the very bottom of the so-called Freedom House scale of freedom, they're members of the deciding bodies of the UN's top human rights body.
And so less than half the number of states on the Human Rights Council are free. And again, because of the way the voting blocs work and the numbers of elected, the Islamic states hold the controlling majority in the Human Rights Council.
So right from the start, knowing nothing but numbers in players and voting blocs, it's a nightmare scenario for the state of Israel, a nightmare because it spells moral relativism. The United Nations has no definition of terrorism. It has no definition of terrorism because the Islamic state bloc doesn't think that the murder of Jews, of Israeli Jews, counts as terrorism.
So when we begin to analyze where we are with the International Court of Justice and so on, we have to understand that we're operating with the United Nations that doesn't have a definition of terrorism. So the United Nations has never condemned Hamas, the General Assembly. Never condemned Hamas in its history as part of it doesn't have a definition of terrorism.
So the Human Rights Council, its top human rights body, the-- there are-- just looking at the numbers here, there are eight times more resolutions condemning the state of Israel than condemning Iran. The General Assembly in the year 2023 had twice as many resolutions condemning the state of Israel for human rights violations than the rest of the world combined.
So then now in that context, we ask, OK, so what happened after October the 7th? Well, we know that every war that Israel has fought has two sides. One side is what happens on the ground, and the second side is bringing in the United Nations to play defense for the aggressors on the ground. And October-- that happened before October the 7th. It happened in spades after October 7.
I mean, on October the 7th, I mean, the winning on the ground from Hamas's point of view was exhilarating, not only for the rapists. It was exhilarating for the United Nations and its actors. You had a situation where the very extent of the barbarism clearly required Israel to strike back in a way that it hadn't hitherto as a matter of survival.
And so-- but the United Nations had carefully articulated or laid the groundwork for denying Israel a right of self-defense. After all, if you're a human rights aggressor, you're not entitled to self-defense.
On the contrary, the other side is entitled to resist you. And so that framework of no self-defense and greenlighting so so-called resistance instead of calling it terrorism was the reaction before October the 7th and the reaction after October the 7th.
So then what happens? After October the 7th, the United Nations essentially went into this flurry of activity to defend Hamas. I mean, within the first 20-- I'm just going to-- on October the 9th, the bodies aren't buried. The people aren't-- the remains are not identified. The kidnap victims are still-- some of them are still being dragged across. The borders aren't completely closed, or the line of defense. The sea is an overhead and by maritime. Israel's are still active. There are-- Israel's fighting on other borders as well.
And the Secretary General, the highest UN officer, comes out with this on October the 9th. "I recognize the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. This most recent violence does not come in a vacuum. The reality is that it grows out of a long-standing conflict." And then he talks about "a circle of bloodshed."
"A circle of bloodshed?" The worst atrocity that the Jewish people have ever suffered since the Holocaust, and he comes in talking excuses, justifications? He uses the language, there are no justifications, and then talks about "the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people," Doesn't happen "in a vacuum." Everybody understood what that meant. It was having Hamas's back.
So after he set the tone, UNRA came in, did the same thing. And I want to say, if I even just summarize our current situation, we looked at all-- at the Touro Institute on human rights and the Holocaust, we are a UN-accredited NGO. But we looked across the board at official UN websites and social media, Twitter accounts of the Office of the High Commissioner, of the General Assembly, of all the major actors, every single major actor, including UN women.
And from that moment, from October the 7th until now, number 1, not a single one of those actors has said Israel has-- a UN Charter has affirmed Israel's charter right of self-defense, which is embedded into the UN Charter. And Israel has, as a full-fledged member state. Not one of those organ-- of those parts of the United Nations has ever called the atrocities of October the 7th antisemitism because they think there's a difference.
They claim, they manufacture a difference between killing and butchering and raping and mutilating Jewish babies, women, families. They distinguish that from what happens outside of Israel. And it's very important for us to call what happened there antisemitism, to ensure that what the atrocities that Jews suffer within Israel are understood in the overall framework of antisemitism.
