IIsrael is paradoxically a state created by a decision of the United Nations (UN) which has continued to challenge the primacy of the United Nations since its founding in 1948. But the history of relations between Israel and the UN may well have been punctuated by crises, but it was an unprecedented provocation which the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations engaged in on October 30 in New York. Gilad Erdan, former Likud minister and loyal to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, indeed wore the yellow star with which the Nazis stigmatized Jews as A ” symbol of pride » in the face of UN criticism of the Israeli campaign on Gaza.
This barely veiled accusation of anti-Semitism was part of a verbal escalation against the United Nations and Antonio Guterres, its secretary general, described as “ danger to world peace ” and of ” support for the terrorist organization Hamas », on December 6, by Eli Cohen, the head of Israeli diplomacy. Furthermore, Israeli bombing of Gaza has already killed 134 local UN employees as of December 15, an unprecedented record.
However, it was the UN which, by the vote of its General Assembly in November 1947, adopted a plan to partition Palestine, then under British mandate for a quarter of a century. This plan, approved by the Zionist leadership, divided this formerly Ottoman territory between a Jewish state and an Arab state, with the UN continuing to manage an internationalized zone in Jerusalem. The Arab side rejected such a plan, on the grounds that the Jewish population, which then constituted only a third of the inhabitants of Palestine, received a state on 55% of this territory.
The assassination of Bernadotte
Hostilities soon broke out between Jews and Arabs, a conflict which changed its nature at the end of the British mandate, in May 1948, with the proclamation of the State of Israel, against which the six neighboring Arab states went to war. The UN appointed as mediator Folke Bernadotte, who had negotiated with the Nazi authorities, as number two of the Swedish Red Cross, in February-March 1945, the rescue of 21,000 prisoners, including 6,500 Jews.
Folke Bernadotte obtained a truce in the fighting, during which he proposed a settlement of the conflict, based on the internationalization of Jerusalem (in the spirit of the partition plan) and the return of Palestinian refugees (who were already numbered by hundreds of thousands). He was assassinated in September 1948 in Jerusalem by an Israeli commando from the extremist group Lehi. Two of the murderers were sentenced by Israeli courts to ten and eight years in prison, but released shortly after as part of a general amnesty.
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