US blocks UN resolution condemning the accident prone state of Israel

An attempt to officially condemn Israel for the recent massacres in Gaza has been vetoed by the United States, making it the second time this year that the United States, through its ambassador John Bolton, has used the veto to prevent the official censure of Israel for its military activity in Gaza. Ten of the fifteen members of the UN Security Council voted in favour of the resolution, with four abstentions - UK, Denmark, Japan and Slovakia.

The resolution sought to bring Israel to book for its operation in Beit Hanoun last month, an operation that Israel claims was effort to root out militants who had been firing rockets in Israel. Ehud Olmert, Prime Minister of Israel apologised for the attack, describing it as a "technical failure".

John Bolton, who is looking increasingly unlikely to continue in the post, described the resolution as unbalanced and politically motivated. In response, the Qatari ambassador said the credibility of the Security Council had been called into question by the vote and that the cycle of violence in the Middle East would continue.

The Olmert apology for this travesty offends the intellect. How can anyone believe this massacre was accidental? It was accidental in the same way that the massacre at Jenin was accidental. It was no more accidental than the deliberate bombing of buildings in Beirut when IDF chief of staff Dan Halutz ordered the air force to destroy 10 multi-storey buildings in the Dahaya district (of Beirut) in response to every rocket fired on Haifa. It is no more a mistake than the siege of Jabalya late in 2004. It is not a mistake. This is not a "technical failure". It is merely the latest round in the slow-motion genocide that Israel has been perpetrating for decades, literally since the state of Israel was founded, since the time the myth about the land being "reclaimed from sand and swamp" was first propagated.

The Israeli reaction to condemnation of their accident-prone terrorist state is always the same. Never accept responsibility. Always blame someone else. Always play the anti-semitism card at the slightest hint of criticism. Year after barbarous year, decade after murderous decade, the armed forces of this homicidal, truculent and racist state continue to massacre with impunity.

The reaction of key elements in the so-called "international community" is equally unchanging - whether it is the outright refusal of the United States to condemn any Israeli attrocity, or the moral cowardice of the inevitable clutch of abstainers.

The failure of the Security Council to act in the face of deliberate and systematic genocide does indeed call into question the credibility of the Security Council, as Nassir Al-Nasser, the Qatari envoy has already suggested.