The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) condemns the veto by the United States (US) government to bar Palestine from the United Nations (UN). Palestinian authorities have applied for membership to the UN, but only the US government voted against Palestine in the Security Council, using the veto power to successfully prevent Palestine from being a member. The United Kingdom (UK) and Switzerland disgracefully abstained from the vote.
Zionist regime’s war on Gaza since October 08th has once more demonstrated the despicable attitude and morality of the Western governments. It has stripped their pretensions of respecting human rights and political rights of nation-states. Despite establishing Israel on a sovereign Palestinian land, the Western governments have successfully prevented its recognition in the UN as a sovereign nation-state.
The US’s veto is consistent with its attitude toward Palestine for more than 5 decades now. It has nodded the colonial expansion of Israel in Palestinian territories through a brutal and genocidal apartheid regime that killed and displaced (and continues to displace and kill) many Palestinians from their lands. The displacement was not without intention. The intentions have always been the dispossession of the Palestinians, the total annexation of Palestine, and its conversion into Israel territory. Hence the refusal to recognise it as a nation-state.
But their attitude and behaviour towards Palestine and its people are not surprising. It is and has been their behaviour for the past 600 years. Together with the fledgling national companies, they engineered the violent hunting of black people for use as slaves in Europe and America starting in the 14th century. The abolishment of slavery was replaced by colonialism which dispossessed people of their lands, brutally suppressed them, and racially discriminated them. Though with a unique background, Palestine is suffering from the consequences of a colonial settlement established in 1947/8. The Zionists and Western powers preyed on the fears of Jewish communities that had emerged out of the horrors of anti-Semitic fascism in Europe which nearly wiped them out.
The systemic slaughter of Palestinians through bombs that have rained horrors on Palestinian towns and villages since October 2023 has also shown the structural defects and weaknesses of the international political order. It is based on the continuation of the domination of Western governments politically and militarily. They have killed more people than any government since the Declaration on Human Rights Charter came into being at the end of the Second World War. Yet, they have not been held accountable and will never be held accountable.
The infrastructure of the United Nations also makes it discriminatory; favouring those with political, economic and military might over those weaker nations that have just emerged out of colonisation in the second half of the 20th century. That one veto can trump the votes of majority members of the UN Security Council is madness. But this illustrates our point and highlights the defects in our international peace, justice, and diplomatic infrastructure.
Perhaps George Orwell’s passage in his majestic novel, the Animal Farm, captures the essence of the international relations crafted based on imperialism, that “some [animals] are more equal than others.”
