Episode Notes:

The United Nations Security Council is slated to meet this morning to vote on a resolution to increase aid to the Gaza Strip. The vote has been repeatedly delayed, reportedly over negotiations to avoid a U.S. veto. Here to tell us more about the resolution and the vote is Anjali Dayal, an associate professor of international politics at Fordham University and an expert on the United Nations. 

This podcast was recorded on Friday, December 22, 2023, before the United Nations vote. 

[:43] The latest on the resolution

[3:35] How have the negotiations affected the resolution?

[5:21] How does this stand up to the need in Gaza?

[6:23] How has the U.S. position changed?

[9:00] Potential for ceasefire

Episode Transcript

Erin O'Brien: My name is Erin O'Brien and I'm the membership editor at War on the Rocks. You are listening to the War Cast, the members-only podcast for what you need to know now.

The United Nations Security Council is slated to meet this morning to vote on a resolution to increase aid to the Gaza Strip. The vote has been repeatedly delayed, reportedly over negotiations to avoid a US veto. Here to tell us more about the resolution and the vote is Anjali Dayal, an associate professor of international politics at Fordham University and an expert on the United Nations. Welcome to the War Cast.

Anjali Dayal: Thank you for having me.

Erin O'Brien: Could you start off by giving us the latest about this vote and this resolution?

Anjali Dayal: This is a vote that has been delayed eight or nine or 10 times, depending on how you count since the beginning of this week. It is about 9:00 AM on Friday, December 22nd right now. In theory, the Security Council should vote on this resolution around 10:00 AM. And the reason behind the delay is because both the US and the other states on the Security Council were really trying to avoid a third US veto of a Security Council resolution on Gaza. This particular resolution is about increasing humanitarian aid to Gaza. And the two big sticking points over the course of the week, in negotiating this resolution, have first been the language around a pause or a suspension or a cessation of hostilities, and second, have been disputes about what exactly the monitoring mechanism for the aid going into Gaza should be.

Now on the first front, the idea that you would need a pause or a cessation or a suspension of hostilities in order to increase the amount of aid into a particular area is pretty self-explanatory. But the US has been very resistant to any kind of language that frames a pause in hostilities. And so that was the first sort of sticking point of the resolution, trying to get language that was mutually acceptable to both the US and other parties at the Security Council on the table. 

The second set of sticking points had to do with the language in the original draft of the resolution at the beginning of this week that proposed an independent United Nations monitoring mechanism to ensure that the aid going into Gaza was in fact humanitarian aid. Right now, the Israeli government is vetting the aid going into Gaza, and there have been a lot of objections about the fact that it's the Israeli government that is overseeing the sort of passage of aid into Gaza. But also there are a number of real choke points in how that aid is going into Gaza because of this vetting.

And as a result, significantly less aid is making into Gaza than should be, than it is needed on the ground. And the final text of the resolution, because of real resistance from the Israeli government and the US on its behalf about an independent UN monitoring mechanism, is actually language about a UN coordinator for humanitarian aid, someone will oversee aid and reconstruction going into Gaza. So that's the sort of state of play at the moment. It's been a week long set of negotiations around these two issues on a resolution that is about how much aid can get into Gaza. And the negotiations have been to try to get the US to not veto.

Erin O'Brien: Have these negotiations or these concessions weakened the resolution in any way?

Anjali Dayal: They certainly have made it less operationally clear. Now when we say have they weakened it in any way, I think it really depends on how we think about that. The language of the original resolution would almost certainly have been immediately vetoed by the United States. So in that sense it was a non-starter because of the structure of the UN Security Council, which says that any of the permanent members can unilaterally veto any resolution no matter how much other support it has on the council. And in this case it looked like near unanimous support aside from the US in terms of what the new resolution, what the new draft text as of last night was circulating, whether that is weaker than the original text in terms of outcomes on the ground, it certainly is, right?

