A new intifada arena for Palestine: the UN General Assembly

Israel's savage genocide, which it has carried out in a spoiled and utterly limitless manner thanks to the unlimited support it receives from the United States, is about to complete its first year. Throughout this year, Israel has continued its massacres, emboldened by its unlimited supporters in the US and Europe and by the silent ones in the region, and it has placed too much confidence in the belief that this unlimited support and silence would last to the very end. Yet nothing in the world is endless, and although the support the US gives may be unlimited in its own eyes, American power is not unlimited.

The speeches the leaders delivered at this year's UN General Assembly showed that, for Israel, and in truth for the US as well, the point where the sea ends has been reached. True, the UN's general ineffectiveness, its inadequacy in solving problems, indeed its dysfunction, leaves a great deal to be said. It is the maddening dysfunction of the UN that makes President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan utter the phrase "The World Is Bigger Than Five" at every General Assembly meeting and at every international gathering.

This dysfunction is, in fact, due to the veto power that 5 countries hold within the UN structure, and to the fact that these 5 countries are generally locked in constant conflicts of interest with one another. In such a situation, the conflicting parties make it impossible for any decision to be taken in favor of or against one another, and if one is taken, impossible for it to be implemented. Yet in the past, using UN principles as a pretext, the US in particular, whether through NATO or on its own, carried out whatever interventions it wished, in Iraq and in Afghanistan for instance, and in its own view restored a broken order and re-established violated law. What it did was of course nothing of the sort. What it did in Iraq and in Afghanistan was nothing more than whittling UN law to suit itself and making its own decision by itself. The one who is strong in fact possesses the ability to interpret the rules as he pleases. That is why the international law that the UN represents, or claims to represent, unfortunately reminds us in practice, every single time, of the requirements of being strong.

Even so, in the speeches delivered by leaders under the roof of the UN General Assembly this year there was a trend never seen in previous years. Criticisms of Israel and of the powers that support it shamelessly dominated the agenda. The objections raised against Israel amounted to the same thing as criticisms of the existing world order itself and even of the UN's non-functioning system.

These criticisms, which in past years we heard only from President Erdoğan, we heard this year from many world leaders. All of them criticized Israel in the harshest language and expressed their support for Palestine. Among them were those who had already stated their position on this matter beforehand, as well as those who, for the first time, expressed it so openly under the roof of the UN. Thus the UN roof became, so to speak, a field of intifada against Israel and those who support it. For example, while Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez said "What we are seeing is an occupation that must be stopped immediately," Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Chilean leader Gabriel Boric, even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, King Abdullah of Jordan and many other heads of state, in differing doses, criticized and condemned Israel in the harshest manner from the UN podium, described what it had done as a massacre at the very least, and demanded that it stop at once.

Truthfully, it was President Erdoğan, who had acted alone in earlier meetings, who opened the stage. Having touched on the Palestinian question and Israeli aggression somewhere in the course of his previous speeches, this time Erdoğan began his speech by speaking directly of the crimes of genocide Israel has committed in Gaza and of the human tragedy being lived there because of them.

Devoting a full 22 minutes of his 37-minute speech to this subject, Erdoğan not only likened Netanyahu directly to Hitler but also called on the world to take the very same measure the League of Nations took against Hitler in the past, to stop him by using force. At the same time, he called on the states that have not yet recognized the State of Palestine to recognize it so as to stand on the right side of history, and he once again saluted Hamas as heroes defending their own country. His speech must undoubtedly go down in history as the clearest manifesto against the UN order, which has virtually accepted in practice the UN's Israeli exceptionalism. In fact, it was seen at this UN meeting, through the many speeches that repeated his words, that Erdoğan's speeches of this kind, in which he had until now stood almost alone, were by no means in vain.

Thus Erdoğan, who even in his years in power at home stood out in the role of opposition against deep, entrenched powers above the law, now displays continuity in his politics by opposing the international order from the same moral position.

Truly, among the speeches delivered from the UN podium, the speech of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, was also noteworthy for strongly sharing the same moral position. He too

devoted roughly the first 13 minutes of his 17-minute speech to Gaza and to criticism of Israel, of the powers behind it, and of a world order that remains silent and ineffective in the face of it. The Emir's speech and Erdoğan's speech, as strong speeches that both complemented and supported each other, together with the speeches of all the other leaders, showed that there is no longer a place for Israel in the current world order.

An Israel that has committed so many crimes of genocide and keeps doing so in a spoiled manner solely on the strength of force will no longer be able, from this hour on, to be counted in the international community or accepted as a normal state. For all its shortcomings, the UN has played a far from negligible

role in reading the crimes of such a criminal country to its face, disgracing it, isolating it and excluding it.

The Israeli delegation, exactly as President Erdoğan said in his talk with journalists, was "in a very strange posture in the face of the speeches criticizing them. Because they have no way of defending themselves. Their stance already shows this."

What Erdoğan rightly lamented is that the murderer Netanyahu was able to speak under the roof of the UN, and that the UN does not distinguish between killer and victim, between right and wrong. But at the end of the day, one must also see that the very roof of the UN under which Netanyahu, like a pig, was able to find the opportunity to mount the podium and speak has itself become, so to speak, an interesting field of intifada against Israel.

Moreover, this time the intifada is not by the Palestinians themselves; the words of world leaders who understand their cause and stand in solidarity with it

have turned into stones and are striking the Zionist occupier, genocidal Israel.