Secondly, the UN Security Council has never condemned October the 7th, never condemned Hamas. That's incredible. Its whole raison d'etre, its purpose for existing, is peace and-- international peace and security.
The UN General Assembly never condemned Hamas. The UN Human Rights Council had no emergency special session to deal with the problem. Absolutely not. It never condemned Hamas. Never condemned October the 7th.
So here we are with this framework of-- so-called framework aligned on the side of the perpetrators, against the self-defense of the state of Israel. And the South Africans see this as a golden opportunity to take Israel to the Geno-- under the Genocide Convention to the International Court of Justice, the UN's world court.
The wind's at their back. They have this relationship to Hamas. They themselves are aiders and abettors of genocide. And they decide that the UN's-- what better opportunity to take Israel-- the final nail in the coffin of denying Israel the right of self-defense. Then to accuse the state which has ai-- the people and its descendants have experienced the worst genocide in human history.
And secondly, that that people has been forced to engage in defense against atrocities which are clearly genocidal. Hamas has a commitment to genocide in its charter. It has promised to do it over again-- over and over again until it's finished the job.
And yet, the South Africans decided to engage in this-- what can only be described as an obscenity. There is no other way to put the obscenity of Israel being forced into the dockets on charges of genocide by the supporters of genocide. So that's where we are today. I don't know whether you want to have-- you know, begin-- let me go on or to ask questions.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Well, so let me just ask you a couple of questions. So you've talked a little bit about South Africa and the UN as a whole. Who's on the International Court of Justice, and what rules do they operate under?
[Anne Bayefsky] Well, for instance, the members of the International Court of Justice include individuals from Russia, from China, from Somalia, from Lebanon, from people that take their orders from back home. I mean, if they ever want to show up again. So the-- many of them are former state officials. That's true also of the United States judge.
And there are 15 members. And because the case was South Africa versus Israel, Israel and South Africa were allowed to have-- to appoint a judge of their own. So there was 17 judges, including the one from Israel and South Africa, as judges ad hoc temporarily.
And so those 17 judges sat in judgment as to whether or not the state of Israel, defending itself against genocide, was guilty of genocide. And so it was all very sophisticated. And they came in in wigs, and they wore little white-- sort of stuffy little shirts with little black ties and colored robes. And everybody sat down, and they acted very sophisticated.
And then they discussed Jew hatred, how Jew hatred can become law, how antisemitism can become part of international law. The destruction of the state of Israel, the denial of self-defense, the failure to denounce Hamas can be part-- can become part of the legal apparatus of our world.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Professor Luchins, from what I understand, the International Court of Justice, while it has important public relations and symbolic action, doesn't really have a means of enforcement.
[David Luchins] Let's take it a step further. No country can be forced to go to the court against its will. Sovereign states-- the heart of international law is the sovereignty of each state member. You can't be forced to go to the court.
Israel made a conscious decision to go to the court. It sent Oren Barak to join the court. Why Israel did that, I'm not entirely certain. It's not for this discussion. Certainly the war going on is not tied, second guess anything Israel is doing or done.
But I would point out that I'm not quite as pessimistic about the court's decision as my colleague is. I actually was pleasantly surprised that the court did stop short of finding Israel guilty of genocide. I was actually pleasantly surprised that the court did not demand a ceasefire.
The court actually, I thought, took a position somewhere closer to Israel's position than what we're hearing from an awful lot of Americans right now, including members of-- quite a few members of Congress. I actually was pleasantly surprised by the court.
But the real question. The court has enormous domestic pull, and the court found Israel guilty of genocide. Domestically, it would have been a tremendous blow within Israel and would have been devastating to American Jewish support for Israel and American support for Israel.
So I think that we ducked a bullet there. And I do agree. I agree with Professor Bayefsky that the court utterly was a totally inappropriate venue to judge Israel in light of whose its members were undenied their background.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] But it's not-- it's not over, right? Israel has to come back in 30 days. And at that point--
[David Luchins] Right.
