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President Emmanuel Macron of France has been reported as saying that Israel “should not forget” that it was “created by the UN” — and therefore, presumably, it ought not to be making life difficult for the UNIFIL troops in southern Lebanon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was outraged by this remark. More on Macron, and on Netanyahu’s response, can be found here: “Macron: Israel was created by UN, Netanyahu should not forget it – report,” Jerusalem Post, October 16, 2024:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should not fail to forget that a UN resolution created Israel, French President Emmanuel Macron said while convening with ministers on Tuesday, according to Le Parisien.
“Netanyahu must not forget that his country was created by a decision of the UN. Therefore, he should not liberate himself from the decisions of the UN,” the French daily newspaper cited Macron as saying behind closed doors.
Macron’s remarks referenced the UN Resolution 181 adopted on November 29, 1947.
“A reminder to the French President: It was not a UN decision that established the State of Israel but the victory that was achieved in the War of Independence with the blood of our heroic fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, including from the Vichy regime in France,” the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) stated in response.
Le Parisien noted that the French president’s comments were made in relation to Israel’s operation in southern Lebanon and the recent incidents concerning the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), which saw IDF troops firing at UNIFIL posts along the border….
The IDF troops do not fire at UNIFIL soldiers. They return the fire of Hezbollah operatives who are deliberately stationing themselves as close to UNIFIL troops and outposts as they possibly can. In the fog of war, and with Hezbollah combatants placing themselves so close to UNIFIL — even within 20-30 meters in some cases — it is hardly surprising that a few UNIFIL soldiers have been hit by IDF fire. The IDF has repeatedly pleaded with UNIFIL to move away from Hezbollah forces and the combat zone; UNIFIL has refused. It is apparently willing to have its troops be used as human shields by Hezbollah.
Those UNIFIL peacekeepers in Lebanon have been there for 18 years. In that time, they have failed utterly to make Hezbollah pull back north of the Litani River, as required by UNSC Resolution 1701. In fact, Hezbollah has sent more men and weapons south of the Litani River in that time, and has dug a network of terror tunnels that now snake underground from southern Lebanon into Israel. UNIFIL has done nothing to halt these preparations for war by Hezbollah. Yet the UN now piously calls for UNIFIL to remain in place, where it will remain unable to prevent Hezbollah from firing rockets and drones into Israel, but as human shields will limit the IDF’s response.
Macron claims that “the UN created Israel.” No, it did not. UN Resolution 181, passed in November 1947, approved the carving out, from the territory of the Palestine Mandate, of two states, one Jewish and one Arab. The Jews accepted the resolution, the Arabs unanimously rejected it.
What created the state of Israel were the Jews themselves, who had since the beginning of the twentieth century, even before the Balfour Declaration — actually a letter to Lord Rothschild — in November 1917, started their “return to Zion” by buying land and settling what was Ottoman-ruled Palestine until the Turkish defeat in World War I, and then became the territory assigned to the Mandate for Palestine, with Great Britain as the Mandatary. The Mandate’s sole purpose was to create the conditions for a Jewish state to be formed, by “facilitating” — see Article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine — Jewish immigration and “close settlement by Jews on the land.” And Jews continued to buy — not seize —land from Arab and Turkish landowners, and to settle in Mandatory Palestine.
The day after the Jews of Israel — with no help from the UN — declared their independence on May 14, 1948, five Arab armies invaded, intent on snuffing out the young life of the Jewish state, whose existence on land that had once been possessed by Muslims was regarded by the Arabs as such an outrage. The UN played no part in that war; it did nothing to help the Jews. It was the Jews of Israel, with no help from anyone save for some Jews in the Diaspora who sent money and shipments of small arms, who defeated the Arabs and created their tiny state on only part of the territory that had been assigned to the Jews by the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine.
And the UN has in recent decades been a hotbed of anti-Israel activities, with endless resolutions passed at the General Assembly that target the Jewish state. More anti-Israel resolutions are passed by the General Assembly than those for all the other 192 member states put together. Fortunately, General Assembly resolutions have no enforcement mechanism. And at the UN Security Council, Agenda item 7, concerning the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories ” is raised at every session of the Council. Only the American veto has prevented a rash of anti-Israel resolutions from being adopted and, what’s more, enforced.
Netanyahu’s furious response to Macron’s ahistorical claim was exactly what was called for. Who created Israel? Not UN Resolution 181. The Jews did, heroically, with no help from the U.N. or any other polity, including France.
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