United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s speech to a special Security Council meeting on the Israel-Hamas war on Tuesday began promisingly enough.
“Nothing can justify the deliberate killing, injuring, and kidnapping of civilians – or the launching of rockets against civilian targets,” he said at the beginning of the speech.
Then Guterres’ moral compass went haywire, and he began to justify what he had just said was unjustifiable.
“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” he said. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
The hole in his argument
This argument is staggering. Using similar logic, were Guterres around when the Vikings pillaged, raped, and plundered Europe in the 9th century, he probably would have said that this didn’t happen in a vacuum, that Scandinavia was poor and the Vikings were just looking for fresh food.
There is no justification for mass murder, for gang rape, for the incineration of entire families in their homes, for mutilation of bodies, for kidnapping children, women, men, and the elderly and holding them hostage.
Pure sadism deserves no context, no explanation, no excuse. None. If Guterres doesn’t understand this, he has no business heading an organization whose goals are ostensibly to promote peace, security, and human rights.
As US President Joe Biden said in a speech to the American people on October 9, “You know, there are moments in this life – and I mean this literally – when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this world.”
Hamas’s barbarous attack, he said, was one of those moments. That is moral clarity. And that is what Guterres needed to say to the Security Council convened to discuss the current war: that there is good and there is evil in the world, and that what Hamas perpetrated – what Hamas itself documented and celebrated – is sheer evil that must be uprooted.No “buts,” no stories about context or tall tales about vacuums.
And this is to say nothing about the justification Guterres served up about 56 years of “suffocating occupation” for the Palestinians and vanishing “hopes for a political solution.”
Listening to Guterres, it’s as if the Palestinians are without agency; as if they are not responsibile for their situation; as if the “suffocating occupation” did not begin after Arab states launched a war to annihilate Israel; as if they were not offered a path toward statehood several times since 1967 and rejected it each time because it did not meet their maximalist demands; as if their unending terrorism isn’t the true reason why there is no peace.As Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said with justified indignation to Guterres, “In what world do you live?”
Guterres said something else inexplicable in his speech, which he posted on X later to explain what he meant by saying that the attacks did not happen in a vacuum.
“The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas. And those appalling attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
Does Guterres really believe that? Does he truly believe that what Israel is doing in Gaza is tantamount to collective punishment?
The war Israel is waging in Gaza is no more collective punishment of the Palestinians than the Allies fighting the Nazis was collective punishment of the Germans. It wasn’t. The Allies wanted to destroy the Nazis so Western civilization could endure; Israel wants to destroy Hamas so that the Jewish state can survive, and by dismantling Hamas it is also doing the West a great favor.
This has nothing to do with collective punishment, and Guterres – by saying it does – is just parroting Hamas propaganda.
With his speech, Guterres has demonstrated a stunning degree of moral bankruptcy – even by the UN’s low standards. If Guterres does not retract those statements, if he does not make it clear that he understands that no vacuum in the world justifies beheading babies, then he has no business leading the United Nations and should step down.