Empty posturing

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: It’s Tuesday, the 14th day of May, 2024.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up on The World and Everything in It: inconsistency at the United Nations.

On Friday, the UN General Assembly voted to give Palestinians new rights and privileges and reevaluate a Palestinian bid for full membership.

Nations from Australia to Venezuela supported the resolution. Here’s Australia’s Foreign Minister, Penny Wong.

PENNY WONG: Australia no longer believes that recognition can only come at the end of a peace process. It could occur as part of a peace process.

MAST: But the U.S. opposed the resolution on the grounds that Israel and the Palestinians need to work out a peace deal before the U.N. can recognize a Palestinian state.

And Israel’s Ambassador Gilad Erdan drew attention to the timing of the measure.

GILAD ERDAN: This week, only this week, Israel commemorated Yom HaShoa, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it is during our sacred week that this shameless body has chosen to reward modern day Nazis with rights and privileges?

EICHER: Only 9 nations opposed the resolution…including Israel and the U.S. Twenty-five more abstained, and the remaining 143 voted in favor.

MAST: Joining us now to talk about this and more is Will Inboden. He served during the George W. Bush administration as a member of the national security council staff. He now teaches at the University of Florida. He’s also a regular contributor to World Opinions.

Will, good morning!

WILL INBODEN: Good morning. Good to be with you.

MAST: Will, What does the resolution say, and does it accomplish anything concrete?

INBODEN: It's pretty meaningless, Lindsay. I think this is largely empty posturing, which the UN specializes in, unfortunately. The Palestinians are still the technical term is "non-member state observer mission." So this essentially says that their representative is welcome to give speeches and make statements on the floor of the UN, but it doesn't give them formal status as a real nation states. It doesn't give them membership on the Security Council, which is where the more binding UN decisions are made. So it was largely a symbolic vote by, you know, most of the countries in the world who belong to the UN, to show some sort of moral support for the Palestinian cause, and try to isolate Israel, but it really changes very little in substance.

EICHER: Is there a scenario where the symbol becomes substance and some future state of Palestine would become a full UN member? What would that mean if that happened?

INBODEN: For that to happen, it would need to be approved by the UN Security Council and the U.S. would veto it. So even though the Biden administration is not as supportive of Israel now as they previously were, the Biden administration statement on why the U.S. voted against this made clear that we would veto any more formal steps to grant statehood to the Palestinians. And the other part of the important U.S. position is that, you know, we we don't want to see statehood until the Palestinians are ready to exercise the responsibilities of a state. You know, this UN General Assembly vote gets the sequencing backwards. You know, you don't declare statehood for someone and then hope that they develop the capacity to be a state. Rather, you wait until they develop the capacity to be a state, which is, you know, responsible sovereign governance over a defined territory of showing that you can police your own own borders, and you will be at peace with your your neighbors, and you're not going to be supporting terrorism, and you have a viable economy and all those things. The Palestinians don't have any of that right now. And they need to develop that before there's a viable path to being a real state.

MAST: Well, I imagine the UN’s doing this now to send a message about the war in Gaza, many branding it genocide and regularly citing UN numbers to bolster the point—we’ve been hearing 25,000 women and children dead. But over the weekend, the UN cut that number nearly in half!

Why hasn’t that gotten more attention?

INBODEN: Yeah, this is another example of, I think, some of the distorted mainstream media coverage of this war is the fact that this, you know, new study just came out over the weekend showing that the number of civilian casualties among the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip—especially women and children—is much less than earlier reports, half earlier reports had been. And so the mainstream media will often, you know, trumpet the most extreme estimates or the largest estimates of civilian casualties. And yet when those are shown to be false, they, they don't do a good job of correcting the record or, you know, highlighting this new report showing that they were much lower.

EICHER: Final question here: So the U.S. voted against the resolution, but continues to withhold weapons from Israel, hoping to prevent an attack on Rafah. So what do you think the Biden administration’s trying to do here?

INBODEN: Well, what what President Biden's main goal seems to be right now is trying to get reelected. And I think we need to see his case withholding of these really important munitions to Israel as largely a political move because his progressive left wing base has increasingly turned against Israel. And he's feeling that that pressure right now as the presidential election heats up. You know, in strategic terms, the Biden administration would also say that they want to reduce Palestinian civilian casual to use and restrain some of Israel's military endeavors. But here, our listeners need to really appreciate this very important point: Hamas has a goal of as many Palestinian civilian deaths as possible. I know that may sound perverse, but that's what they're trying to do. Israel has a goal of minimizing Palestinian civilian deaths. However, Israel also needs to destroy and defeat Hamas. And so Israel has been going about that in, I think, overall pretty careful ways of trying to minimize those Palestinian civilian casualties. But Hamas keeps using the civilians as human shields, and so it's placed Israel in this awful dilemma. But, you know, I support the Rafah offensive. I think Biden's made a bad mistake in preventing those weapons deliveries to Israel, because they really need them to be able to finish the job. And the best outcome for the Palestinian people would be this war ending as soon as possible in terms favorable for Israel, so the Palestinian people will be freed of the scourge of Hamas.

MAST: Will Inboden is a former staff member of the National Security Council now teaching at the University of Florida. Will, thank you for your analysis!

INBODEN: Thank you.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.