[Anne Bayefsky] Yeah. I would say, look, there's no-- they didn't decide. They made no final determination.
[David Luchins] Exactly.
[Anne Bayefsky]It's very important to know that this was the provisional measures stage. South Africa, the reason they were able to get before the court within a month, it was a speedy operation in order to get
[David Luchins] Right, right.
[Anne Bayefsky] provisional orders. And the court did not find that Israel had violated the Geneva-- the Genocide Convention.
But in terms of it not being-- or in terms of understanding what's coming next is that there were a series of orders. Not one of the orders was directed at anybody but Israel. Israel shall, Israel shall, Israel shall,
[David Luchins] Right.
[Anne Bayefsky] over and over and over again. There was no South Africa shall do everything it can with its-- I mean, South Africa has now become the legal arm of Hamas, the legal arm of a terror organization.
So given they decided to take on that role, the court could have said that they shall do whatever they can to make sure that the hostages are immediate released. They didn't do that. They didn't say anything directed at Hamas. It's from-- Hamas was not a party.
And so you have-- it's set up to be completely one-sided. And now in a month from now, 30 days from the decision, Israel is required to come back and say, yeah, we're still not committing genocide.
And so, you know, they may or may not do so. But if they did do so, they don't have to do anything other than reiterate the fact that this is an obscenity. They're not committing genocide, and so on.
But there are cases, other cases out there which indicate that provisional measures, situations can be actually repeated. They can ask to review them. They can ask to carry them on, to revisit them, to amend them. And then it goes back and forth. And it has gone back and forth in the past. So no, it's not over by a long shot.
And the reason-- other reason it's not over by a long shot is because the Secretary General immediately put the order of the International Court of Justice to the World Court, to the Security Council. The Security Council will meet this week about trying to turn the order of the court into a Security Council resolution, and so round and round we go. So it will be back and the question will be whether the United States will--
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Just to be fair, although it was easy to miss because the decision really was a 45-minute diatribe against Israel in many ways before they announced the final decision, they did actually call for the release of the hostages in one line after a 40--
[Anne Bayefsky] No, no. OK. Interestingly, the orders do not say-- order Hamas to do anything.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Right.
[Anne Bayefsky] They have a line which says-- interestingly, that line says, Hamas took the kidnapped people, and then it calls for their release. Now, if you know how the UN negotiates terminology, it did not call on Hamas to do the releasing.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Got it.
[Anne Bayefsky] So it was one of those, you know, tricks. And it wasn't an order, so it wasn't part of the binding anything.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Got it.
[Anne Bayefsky] It was simply an offhand remark, not directed at Hamas.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] At Hamas. So what-- and Professor Bayefsky, you've suggested you think things are going to go round and round. So in 30 days, assuming Israel elects to continue to appear, it will provide evidence that it's not committing genocide. You don't expect it to end there, right?
[Anne Bayefsky] The UN has-- they built a continuation into the orders itself. And it won't end there for other reasons, namely that we haven't reached the merit stage. It's up to South Africa now to put in what they call a memorial on the merits.
It's pretty obvious to everybody, including South Africa, that they're going to lose on the merits. But I don't think they really care because it's years and years down the road.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Got it.
[Anne Bayefsky] There are other questions like, what about bringing case against Iran for violation of the Genocide Convention? After all, they are clearly either both engaged in efforts at genocide and committed to it quite publicly. So there are other avenues, possibly South Africa. Why isn't South Africa as an aider and abettor of genocide being taken before the World Court? So there are other avenues.
But one thing we know absolutely for sure, the UN is just licking its chops. They ain't stopping. They're just getting started. This is a game plan that has been going on since 1948, how to destroy the Jewish state. They try it on the ground. And when it doesn't work or sort of worked in part, then they go to the United Nations to make it illegal for Israel to fight back. If you can't fight back, you're not going to survive.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] So--
[David Luchins] If I could just jump in.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Sure, please.
