Consequences of a walkout at the United Nations

OPINION:

On Friday, the world witnessed a disheartening spectacle. As the prime minister of the state of Israel, the head of government of a member of the United Nations in good standing, was about to address the opening session of the U.N. General Assembly, many of the representatives of other member states staged a walkout. With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to speak, they stood up and rudely exited the General Assembly chamber, leaving Mr. Netanyahu to address a largely empty chamber as he sought to describe his nation’s valiant struggle against the terrorists of Hamas.

It is important to recall that the United Nations was created in the wake of the unconditional victory over the Axis powers in World War II. The victorious powers were determined to create a body that they hoped would replace the horrors of war with deliberation and open dialogue among nations.

As a result, the U.N. Charter specifies that it was created “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” This implies that a forum for dialogue among nations would promote peace. Thus, one of the foundational principles of the United Nations was the notion that nations would regularly gather to discuss their disagreements instead of resolving them by force.

The forum for achieving this dialogue was intended to be, in the first instance, the U.N. General Assembly. Over time, it was determined that, as an integral part of this dialogue, each member state would be given an opportunity to have one of its representatives address representatives of all of the other member states at the opening session of each annual gathering of the General Assembly.

So, throughout most of last week, representatives of all the United Nations member states spoke from the podium of the General Assembly building. However, when the representative of the world’s only Jewish state rose to speak, representatives of many member states chose to leave the room, effectively turning their backs on dialogue with Israel.

Interestingly, no such dramatic departure occurred when the Turkish representative spoke, notwithstanding that Turkey has militarily occupied a large part of the island of Cyprus against the will of Cypriots since July 1974, or when the representative of Iran spoke, despite Iran’s repeated threats of violence against an assortment of U.N. member states, or when the representative of Nigeria spoke, even though Christians are systematically being persecuted and murdered in that nation.

Only when the prime minister of Israel ascended the podium did the representatives of so many nations stage their walkout. It can be concluded that the actions of those who exited the General Assembly chamber were less motivated by lofty moral concerns than by an old-fashioned prejudice: antisemitism, couched in the equally reprehensible ideology of anti-Zionism.

The most disturbing aspect of this comportment was the absence of consequence for this flagrant violation of one of the United Nations’ foundational principles. Because the institution was created to promote dialogue as a means of preventing war, it should be normal for adversaries, even fervent adversaries, to engage in such dialogue and, in order to promote dialogue, listen to those with whom they may be in conflict.

It would, therefore, appear fully warranted that every member of the United Nations should be mandated to have its representatives remain present to hear the remarks of the representative of every other member state. There should be adverse consequences to those who violate this obligation to remain present and hear differing points of view, even if they find those views objectionable. An obvious consequence could be that any nation whose representatives violate the obligation to listen to every other nation’s representatives should be deemed to have elected to exclude their nation from any participation in the activities of the United Nations during the year.

This would mean that such a nation would have relinquished the right to participate in deliberations of the General Assembly and all other U.N. bodies throughout the forthcoming year. This should be augmented by the supplemented consequence that, if such conduct is repeated within the following five years, the nation in question would be expelled from the United Nations with such exclusion to last at least five years. There should be no place at the United Nations for those who refuse, minimally, to listen to the representatives of other nations, including, and especially, those with whom they are in potential conflict.

Although such sanctions may not prevent every nation wishing to make a spectacle of its disdain for a fellow member from doing so, they would assuredly reduce the likelihood of such an occurrence. They would also enhance the probability that the United Nations’ role as a forum for discussing international disagreements would be strengthened.

A failure to take remedial action to prevent displays such as the recent rude grandstanding by a group of human rights violators, autocracies and warmongers seeking to ostracize the only democracy in the Middle East can only help doom the United Nations to the fate of the League of Nations, its long-disappeared, impotent and unlamented predecessor.

• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington office of a national law firm. He is the author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights During the French Revolution,” published by HUC Press.