Why the Marshall Islands Made the Right Vote on Gaza at the United Nations

Damage in Gaza Strip: October 2023
Credit: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This newspaper article was published in the Marshall Islands Journal on November 17, 2023. Below is the full article, along with the original clipping of the article from the newspaper:

In last two editions of the Marshall Islands Journal, many contributors have expressed their disappointment at the RMI government in voting against a UN Resolution for a ceasefire in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas. I want to make the case that the RMI made the right vote.

First, there seems to be this strange idea going around on social media and even in the press that the state of Israel is “occupying” or “colonizing” the Palestinians on their rightful land. But, historically speaking, that is not true.

Map of the Ottoman Empire: 1914
Credit: DragonTiger23, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The territory of Palestine in the early 1900s belonged to the Ottoman Empire. When the Ottomans were defeated in the First World War, the victors—Great Britain and France—governed the former Ottoman territories with supervision from the newly created League of Nations. These European nations then created the states of the Middle East that we know today, including Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. The Arabs of these territories didn’t even identify with these newly created borders drawn up by Europeans—the only thing they had in common was that they were all Arabs who were formerly subjects of the Ottoman Empire.

Map of the League of Nations Mandates
Credit: Kolomaznik, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

But by 1917, one year before the end of the First World War, Britain’s Balfour Declaration stated its intention to support a national home for the Jews. And it was this declaration that drew the Jews to Palestine. Many Jews who were persecuted in Nazi Germany then fled to Palestine—and who could blame them? By 1939, there were already 450,000 Jews in Palestine. And after the Second World War, the world began to learn about the Holocaust: Hitler’s deliberate extermination of six million Jews by execution squads and death camps. This sympathy for the Jewish plight led the United Nations to divide Palestine into both the Jewish state of Israel and the Arab state of Palestine in 1948.

The Balfour Declaration
Credit: United Kingdom Government signed by Arthur Balfour, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Knowing all of this, how can anyone say that the Jews are occupiers or colonizers? They simply took advantage of a situation where the governors of their biblical holy land offered them refuge and the opportunity to settle in the region to have own nation—and they took full advantage of it.

Second, this war is not between Israel and Palestine; it is between Israel and Hamas. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and their main goal is to destroy Israel and replace it with one Islamic Palestinian state. They are supplied with a large number of weapons and money from Iran, whose president in 2005 described Israel as a “disgraceful blot” that “must be wiped off the map.”

Iran’s views have since not changed. After Hamas’ surprise attack on October 7, a day for the Jewish Sabbath and a Jewish High Holiday, the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said: “We support Palestine and its struggles… This attack is the work of the Palestinians themselves, and we salute and honor the planners of this attack.”

And Hamas is to blame for why the United Nations is having such a hard time delivering aid. Israel knows that Hamas will take that aid, especially the petrol, for its military instead of using it on hospitals and water desalinization.

Since taking power in Gaza in 2007, Hamas has shown that it cares nothing for the Palestinian people. In the last 16 years, they have done nothing to alleviate the Palestinians from high levels of poverty and unemployment, and they knew that it would only be a matter of time before they were discredited by their political rival: The Palestinian Authority. The only way Hamas could gain points over their rival was to do something to make it seem as if they were making some sort of progress, and the method they chose was to attack Israel. The result is the ongoing war that has destroyed the lives of innocent civilians on both sides. But that did not seem to matter to Hamas because, to them, political power is more important than the lives of their own people.

Since Hamas cares nothing for the Palestinians, it makes no sense to send them aid in hopes that, somehow, they will use it responsibly; if anything, it sounds like wishful thinking.