[David Luchins] Professor Bayefsky just set up one of what Pat Moynihan said to the General Assembly of the United Nations on November 10, 1975, in the zionst racism resolution. He said, those who have failed to defeat Israel on the field of battle are now trying to discredit her and delegitimize her among the nations of the world. And I think I would agree that unfortunately, sadly, the United Nations has become, to a large degree, a vehicle for those efforts.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Right. So let's turn-- with this sort of introduction about the United Nations, David, you-- Professor Luchins told us a little bit about the start of the specialized relief organization designed to serve Palestinian refugees. So they calculate that there are millions of refugees now because, I presume of what you said before, that they have permanent descendant status as refugees.
[David Luchins] That's correct.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] So how many refugees are there, and what is the organization supposed to do? And what are these allegations about, Professor Luchins?
[David Luchins] I mean, look, I speak at a lot of high schools for the college, and I speak in high schools. I say, has anyone's family been here for less than 75 years? A lot of hands go up. You know, Russian Jews, Bulgarians. And I said, do you consider yourself a refugee? Of course not.
But the United Nations has created this myth. And as I said, they were poster children first for legitimization of Israel, then by the Soviet Union to discredit American foreign policy in the Cold War. And since the Arabs-- and more and more Arab states have normalized relations with Israel and made-- and agreed to end the conflict with Israel, those who don't want that to happen-- and that may be including the gentleman in the Kremlin-- have made more and more of an effort to discredit and delegitimize Israel. There's no question that is going full steam.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Professor Bayefsky, tell us a little bit--
[Anne Bayefsky] Well, there are two definitions of refugees in the world. One kind of refugee is Palestinian, whereby you inherit your Palestinian-- your refugee status.
[David Luchins] Correct.
[Anne Bayefsky] Doesn't matter if you're a full-fledged citizen of another part of the world and haven't lived there and weren't born there.
The second kind of refugee is the ones who are persecuted, who feel persecution. That kind of refugee status, the persecuted, is true of every other refugee in the entire world except for Palestinians.
So you have this UN Refugee Agency that is literally-- whose purpose is to perpetuate Palestinian refugee status in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And the recent finding or revelation that UNRA staff members were actually part of the atrocities that took part-- in the atrocities of October the 7th, I think we have to go, as we've tried to do, go back in time.
UNRA had a role in the 2014 Gaza conflict. There were weapons stored in Palestinian and UNRA facilities. They used UNRA facilities as cover for firing rockets, and so on.
So this time round, before we knew that they-- in the last few days that they were actually members of UNRA who went-- who committed the atrocities personally, we knew there were weapons found in UNRA schools. We knew they were firing and attacking the IDF members from UNRA schools. We knew that the schools-- UNRA facilities were being used as cover. And we knew that UNRA supplies were found in the tunnels. We have pictures of them. We knew that UNRA staff cheered October the 7th.
So the fact that the final part is that they actually participated in the atrocities of October the 7th is, of course, horrendous. And the funding should have been withheld years ago, and it was, in fact, under the Trump administration. Now we're remembering that maybe schools that teach and perpetuate antisemitism, that teach the next generation that they have a right to return, which means to overwhelm and deny Jewish self-determination, wasn't always a problem and has been a problem for generations. You know, maybe now we get it. I don't know.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Well, one of the real tragedies, of course, is that what Israel sort of knew about but is now fully discovered during the war is the tremendous resources that were used to create the tunnel infrastructure and weapon infrastructure by Hamas. And the fact is, the poverty rate among Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip is terrible. Their quality of life is poor. They have had a tough time, and during the war continue to have a tough time.
But the real tragedy is this organization that was supposed to support them must have known that there was a tremendous diversion of resources that were meant for humanitarian aid, that instead was used to create a terror infrastructure, to create hundreds of miles of underground tunnels with electricity, with plumbing, to build enormous caches of weapons, despite the fact that probably 10,000 rockets have been fired at Israel. They're still being fired. They had to have known this was going on. So to add to your list of things which were no one was complicit with it, is it possible that they didn't know?
