Commentary: Why I Believe We Need to Strengthen the United Nations

 

 

Your special issue on Minnesotans with Asian backgrounds was appealing, so it was with special interest that I read Soophia Ansari’s essay, “The Struggle for Justice Has No Borders,” I wondered how she would connect her tragic family story about being caught in the British colonial partitioning of India with Gaza and Israel. 

I appreciate that more people — especially Americans — should understand the plight of that time in 1947-48. As she said, “Everyone in the South Asian diaspora has been affected by the British Partition of 1947, and therefore by colonization, ethno-religious violence, and state-sanctioned war crimes.”  

I, too, wish that the Mideast under British and French colonization could be better understood.  I write to offer a different narrative and conclusion than hers about Israel and Gaza.

A year has passed since Hamas terrorists from Gaza attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing more than 1,000 Israelis — many of them young people attending the Nova music festival for peace, purposely held near the border of Israel with Gaza. Hamas captured 251 people, taking them hostage into the Gaza Strip. The hostages included men, children, women, and elderly, plus foreigners living and working in Israel.Some have been released and others were killed in captivity. It is estimated that there are still 97 hostages in Gaza. 

Ironically, many of those captured lived in border agricultural settlements or kibbutzim near Gaza. They believed in peace, teaching Arabic, employing Gazans in their fields, and chauffeuring ill Palestinians to hospitals in Israel.

Defining terms is important to me. I wish more readers understood who Israelis are, and could learn of their incredible stories, just as it would be important to learn more about who lives in Gaza and their individual stories, or who lives in Pakistan and India from separated families.

Today the total population of Israel numbers 9 million; Israel became an independent state when the British withdrew in May 1948. Of that number, 7.2 million are Israeli Jews. 

Some readers might be surprised to learn that half of the population in Israel comes from Arab countries and are refugees from Muslim countries, including Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and Morocco. The extent of refugees arriving in Israel over the 76 years since independence is hard to calculate. 

The Jewish population is unlike the majority of Jews in the U.S., where most have a white European background. The most recent Jewish refugees who left a civil war in Africa came from Ethiopia. Also, Jews resettling as a result of the Holocaust in Europe after World War II have disproportionately higher numbers in Israel than in other Jewish populations. 

In many cases, these stories are as Ms. Ansari writes about her grandparents: “Memories too painful to speak of to this day — wounds that continue to heal crookedly.”

In addition to the Jewish population of Israel, there are about 2 million Palestinians who live in Israel and vote as Israeli citizens. Additionally, some 500,000 Israelis identify as Christian, Druze, Bedouin (nomadic Arabs of the desert, primarily in Israel’s southern Negev desert, but also in the northern part of Israel called the Galilee), plus other minorities including Circassians..

Israel is still the only nation in the world with a majority of Jews. Globally, there are about 15.7 million Jews (some 6 million in the U.S., more than 7 million in Israel, and the rest mostly living in Argentina, Russia, France, and Ukraine). The 15.7 million population of Jews is miniscule compared to the world’s 1.9 billion Muslims in 22 Arab nations, with Islam making up more than 24.1 percent of the world’s population. Muslims are the majority in 49 countries.

Complicating the individual stories and tragedies on all sides are political involvements with outside countries, growing as the news changes daily.  in Gaza and Lebanon, Iran apparently gives financial, military, and personnel support. Russia is involved too, with U.S. and NATO alliances in opposition. 

In short, it is more complex than  the “colonization” of the 20th century, as Ms. Ansari puts it, but alliances now seem to threaten any equilibrium that there was. 

Multiple Interpretations

As the new academic year has started, once again on campuses in Europe, the Middle East, and America, and in the hallways of government, a controversial slogan can be heard at demonstrations and on broadcasts, and read in newspapers: “From the River to the Sea.” 

These six words have vastly different interpretations depending on who is shouting them or who is hearing them.  Some say they are chanting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Others who support Israel point out that these are antisemitic words — an age-old canard that has morphed through the centuries, rekindled in our present time. The implication is that Jews are foreigners, intruders, and transgressors who have never belonged and must be destroyed. The implication is that they should be pushed aside from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea — removed from the physical land and erased from any map. 

In other words, the slogan implies — as in the Hamas charter — that there should be extermination of Israel and the Jews.

The controversial use of “from the river to the sea” was described in an article in The Guardian. “Critics of the slogan argue that it calls for the elimination of Israel, while some of its supporters, including Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer, argue that it supports Palestinians living in ‘their homeland as free and equal citizens’.”

It seems difficult to move forward with so many opposing viewpoints, plus the tragic daily news reports of destruction of life and property as all sides become more belligerent and intransigent.  It might seem hopeless. But I think of the U.S. songwriter Pete Seeger, who was inspired by the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes. He noted that we can hold opposing ideas all at once, including a sense of past and future. He gave a surging melody to” there is a time to plant and a time to reap, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to laugh and a time to weep.”

Ms. Ansari remembered her grandparents and their plight in her essay. I, too, call forth inspiration from the memory of my grandmother, Fanny Fligelman Brin, who was a devoted suffragist and pacifist. For her views, she was voted one of the ten most influential American women in her time. At the conclusion of World War II, she traveled to San Francisco, where 46 nations gathered to declare the founding of the United Nations. She, too, signed the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Unfortunately, the United Nations today is not perceived as strong. But there still is the inspiring story of United Nations soldiers recently dispatched to Haiti to quell rampant gang warfare; this could become a model for U.N. policing efforts.

I believe in the U.N., for it is one of a rare few international vehicles that our global world has; it is founded on ideals against war and for human rights. It could be strengthened to become a truly viable vehicle that countries can depend on. 

The U.N. Climate Change Conference will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan, starting on November 11. It is expected to focus on finance; we know some trillions of dollars are required for countries to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect us from the worsening impacts of climate change.

I think of the International Monetary Fund, which works for sustainable growth and prosperity for its 190 countries. It seems to me that warring areas of the world could be offered real international help, whether in the Middle East, Sudan, India, the Congo, Myanmar or Venezuela, for starters. 

People would be better served if these international institutions could offer true forums and solutions as antidotes for war. Rather than suffering the continued trauma of generational wars, which leave scars and unsolved cries for vengeance, we could learn to hear each other out.

I believe we must remain hopeful that these international vehicles — not just the U.S. Secretary of State or President trying to strong-arm concessions — could offer a true examination of local ethics and religions. 

Groups with nationalistic aspirations, as well as different ethnic and religious groups, and citizens of warring countries, all need to be heard rather than resort to killing and destruction. For that we need substantial aid from international institutions, with fair hearings and just decisions, and separations of warring groups. 

We could weep together for those lost on all sides and find solutions. 

We could resolve to change what seem to be intractable conflicts. 

International coffers and compassion could truly help to construct safe neighborhoods, farming areas, green spaces, schools, hospitals, and what everyone needs for enhanced life for the betterment of all of humanity. 

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