As the arc of the conflict in the Middle East expands, so too does the seeming helplessness of the international community, especially the United Nations. Since last week, Israel has relentlessly bombed Lebanon, including its capital, Beirut, and its forces have begun a ground offensive in southern Lebanon. A million people in Lebanon have been displaced and so grave is the humanitarian situation that Syrian refugees in the country are returning home. In Gaza, Israel’s brutal war continues uninterrupted, as do the killings in the occupied West Bank. On Tuesday, Iran fired ballistic missiles at Israel in response to the assassinations of its allies, including the Hamas political chief, Ismail Haniyeh, and the Hezbollah boss, Hassan Nasrallah, raising the prospects of an all-out war between Tehran and Tel Aviv. Meanwhile, the Russia-Ukraine war has intensified too, with both sides rejecting peace plans unacceptable to their maximalist positions. Russia is gaining territory in eastern Ukraine, while Ukrainian troops remain within Russia’s Kursk region after an audacious incursion in August.
Through it all, daily calls from the UN and world leaders for calm and for diplomacy have fallen on deaf ears. Russia and Israel have ignored multiple UN General Assembly resolutions to end their respective wars. Israel has snubbed a UN Security Council resolution seeking a ceasefire as well as the interim orders of the International Court of Justice demanding that it halt the wholesale massacre of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and the court’s ruling that Israel’s occupation of the West bank is illegal and must end. More UN staff members have been killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza in the past year than in any other conflict, ever. UN-run schools, once considered safe spaces, have been bombed. Earlier this week, Israel even declared the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, persona non grata, barring him from entering the country and the occupied Palestinian territories it controls, accusing him of an anti-Israel bias.
The message from Russia and Israel is clear: they will do as they please, international law be damned. The message for the rest of the world is even clearer: international law and the institutions tasked with upholding it are already damned. The most powerful nations routinely use vetoes in the Security Council to shield themselves and their allies from any meaningful consequences for war crimes. The voice of the world, reflected in the General Assembly, does not matter. What is needed are not just reforms but a deeper rethink of global institutions that came up in the aftermath of World War II but have been shown up as ineffective by more recent conflicts. Indeed, if international law is only applicable to some nations, then it deepens historical inequalities between the powerful and the vulnerable. India, as a longtime advocate of change, must not settle for a seat for itself at the global high table. What the world needs is a table that can seat everybody.