[David Luchins] And can I add to that list? Is it possible that Qatar didn't know where its billions of dollars was being spent? Well, I certainly hope Israel didn't know. Qatar-- four American presidents, two from each party, continued to insist that Qatar be allowed to give this money. So there are a lot of questions to be asked here. I think certainly the role of Qatar is, to me, a very serious one that has to be addressed at some point.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] So the Qataris claim that they can act as a positive force through negotiation.
[David Luchins] Yes.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] And apparently, some Israelis in the past have agreed, although obviously the relationship is over now. Do you put any stock in that? Do you think they've been a positive force in any way, the Qataris?
[David Luchins] You know, whether it was a question of getting Gilad Shalit out or whether for 1,100 people, whether it was a question of the hostage exchange that took place at the beginning of the war, Qatar played a role. The question is, at what price has Qatar played that role?
Can I take a one-minute story? In 1993 when Israel signed the Oslo Accords-- so Senator Moynihan and I met with Shimon Peres shortly after the signing of the Oslo Accords. And the senator said, you know, Mr. Peres, why did you make an agreement with this terrorist, this murderer of American diplomats, of Israeli athletes?
And Peres said, three reasons. One, because the Soviet Union has just collapsed and we have a window of opportunity before the bear comes out of the cave angry and gets involved again. Secondly because you, the United States, badly weakened Saddam Hussein, who was the secular Sunni Arab alternative to the rising extremism in Iran, and Iran will be a larger player.
And then thirdly, he said, there are two main players in the Palestinian camp. There's the PLO and there's Hamas. If tomorrow we said every Jew in Israel was moving to Denmark, the PLO would declare a month of celebration and ask us to stay for parties, parades, and tributes to everything they had done to build-- we had done to build this country for them. Hamas would say, you can't leave. We have to kill you. It's in our charter.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Professor Bayefsky, what are your thoughts about--
[Anne Bayefsky] I think that--
[Dr. Alan Kadish] --and what do you think it's going to mean for the future if these allegations against UNRA are found to be real?
[Anne Bayefsky] I don't know. They seem to have a cat with nine lives. And I wouldn't put it past the United States to dream up some other way of funneling the mother-- the money, I should say-- [LAUGHS] to them in the same-- as they do with the Taylor Force Act, which says, thou shalt not pay the Palestinian authority because they have a pay to slay law, which says they pay Palestinians to kill Jews.
And that's against American policy. And yet, we find other ways of getting around the rules and getting the money to individuals who are dedicated to terminating a Jewish state, which is what it's all about.
And I think, you know, as we're coming to our conclusion, I think there's a few things we have to remember about this, and that is that-- and it ties back into the International Court of Justice. Within two weeks of October the 7th, UN "human rights experts" in quotation marks were using the word that we're talking about, Israeli genocide, within two weeks.
And the reason I brought up what the Secretary General said about how we've got to all put it in context and the Jews-- you know, to invert perpetrator and victim within two days was that it wasn't about what was going on in Gaza, which is, of course, extremely unfortunate. But the reality is that Israelis are dying in order to defend their families against the most extreme barbarism, butchery that we have seen in, you know, 3/4 of a century against the Jewish people.
And the idea that-- and yet, the United Nations doesn't factor in the suffering of Israelis into these equations. I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have never gone back home. They're also displaced. 300,000, or up to 300,000 IDF soldiers on the frontlines facing an enemy which has no shred of human decency.
All the families it affected, all the-- the way of life of Israelis has been profoundly impacted. The economy, the school system, the people kept out of school for an entire term, et cetera, et cetera.
