The Institutional Antisemitism of the United Nations
The real UN agenda toward Israel
Just before the end of 2022, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) succeeded in reaffirming the deeply rooted antisemitism within the organization which was founded after the Holocaust and World War II.
Following the advice of the so-called Anti-Colonization Committee of the UN, on Friday evening the General Assembly adopted yet another anti-Israel resolution.
This resolution was a follow-up to the Anti-Colonization Committee’s decision to refer the issue of the so-called Israeli “occupation” of “the Palestinian Territories” to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague in November 2022.
The text of the new UNGA resolution spoke of “Israel’s prolonged occupation” and of the “colonization and annexation of Palestinian territory” and also accused Israel of institutional discrimination.
Some of Israel’s ‘friends’ abstain from voting again. The resolution passed by an overwhelming majority of 87 to 26, with 53 nations abstaining.
The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and France were among the countries that abstained, while Germany and the United Kingdom voted against the resolution.
Unlike the vote in November, when the UN ambassador to Ukraine voted in favor of a similar resolution brought by the UN’s Anti-Colonization Committee, the diplomat was absent from the vote this time.
That was probably the result of a telephone conversation between President Volodymyr Zelensky and the ‘new’ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of the debate in the General Assembly.
PA victory
Both the committee’s resolution and the vote on a new anti-Israel resolution in the General Assembly were the work of the Palestinian Authority (PA) under the leadership of its aging autocratic leader Mahmoud Abbas.
Since 2008, when Abbas effectively turned down an unprecedented peace offer made by then-Israeli Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni, the PA has been working on a new strategy aimed at inciting the international community against Israel.
This was done, among other things, by applying for membership in various important international organizations, including most UN bodies.
According to the PA, that strategy has proven successful and thus there was reason to celebrate this new “victory” over Israel.
The PA strategy, initiated by the Palestinian Strategy Group in 2007, has been aimed at gaining legitimacy for the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.
That state, according to the Palestinian leadership, should be based on what it calls the “’67 borders” and should have Jerusalem as its capital.
In reality, however, there were no borders when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, these were just the negotiated (with Jordan) armistice lines of 1948.
Anger in Israel
Israel reacted with anger and disgust to the latest UN resolution against the Jewish state.
UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan was not present in the UN building during the debate and vote because, as a traditional Jew, he keeps the mandatory Shabbat rest.
The United States, therefore, cast the Israeli vote against the resolution. Erdan later said the adoption of the resolution was “another stain” on the UN’s reputation.
“No international organization can decide that the Jewish people are the occupiers of their homeland,” Erdan bellowed calling the UN “morally bankrupt and politicized” and saying the decisions of the country organization are not legitimate.
Erdan went on to explain that the UN is helping the Palestinian Authority to harm the “only vibrant democracy in the Middle East.”
The Israeli UN Ambassador also strongly criticized the fact that the UN voted on the resolution during Shabbat, calling this further evidence of the organization’s “moral decay”.
Positive turn?
Other Israeli diplomats pointed to a perceived positive turn within the UN, compared to the vote on the resolution of the anti-colonization committee.
In November, 98 countries voted in favor of this resolution while 17 UN members voted against it this time while a handful of other countries joined Israel in rejecting the UNGA resolution.
These observers claimed that this supposedly positive turn of events was a result of the telephone conversations that both outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Netanyahu had with some leaders of UN member states.
However, when one looks at the real situation at the UN, a truly disturbing and very worrying picture emerges.
Outright antisemitism
Not only does the UN have several unique committees that focus exclusively on work for the benefit of the Palestinian Arabs, including a commission set up to defend the ‘inalienable rights of the Palestinian people and the recently established UN Permanent Commission of Inquiry into Israel’s alleged war crimes, but there is outright antisemitism within the organization.
Examples of UN anti-Semitism
Take, for example, what happened during the year 2022 when the UN General Assembly passed a whopping 15 resolutions against Israel mainly because of alleged wrongdoings against the Palestinian Arabs.
That same year, the UN adopted a total of 13 (!) similar resolutions against other member states.
Among those resolutions, six were directed against the Russian invasion of Ukraine and only one against Iran, North Korea, and Syria, states where human rights are violated every day.
There is more. Since 2015 the United Nations General Assembly has passed a total of 136 resolutions against Israel while for all the other member states combined, the number was only 58.
Several states with a long record of human rights violations such as Turkey, Algeria, China, and Pakistan were completely ignored by the UN in its alleged drive to establish a more just world order.
Israel is thus judged by the United Nations according to the principle of “double standards” selectively demanding a higher standard of human rights protection from Israel than from other nations without taking in account the terror the Jewish state suffers from, is classic anti-Semitism.
The real UN agenda toward Israel
According to Hillel Neuer of the organization UN Watch, the real agenda of the United Nations and its subsidiary body the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is to demonize the Jewish state.
“The disproportionate assault against the Jewish state undermines the institutional credibility of what is supposed to be an impartial international body. Politicization and selectivity harm its founding mission, eroding the UN’s charter’s promise to give equal treatment to all nations, large or small,” Hillel said.
Netanyahu and the historical truth
Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to the latest UN resolution against Israel after Shabbat, broadly reiterating what Ambassador Erdan had said about the rights of the Jewish people to its historic homeland.
“No UN resolution can distort the historical truth,” said the Prime Minister, immediately announcing that Israel does not consider itself bound by UN General Assembly resolutions.
Consequences of negative ICJ advice
A legal opinion on the Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria by the ICJ is expected to be negative for Israel but will be ignored by the government in Jerusalem.
The legal judgments of that court are binding, but the UN body has no means to enforce them as became also clear when the ICJ issued an advisory opinion on the legality of the security barrier Israel was constructing to protect its citizens from Palestinian terror.
Despite the ICJ’s opinion that the construction, of what it called “the wall”, was illegal and violated international law Israel continued working on the security fence which hasn’t been completed until this very day.
That said, the effect of the ongoing series of anti-Israel resolutions and decisions by UN bodies is likely to be that antisemitic elements will feel even more free to express their hatred of Jews.
This is already the case in the United States and also in some European and especially in Arab countries.
The antisemitism, fueled by the vicious Palestinian propaganda about Israel, among Arabs was also clearly visible during the last World Cup and shocked the Israeli journalists present in Qatar.
It was also visible on Friday night in the UN building in New York, when none of Israel’s Arab peace partners voted against the resolution or even abstained.
UN and the Naqba lie
In another expression of its downright disdain for Israel the UN General Assembly recently also decided to hold a so-called Naqba commemoration for the first time this year, just one day after The Jewish state will celebrate its 75th Independence Day.
The Naqba (Disaster) is a term first used by Constantin Zureiq, a Syrian historian, after the events of 1948 when a large part of the Palestinian Arab population fled to the surrounding Arab countries during the War of Independence.
Zureiq blamed this flight on the Arab legion that had vowed to destroy the fledgling state of Israel. The Syrian historian later used the term Naqba again when describing the blunders that led to the humiliating Arab defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War.
PLO hijacked the term Naqba
The PLO later used the term Naqba in its propaganda against Israel, claiming that this disaster was a result of systematic Israeli efforts to rid the land of Israel of its Arab population.
By now effectively adopting the Palestinian propaganda about this event, the UN sided with the true aggressor in the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict and at the same time continued to ignore the plight of more than 800,000 Jewish refugees who were forcefully expelled from Arab countries after the modern State of Israel was founded.
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