Last week I wrote about the disappointing silence from the Islamic and feminist organisations about the brutal sexual violence inflicted on Israeli women in the terrorist attacks of 7 October. The silence from UN Women is even more scandalous. It diminishes the office and stains the United Nations overall. I’ve just looked at the top stories on UN Women’s home page on 25 November, the ‘International Day for the Prevention of Violence against Women’ as designated by the UN General Assembly. By coincidence this is the day on which I write this column. ‘16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence’ is the lead story. ‘Ten ways to prevent violence against women and girls’ and ‘Funding Women’s organisations to prevent violence’ are prominently displayed. Not to mention, ‘Creating Safe Digital Spaces’ and ‘Facts and Figures: Women and girls during the war in Gaza’.

First, a bit of background on the UN role in the advancement of the human rights norm, the stigmatisation and criminalisation of genocide and the development of international criminal justice, in some of which I played more than a bit role back in the day.

The rise, extension and diffusion of human rights norms and conventions and international humanitarian law were among the major achievements of the last century. The UN was at the centre of that effort by constructing a treaty structure in which the principles were embedded and led to the establishment of many national human rights institutions alongside intergovernmental machinery. A human right, held only by human beings but equally by all, dictates that every individual is of equal moral worth. The UN Charter was the first general treaty to obligate every state to promote universal observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on 10 December 1948, inscribed around thirty human rights standards to give some content to the abstract principle. Because all states like to regard themselves as good, few are prepared to stand up against human rights and there has been considerable normative and institutional advance in the decades since 1948. But implementation of the Declaration has always suffered from the shared reluctance of governments to make human rights norms specific, legally binding and enforceable. Few states that endorse human rights fail to break their commitments when they prove inconvenient. The human rights instruments are meant to be our firewalls against barbarism and the national and international legal machinery that has grown up around them are supposed to give us a toolkit against oppression. Alas, if only.

The phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ was coined by the African-American George Washington Williams to describe Belgian atrocities against the natives of Congo in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. ‘Genocide’ (the crime of crimes) was coined by Raphael Lemkin to describe Nazi German atrocities against the Jews in the first half of the twentieth century. The Genocide Convention, adopted on 9 December 1948, was a milestone in defining genocide as a crime against humanity and thus a matter of universal criminal jurisdiction. Lemkin was discovered weeping in a UN corridor at the news of its adoption that owed so much to his moral engagement with the effort. He described the convention as an epitaph for his mother who had been among many members of his family killed in the Holocaust. Writing in 1946 to her former professor Karl Jaspers of Heidelberg University, Hannah Arendt said, ‘We are simply not equipped to deal on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue.’ Objecting that such a moral vocabulary would endow Nazi crimes with ‘satanic greatness’, Jaspers insisted on seeing them instead ‘in their total banality’ – a phrase Arendt famously used in the subtitle of her book almost two decades later.

Accusing Israel of genocide is topsy-turvy. Hamas is guilty of the double war crimes of deliberately targeting Israeli civilians for atrocities and of endangering Gaza civilians by hiding its fighters and weaponry behind civilian lines. By its founding charter, deeds and words, Hamas would commit genocide of Israelis if it could, but cannot. Plus the ethnic cleansing of Jews in the catch-cry ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’. By contrast Israel could commit genocide of Gazans, but chooses not to, limiting civilian casualties as far as possible when hunting Hamas operatives amidst civilian communities.

In an article in Newsweek to mark International Day for the Prevention of Violence against Women, Israel’s First Lady Michal Herzog recalled just a few incidents of the brutality, rape, mutilation and incineration of women in southern Israel by Hamas terrorists on 7 October. A pregnant woman tortured and her foetus torn out. Women and girls raped with such violence that their pelvic bones were broken. The terrorists themselves broadcast videos they filmed of a naked woman paraded through the streets of Gaza. Of a woman with bloodied pants being pulled into a jeep by her hair at gunpoint to be taken across to Gaza. A mother’s breast sliced off in the presence of her six and eight-year-olds and the whole family then killed. ‘Organisations like UN Women exist to protect women from such crimes’, Herzog wrote. Israeli activists and experts have been fully involved and invested in the international efforts. Hence the shock at, ‘The inconceivable and unforgiveable silence of these organisations when faced with the rape and murder of Israeli women’. ‘It is not that condemnations of gender-based violence by Hamas have been weak or insufficient – there have been none at all…. They failed us, and all women, at this critical moment.’

I decided to check it out. On 13 October, the ‘UN Women statement on the situation in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory’ (note the equivalence in the title itself) condemned the attacks on civilians in Israel and Gaza and urged all parties ‘to ensure the safety of civilians and civilian infrastructure’. On 27 October, its deputy director demanded that all parties ‘ensure immediate access to services for women and girls and ensure the prevention of gender-based violence’. On 13 November, it published a feature article entitled ‘Voices from Gaza: Nourhan’s story of survival amid airstrikes’. On 22 November, it called for ‘an immediate humanitarian ceasefire and for the establishment of humanitarian access to facilitate the immediate entry of humanitarian assistance’. UN Women’s shameful silence on the brutal and depraved sexual assaults on women and children in Israel on 7 October – ‘a moment of crushing disappointment’ (Michal Herzog ) – betrays the founding purpose of the organisation, trashes the UN’s proud legacy of universalising the human rights norm and discredits the entire UN human rights machinery. It diminishes the head of UN Women who should resign or else be fired by the Secretary-General. But don’t hold your breath.