None of that is factored in. The suffering, the emotional suffering, the fact that Holocaust survivors not only experienced a Holocaust, but they also experienced October the 7th or are kidnap victims, it doesn't make-- it doesn't make an impact. And in fact, you have the Commission of Inquiry of the Human Rights Council, Navi Pillay, who is also South African. She talked within two weeks of October the 7th about the right to resist an armed struggle.
So we're not just facing blood libels. We're facing a foe which is a $50 billion a year all-in enterprise that is dedicated to denying the right of self-determination of the Jewish people and the right of self-defense of the Jewish state.
And we have to understand that when Israel says it's a long battle, what's going to happen in the immediate future? In the immediate future, we haven't won yet. We haven't been allowed to win. We haven't been able to defeat that enemy. We're fighting with hands held behind our back by the Security Council. And unfortunately, I'd have to say, by parts of the Biden administration.
And so I think we have to understand that this is not just Israel's fight when you have an organization that it would not survive without the United States, that can't define terrorism, that can't call antisemitism by its name, that its impact obviously explodes on American campuses because they're fueled by the United Nations. It affects Americans. It affects Jews everywhere.
And the prognosis is not good. It's certainly not good unless we get our-- you know, a backbone to stand up to this kind of intimidation and antisemitism and call it exactly as antisemitism.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] You've made it-- you've made a-- you made a good point, which is both of you focused very much on the geopolitical factors responsible for the vilification of Israel at the United Nations. But until just recently in the conversation, we didn't talk about the fact that some of this may relate to the fact that antisemitism has been around for 2,000 years.
And it's not colonialism that's the issue. It's not voting blocs. It's that I think we were under the illusion that antisemitism had disappeared, and it hasn't. So Professor Luchins, you were going to say something before.
[David Luchins] Yeah, I agree with almost everything my colleague, Professor Bayefsky, has said except for the one little shot she took at the Biden administration. So I'm just going to say that I worked for Hubert Humphrey in 1973. He went to the White House at Moshe Dayan's request when they were told that Israel would run out of ammunition in three days. And it took four US senators and dramatic and emotional intervention by Henry Kissinger, who said, Mr. President, I lost 87 family members in the Holocaust to get Nixon to lift the arms embargo on Israel and to send American supplies and save Israel.
The first day of the war this time, the president of United States, as I believe-- I'd like to believe any president, recent president would have done, called Benjamin Netanyahu and told him, we have NATO-- we have supplies for NATO in Israel. They're yours. The stockpile's yours. The United States has sent over 300 cargo planes filled with arms and weapons to Israel. The president has taken a lot of flak from elements both within his own party and within the Tucker Carlson branch of the other party for doing so. He may lose re-election because of his support for Israel. So I would just say I think I have to say that.
And secondly, I want to say something on behalf of the Palestinians. They are an oppressed people. They're in an open air prison in Gaza, and Egypt's holding the keys. They are a designer nation, designed to be used as a means to an end to discredit and destroy the state of Israel.
And that's tragic because no one should be treated that way. Hamas couldn't care less about the lives and well-being of the people of Gaza. If they did, they wouldn't have done what they did.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] Well, there's no question that that's true. And it is a deep humanitarian tragedy. And the only thing we can hope for is that cooler heads prevail and that somehow we find a way to remove Hamas and regain dignity for the Palestinian people.
There was optimism this weekend about a potential ceasefire and release of the hostages. And apparently, even that deal, which would have in many ways harmed Israel, has been rejected by Hamas. So the war and the suffering on both sides will continue.
[David Luchins] Yes.
[Dr. Alan Kadish] The tragedy. And I wish we could feel that the United Nations was helping things. But as you've heard from our panelists tonight, I don't think that's the case. And it is a real failure of the vision of the United Nations that it's not been able to take a rational approach to condemning Hamas and finding a way to end this violence and prevent further deaths and destruction on both sides.
And with that, I will turn it back to Nahum Twersky. Thanks for organizing this, Nahum. Thank you, Professor Bayefsky and Professor Luchins, for your very insightful comments. And I wish everyone a good night, and hope that there are happier days ahead.
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