Idealistic rhetoric regarding “democracy” and “human rights” and so on and so forth which started with the “League of Nations” and now the “United Nations” also runs into a wall when the basic political and social realities of the Middle East are acknowledged and recognized. To borrow from Khalidi: “The actual nature of the League of Nations Mandate system as it worked in practice was one of the most egregious examples of outcomes in the Middle East being determined by the cold calculus of power politics rather than idealistic Wilsonian rhetoric.” He added: “In the Middle East in general, and in Palestine in particular, great-power interests rather than the principle of self-determination or the wishes of the indigenous peoples concerned dictated the nature of the form of governance that was imposed on them by the League of Nations.”
Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” is a superfluity and is utterly baseless given the true nature of the operations and workings in the Middle East. An element of racism is also involved, given the fact that the Middle East and Afghanistan have not become full-fledged members of past great-power systems during the age of European colonialism and the 20th century Cold War. “Self-determination” applies only to European peoples and not to non-European peoples in this kind of system. In general, smaller states do not get the kind of representation they seek in an “international community” that is defined by major power competition, and this condition applies far more in the Middle East than in any other region of the world.
In short, Wilsonian “self-determination” is overridden by major power dominance and hegemony, especially in the Middle East and Afghanistan, given the obsession of the major powers with that region of the world. Likewise, the United Nations after World War II “rapidly came to be dominated by the Cold War.” The only real upside to the Cold War was that it “helped considerably in the dissolution of the centuries-old European colonial empires the world over.”
The United Nations became a “recasting” of “unilateral policy positions” taken by the major powers. This meant that Arabs were very much stripped of all their rights as a result of these unilateral policy positions, given that the United States became the most dominant major power in the Middle East after World War II. Both the “League of Nations” and the “United Nations” which came after it “affected only slightly the behavior of the dominant powers of the day.”
The United States has either sought to “subordinate” the United Nations to its policies, or “bypass” it altogether. Both the United States and Israel are anathema to “any multilateral forum with the Arabs in which it is believed it would be at a disadvantage, and in particular the desire of the United States to expand its own growing regional dominance.” As a result, due to the reluctance on the part of the United States to accommodate the demands of a growing Third World bloc since the advent of decolonization, there has yet to be a “comprehensive settlement” to the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Adam A. Azim 