A resolution that proposes a pause in hostilities in order to get more aid in through independently assessed multilateral mechanism is a much stronger resolution than one that doesn't account for a pause in fighting to get more aid in and one that doesn't specify a clear operational scope of authority for the sort of multilateral oversight of this aid coming in. And in that sense, we can think of this resolution as basically being geared towards not getting a US veto in order to establish a basic floor for humanitarian aid passing into Gaza, and in order to establish a sort of space for the Secretariat to start doing the operational work of putting together an office of a humanitarian coordinator.

Erin O'Brien: This kind of leads to my next question. I mean, how does this resolution or this kind of floor, as you put it, stand up to the actual need in Gaza?

Anjali Dayal: It's very hard to know whether or not it's going to change the situation on the ground because a lot will depend on how the Israeli government receives it. If the goal is to get more aid into Gaza, that's the goal of the resolution, then we can imagine a world in which without strong pressure from the US this kind of resolution leaves it up to Israel to decide how and when and where the UN can operate in terms of overseeing aid that comes in. This is something that a number of humanitarian and aid agencies brought up yesterday after the draft of the text was circulated, which is that it's very hard to increase the amount of aid flowing into a place, any place, in the absence of some pause in hostilities.

Erin O'Brien: I'm curious with all this talk of U.S. veto, has the U.S.'s disposition towards this kind of resolution towards providing more humanitarian aid changed since the start of the war in any significant way?

Anjali Dayal: The U.S. has very rarely used his veto at the Security Council except on issues related to Israel and Palestine. And there is I think some good evidence, a bunch of reporting from Al Jazeera, from the Huffington Post, from the Washington Post, about what appeared to be real divisions between the White House and the US Mission to the United Nations on the question of this resolution and previous resolutions. There have been, at this point, including today, four concrete resolutions on the table around ceasefire and around aid and Gaza. The US has vetoed two of them. It abstained on the one in the middle, and it will either... if we go by what US Ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas Greenfield said last night, it will either vote in favor of or abstain from the resolution today, allowing it to pass.

And some of that difference has been attributed to diplomacy on Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield's part with the understanding that it is in the interests of the US at the United Nations to embrace more aid into Gaza, in the face of sort of deep multilateral documentation of mass civilian casualties, of impending famine, of rising hunger and of the collapse of the humanitarian system there. And in the face of now two big UN General Assembly votes that demonstrate how diplomatically isolated the US is on this issue. That has sort of shifted the space the US occupies on this question I think at the UN Security Council in particular. 

And so we've been seeing over the course of this week, not just negotiations at the UN, but negotiations between New York and Washington. So Ambassador Thomas Greenfield came to Washington to meet with President Biden. We've seen that sort of back and forth where the consultations with the national capital are actually shaping a significant part of what this resolution is going to look like.

Erin O'Brien: And does this indicate that in the future or in the near future there might be negotiations towards a more permanent ceasefire or a cessation of violence?

Anjali Dayal: I think that's very hard to say because the shape of these negotiations seems to indicate two things. The first is that at the UN there is real energy for avoiding a veto, but this energy isn't unlimited, right? There are going to be situations where other member states want the US on record as vetoing to demonstrate that it is almost single-handedly grinding the sort of multilateral apparatus of conflict resolution and humanitarian assistance to halt. But there is space. Allowing for a week of negotiations indicates that the US Mission to the UN doesn't want to veto and other member states don't want the US to veto. They want there to be a working space, they want there to be a scope of action for the UN Secretariat for aid agencies. 

The flip side of that is that it appears as though the White House is more willing to exercise that veto because they're very committed to the policy of allowing Israel to pursue its interest in this case. And so, depending on what the balance of that diplomacy is, I think we would see more or less space for this kind of discussion.

Erin O'Brien: All right. Well, certainly there's a lot to look out for even in the next couple of minutes, but thank you so much for coming on the WarCast to discuss this before the vote.

Anjali Dayal: Yeah. Thank you for having me.