Missing in action: As Gaza burns, a failing UN needs Dylan's wake-up call

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, but perhaps he should have won the peace prize. It is a toss-up really. As innocent children die by the hundreds in Gaza, whose night skies are lit up by Israeli bombs in response to the Palestinian Hamas rockets that thundered to spill blood over an Israeli music festival about a month ago, the lyrics of his most famous song ring true:

"Yes, and how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
And how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind"

As "Blowin in the Wind' buzzes in our ears, let us look at the entity that actually won the Nobel Prize for peace in 1988: The United Nations Peacekeeping Forces.

Headlines this week do not look pretty for a subordinate agency of the UN that has a long official web page singing its praises since the founding of the UNO at the end of the Second World War.

'Israeli strikes kill or injure 400+ children in Gaza every day: UN'.

'Top UN official resigns citing genocide in the Gaza Strip'.

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As any person who has been to a New Delhi diplomatic party might know, the UN seems to have been reduced to a bunch of bureaucratic diplomats earning tax-free US-dollar salaries who issue statements that do not go anywhere. The UN Security Council is now in a perpetual logjam state as the US, Russia and China display their peculiarly tangential and frequently conflicting positions best illustrated by symbolic planets in the Hindu astrological chart. The vote in the General Assembly always mattered little compared to the veto in the Security Council, but what is happening now in West Asia should make us look up the organisation's peacekeeping role, which I did. (Meanwhile, the UN continues to call West Asia the Middle East in a Freudian description that matches the American worldview).

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To cut the long story short, the UN Peacekeeping actually began in 1948 precisely where all the bloody action is now to police a ceasefire between Arabs and Israelis. Since then it has been all over the planet mostly to police ceasefires as colonial exploitation gave way to ethnic strifes and civil wars bearing the indelible marks of a has-been imperialism turning into a never-say-die shadow colonialism.

The UN officially says its peacekeeper role changed after the end of the Cold War circa 1991 (Has it, really?). It has been to places like the former Yugoslavia, Angola, and Somalia and lists among the Peacekeeping Forces' tasks an objective to "stabilise the security situation". And it also says with an official straight face: "The nature of conflicts also changed over the years. UN Peacekeeping, originally developed as a means of dealing with inter-State conflict, was increasingly being applied to intra-state conflicts and civil wars."

I want to ask how one would describe the current conflict in Palestine. It is nothing but a prolonged civil war between two national communities that claim stakes to the same ancient homeland - divided by religion, language and heritage but not by territory. A two-state solution widely seen as the right way out implies that geographically intertwined nation-states are at war. The Israel-Hamas conflict has both inter-State and intra-state characteristics. Either way, the UN has to play some sort of a peacekeeping role that goes beyond the policing of a ceasefire that is simply not happening.

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Along with hundreds of kids and civilians, we also see irony dying a thousand deaths at Gaza in a world in which a veto-empowered Russia can bomb Ukraine and kill civilians in an ostensible "de-Nazification" act that enlists support from a private army named after a Nazi favourite composer, Wagner! 

That digression to Ukraine is just a drone's eye view of the planet to show that we are now seeing a world in which geopolitics has become a theatre of the absurd. It would be funny were it not for the tragic destruction and deaths that we are witnessing day after day in Gaza. If there was ever a need to airdrop powerful military support to keep the peace, it is now and the place is exactly where it all began in 1948.

But who will bell the cat? US President Joe Biden and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin are now two of a kind. China remains mysteriously torn between being a stealthy expansionist and a wannabe deal-maker. France is fighting its own internal monsters like a latter-day Don Quixote. The answer is indeed blowing in the wind.

(Disclaimer: The views of the writer do not represent the views of WION or ZMCL. Nor does WION or ZMCL endorse the views of the writer.)