UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres should resign
Michael Rubin
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U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres should resign. The survival of liberal order requires it.
Guterres, like many recent secretaries-general, both confuses the arbitrariness of the United Nations selection process with moral authority and misunderstands that leading the U.N. is about management, not being an arbiter of international law.
Guterres wears his politics on his sleeve. He was both president of the Socialist International and head of Portugal’s Socialist Party during which time he also served as prime minister. On Oct. 24, he rationalized and appeared to excuse Hamas attacks on Jewish civilians.
“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation,” he declared, adding that the Israeli assault on Gaza demonstrated “clear violations of international humanitarian law.”
Both statements are wrong factually and inverted morally. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are disputed, not occupied, as there has never been a Palestinian state; Arab governments in 1948 would not allow one when they rejected the U.N. partition plan. Gaza has not been occupied for 18 years. The U.N. itself found Israel’s restrictions — polemically labeled a blockade by the Jewish state’s detractors — to be legal. Nor does Guterres have reason to call Israel’s supposed occupation “suffocating.” Even Gaza outperforms countries such as India and Brazil on basic measures of health and welfare.
Nor has Israel violated international humanitarian law in Gaza; quite the contrary, Hamas has. Much as the U.S. military does, the Israel Defense Forces employ lawyers to determine the legality of every proposed operation. Urban warfare is not illegal, nor is the reality that civilians will suffer during such operations.
If Guterres worries about the situation in Gaza, he should question instead the U.N.’s responsibility. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency allowed Hamas to co-opt it, and it has repeatedly not only allowed its classrooms to be hijacked for antisemitic incitement but has also allowed schools and hospitals to become warehouses for weaponry. Can Guterres explain how Hamas built an extensive network of tunnels under the Gaza Strip? How it acquired the fuel to run ventilation for its underground network? How it imported North Korean weaponry? How much cement the group diverted under the watchful eyes of the U.N.?
Then there is the growing threat from Lebanon. In 2006, Israel and Hezbollah went to war after Hezbollah invaded northern Israel. Over subsequent days, Israel sought to eradicate tens of thousands of rockets and missiles as Hezbollah scrambled to launch the same at northern Israel. In the wake of the fighting, the U.N. and Western diplomats promised to enhance the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah’s rearmament. As Guterres and his predecessor Ban Ki-moon jetted around the world on the public dime, Hezbollah rearmed with weapons even more precise and lethal so that today its arsenal surpasses that before the enhanced UNIFIL mission.
The U.N. Human Rights Council normalized antisemitism and hate. Guterres’s muted response to China’s genocide against its Uyghurs, his moral equivalence between Rwandan victims of genocide and the “genocidaires” the U.N. cultivates in camps across the border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and his inaction in the face of Turkey’s bombardment of Yezidis and Kurds reflect his inconsistency and his lack of fitness for the U.N.’s highest position.
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Guterres might have stopped U.N. agency abuses in Gaza and along Israel’s frontier. That he allowed them to continue reflects either incompetence or endorsement. As a result, the U.N. now weathers its worst crisis since former Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s Oil-for-Food corruption scandal.
The U.N. needs leadership and a man who respects the rules-based order, not a politician who subordinates it to his own personal biases and believes, like a dictator, he can opine on international law absent any debate or process. Crises show leaders’ true character. Seven weeks into a war Hamas itself started, Guterres shows himself lacking one. If he truly cares about the U.N. and not simply the perks it awards him, Guterres should turn the baton of leadership over to someone who can repair the damage he has done.
Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.