A chaotic week at the United Nations that proved American diplomacy isn’t what it was

This week’s stalled UN Security Council vote on sending aid to Gaza is a stark reminder of how badly the US has misjudged international public opinion on Israel’s war – and how its place in the international order has changed, says Mary Dejevsky

Members of the UN Security Council hold splinter meetings at the United Nations headquarters (Getty)

One of the most striking features of the current conflict in the Middle East is the way the United Nations is back – almost as though it had never been away.

International television is following proceedings from UN headquarters in New York. Terms that had become practically extinct are being bandied about again, almost as they were in the years after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. We are back in the land of UN Security Council Resolution 343, the “two-state solution” that is enshrined in it, and the “Middle East peace process” that, for so long, seemed akin to a byword for diplomacy itself.

Except that the context, and the balance of advantage – or what, I seem to remember, used to be called the “correlation of forces” – are different. How different is underlined by the intensive backroom discussions that have been going on over the past week in New York in an effort to halt, or at least pause, the bloodshed in and around Gaza.