The United Nations was created in 1945, with the intent of preventing a third world war. Only two years later, on 29 November 1947 - among the first decisions of great geopolitical importance - the UN adopted resolution 181 which provided for the creation of an Arab state and a Jewish state in the territories of the former British Mandate of Palestine. In 76 long years, not only has the Arab State of Palestine never seen the light, but these decades have been marked by interminable and ferocious armed conflicts, up until the terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel two months ago, the massacre of innocents in Kibbutz of Kfar Aza and the terrible response of the Israeli army aimed at eradicating Hamas from the Gaza strip.
Faced with the barbarity of the first and second world wars and the real danger that atomic weapons would destroy the planet, the declared objective of the United Nations was "Never again"! Following the previous attempt made by the League of Nations (LoN), founded in 1919 to try to prevent the massacre of the First World War (17 million victims) from being followed by another. We know that that first attempt was unfortunately a failure.
An attempt in which Switzerland also believed deeply. Although they had not paid the dramatic blood tribute of other European countries, the Swiss did not in fact consider their neutrality as a shield to stay on the sidelines: in the popular vote, in 1920 they said a convinced yes to the LoN. Furthermore, ardently encouraged by Federal Councilor Giuseppe Motta, head of the Swiss Political Department, which the League of Nations then presided over in 1924-25.
In this brutal beginning of the 1945st century, the UN - born on the ashes of the League of Nations to redeem its failure - is unfortunately risking tragically replicating the fate of the LoN. The current spiral of new armed conflicts seems to indicate this, not only in regions far from the West but on the very borders of Europe and in the Middle East, between the Baltic, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Precisely where the plan for future reconciliation had been signed - in Yalta, Crimea, in February XNUMX - between the leaders of the allied powers against Nazi-fascism: Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Josip Stalin. In fact, in Yalta it was decided - in addition to the last joint offensive to defeat Hitler - the creation of the United Nations among the countries that later won the Second World War. And Crimea is today the strategic-military fulcrum of Russia's invasion war against Ukraine.
Looking at the succession of failed attempts to build a new peaceful world order, we cannot help but notice that the times of history are much longer than we tend to imagine. It is evident that the world has not yet metabolised the collapse of the old empires (tsarist, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian, but also Chinese) which gave rise to the totalitarian nationalisms of the twentieth century and which is violently producing, according to new parameters and dynamics, a new clash between the West, Russia, the "Arab-Islamic hydra" and China. The birth and extraordinary development of the United Nations (as well as the creation and development of the European Union) after the end of the Second World War were called to build new bases concerted at an international level that would guarantee strategic-military balances, economic and financial development , food and health security, a cultural and humanitarian policy (refugees), global and shared. Unfortunately, we cannot help but notice that we are once again at the foot of the ladder.
The continuously reopened and apparently unhealable wound of the conflict between Israel and Palestine is painful but also has an emblematic value of the dead end from which the world seems incapable of escaping. Without peace in Jerusalem (where the three great monotheistic religions coexist) there is no peace in the world, one might say. Also because Jerusalem means pure Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial which indelibly denounces the horror of the extermination of the Jews - a stain that haunts the conscience of the international community - but at the same time valorises the Righteous who, at the cost of their own lives, committed themselves to saving them.
United Nations Resolution 181 sought to somehow wash away that stain, proposing the creation of a State of Israel and a State of Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. That sixty-nine UN resolutions have failed to lay the foundations of a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians is probably the most eloquent sign that the wounds of the twentieth century are more open than ever.
It is as if the ideal impetus of the United Nations - although desired by the United States, Russia and Great Britain in Yalta to give stability and peace to a devastated world - had not affected the rough reality of the geopolitical interests of those who wanted it. As soon as Auschwitz was liberated and Hitler was defeated, Stalin's Red Army prepared to carry out the project Mir (which means peace but in fact it was a new Soviet world empire, exactly like the Pravda meant Truth but in fact it was a programmatic lie).
In the aftermath of the Second World War, the victorious powers threw themselves into a new war, which was called cold but which was a real armed conflict (fortunately not nuclear) often carried out by proxy on a global scale: an imperialist struggle between the West and the USSR (but also communist China) for the division of the world. A global clash between the USSR and its allies on one side and the USA and its allies on the other, of which Palestine was also inexorably the theater and hostage. The alignments created at an international level in recent weeks after the Hamas attack and Israel's response, and the new global Intifada are clear confirmation of this.
The collapse of the Soviet empire could have allowed the UN and the European Union to lay the foundations of a new, non-imperialist and concerted world order, as well as a security body in Europe founded on constructive strategic foundations and balances involving the Russia. The United States preferred to decide, in the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet Russia and the Berlin Wall, to push towards the enlargement of NATO while planning the reduction of Russia to a small regional power. We know Vladimir Putin's brutal response. It is not easy for an empire that was a hegemonic power at a Eurasian and global level, which paid an enormous blood tribute to defeat Nazi-fascism, which voluntarily sanctioned the dissolution of the USSR and which possesses enormous energy deposits and the largest number of warheads nuclear weapons in the world, accept the law of the historic enemy and the independence of their own republics, to be reduced to an insignificant desolate steppe.
The crossed vetoes of the permanent members of the UN Security Council (starting with Russia, the USA and China) and the pathetic appeals of the Secretary General in the face of the resurgence of old and new armed conflicts (and anti-Semitic demons), are the emblem of the impotence of the United Nations Organization in the face of the onset of a new imperial era. Which promises to be fraught with new dangers.
