Eurasia Press & News
The chess game at the UN Security Council ends with the United States vetoing the Russian resolution on Israel (supported by only four votes including the Chinese one), and Russia and China vetoing the American one . On Wednesday the countries of the world gathered at the Glass Palace to talk about the military crisis opened by the beastly Hamas attack on Saturday 7 October
“We all have an urgent task ahead: to end the violence and open humanitarian access to Gaza which has suffered indiscriminate attacks by Israel and flagrant violations of international humanitarian law,” said Vassily Nebenzia, Russian ambassador . A position that does not find agreement with the United States, which defends the Israeli right to self-defense after the brutal attack on October 7, also through a ground operation – which the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, announced in a speech to the nation . While marking the boundaries: protection of civilians and international law.
For the Americans, a ceasefire would now play into Hamas’s hands. It would allow a reorganization and Israel would risk appearing weak in the face of the brutalities of terrorism. At the same time, Washington is working to avoid a military and humanitarian catastrophe. Diplomacy seeks to convey this position among allied countries, first and foremost the regional one. In the next few days, Under Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Barbara Leaf will be in the United Arab Emirates, after which she will continue to Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Jordan and Israel — and “additional stops may be added,” State Department explains to journalists. She will take the baton from her boss, Secretary Antony Blinken , the man who has so far actively guided diplomacy around the crisis. Where Washington has also deployed military diplomacy , with military advisors sent to Israel (and the region) with the aim of bringing the allies to a tactical reflection on the operation.
Russian-Chinese chess match, remotely
Russia and China remain distant from these dynamics. They avoid direct involvement, use their regional influence to maintain contact with partners, and play bullish on multilateral contexts such as the UN.
For example, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced via Tass that US aircraft – including eight F-15 and four F-16 aircraft, an MQ-9 Reaper and two MQ-1C Gray Eagle drones – violated Syrian airspace 15 times only in one day. It is a double message: on the one hand, Moscow underlines that it has control of the skies of Syria and therefore does not hinder American activities out of common sense (but can have leverage in the regional military and security game); on the other, he tells a series of interlocutors that the United States violates international law even as it demands respect for it.
It is a psychological game, made up of altered and other partial information which has as its objective international public opinion and specifically that of a large part of the non-Western world. What is now called the “Global South”, which Beijing and Moscow constantly incite (through propaganda and alterations of reality) against the so-called “North”, i.e. the West.
There is actually a series of countries that for disparate reasons (security, increase in the costs of raw materials, internal balances) want an immediate stop to the fighting – as they would like the end of the Russian war in Ukraine. And for this reason, making the West perceived as the driver of the conflict – in the Middle East as in Ukraine – becomes useful for strategic narration.
As in the specific case cited by Tass , with US aircraft called to protect the soldiers who are still quartered in Syria, after having fought the Islamic State there and in Iraq, while they are attacked by militias moved by Iran. Furthermore, many of the current propaganda lines have taken root around the war on IS, with the Russians engaged in reviewing the facts – as with the fight against Nazism – claiming the success of the campaigns against the Caliphate, even if in reality they did not have it. almost never fought, interested only in protecting the regime friendly to Damascus.
“The draft ( of the American resolution, ed. ) does not reflect the world’s strongest calls for a ceasefire, an end to the fighting, and does not help solve the problem,” replied the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Zhang Jun to the council after the vote. “Right now, ceasefire is not just a diplomatic term. It means the life and death of many civilians.”
Anti-Western convergence
The information chaos around the Middle East crisis is also fueled by an overall increase in AI-based disinformation, analyzes the Soufan Center, in the wake of what has been happening since the public gained widespread access to large language models (LLMs) and to other generative AI tools in late 2022, with “malicious actors seeking to execute their influence campaigns more efficiently and less resource-intensively.”
China and Russia, with the support of Iran, are glorifying violence, promoting hatred and spreading their truths about the situation in the Middle East, has studied the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a London-based think tank which has assessed the surge in online disinformation, particularly on social media, and an increase in “hateful and violent speech”, including both anti-Semitic and Islamophobic content. The objective of infowar, moreover, is not to define a field, but to create chaos, disarticulate the balance, break down the order.
“The activity is carried out by state agents who are exploiting the crisis to promote their own geopolitical agendas,” writes the ISD, according to its own peculiarities. For example, Iranian accounts affiliated with theocracy structures glorified the Hamas attack, while Russian accounts promoted the anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian narrative, and Chinese state media accounts adapted their approach depending on the platform used.
According to Julia Smirnova , senior analyst at ISD, this exploitation of the situation exacerbates polarization, resulting in deepening distrust of democratic institutions and the media. Results which, moreover, as has already happened in the past, also directly affect Western public opinions, with European squares acting as a platform for this type of propaganda in some anti-Israeli demonstrations.
The vote on Friday
Following the impasse in the Security Council, the United Nations General Assembly will vote on Friday on a draft resolution submitted by Arab states calling for a ceasefire. Within the General Assembly, no country has the right of veto. The resolutions are not binding, but have political weight. And from the results it will also be possible to read against the light the effect of the infowar articulated against the West.
For now, after the double veto, the Security Council has voted on an alternative text proposed by Russia, which called for a humanitarian ceasefire and the withdrawal of Israel’s order for civilians in Gaza to move south ahead of an offensive terrestrial. Russia failed to obtain the minimum necessary support, receiving only four votes, while at least nine votes and no vetoes from the five permanent members are needed to adopt a resolution.
This was Russia’s second attempt at a resolution. Previously, on October 16, only five Council members had voted in favor of the Russian text. The ten elected members of the Security Council now intend to work on a new draft resolution, Malta’s ambassador to the United Nations, Vanessa Frazier , said . “This crisis is also characterized by the growing risk of regional involvement. This requires our full attention,” she said. “We have a duty and obligation to act.”
