Back in February, U.N. Secretary-General
António Guterres delivered a speech at the Ohel Jakob synagogue in
Munich in which he struck most of the right notes.
Guterres acknowledged what Israel’s most
diehard adversaries never will—that the Jewish people are indigenous to
the historic Land of Israel. “I was in Masada,” he said. “And I lived
the feeling of the Jewish people about the expulsion of the Roman Empire
in the first century and how the Jewish community has spread in the
Roman Empire but, since the beginning, became in the different areas of
the empire, victims of different forms of segregation, discrimination
and persecution.”
Antisemitism, Guterres also observed, “was
not born with the Nazis and did not die with the Nazis.” Referring to
his native Portugal, which expelled its Jewish population at the
beginning of the 16th century, the U.N. chief bemoaned this “criminal”
and “stupid” act for causing suffering to Jews and impoverishing the
country culturally and economically. And, he continued, “antisemitism is
unfortunately spreading today. It has had, I would say, a clear
acceleration since the horrific attacks of Hamas on the seventh of
October, but it was already a central concern for us in the last
decades. We have seen how it was multiplying both online and offline
with all kinds of manifestations, desecration of cemeteries, personal
attacks on people, vicious actions online, and worst, an attempt to
rewrite history.”
All of this is in keeping with Guterres’s
previous comments on the issue, including his determination in 2017 that
the “denial of Israel’s right to exist is antisemitism,” which is an
enormously significant statement for the head of the world’s most
thoroughly and consistently anti-Israel body. Additionally, during the
coronavirus pandemic, Guterres spoke out more than once against the
antisemitic memes that spread like wildfire in the “covidiocy” camp of
anti-vaxxers and allied conspiracy theorists.
Yet there is one aspect of this issue on
which he has remained silent. And that is the antisemitism that stains
the organization he leads.
When Guterres rightly identified calls for
Israel’s elimination as antisemitism—a contention that has been proven
ad nauseam in the months since the Oct. 7 pogrom—it would have been
natural for him, intellectually speaking, to examine how the United
Nations has contributed to legitimizing this demand. In 1975, at the
behest of the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, the U.N. General
Assembly passed a resolution decrying Zionism as a form of racism,
already established as a staple of Soviet propaganda. In the same year,
the United Nations created a Division for Palestinian Rights dedicated
to promoting and amplifying the themes in that resolution. Alongside
this network is a so-called humanitarian agency, UNRWA, which is solely
dedicated to Palestinian refugees and their descendants. No other
dispossessed or persecuted people, inside or outside the Middle East,
has been handed the same privilege. UNRWA has certainly risen to the
occasion, spreading antisemitic ideology in the schools it runs and even
employing Palestinians who participated in the Oct. 7 atrocities.
Then you have the U.N. Human Rights
Council, which dedicates an entire agenda item to vilifying Israel, and
which periodically pushes out ugly, unsubstantiated attacks on Israel
through the guise of “independent experts.” One such report was released
just last week by a team of three commissioners, one of whom, Miloon
Kothari, famously accused the “Jewish Lobby” of controlling social media
(if only, eh?)
In an environment like this one, it’s
hardly surprising that Israel now finds itself on a blacklist with the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan,
South Sudan and Yemen as states whose militaries systemically abuse
children. Yet what is noteworthy here is that this list is provided by
Guterres’ own office, which produces the annual “Children in Armed
Conflict” report.
Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad also
made the list, rubbing salt into the wound by equating Israel’s military
with a bunch of murderers, rapists and deviants who derive pleasure
from mutilating the dead and similarly bestial acts. Again, there is
nothing remarkable about the world body drawing such a grotesque
comparison. What is noteworthy is that it carries the endorsement of
Guterres, who goes out of his way to portray himself as an ally of Jews
when he speaks to Jewish audiences, but then doggedly sticks to the
anti-Zionist script once he returns to Turtle Bay.
Because if Guterres really did believe in
the points he made during his Munich speech, then he would not have
assented to Israel’s inclusion on the blacklist. If he really
appreciated the centrality of Israel as an anchor of security for Jews
the world over, if he really grasped the mass trauma provoked by Oct. 7
for Israelis and Jews around the world alike, if he really knew in every
fiber of his being that the Jewish people have only this one country
that is currently facing a campaign of deadly violence orchestrated by
Iran and its regional proxies, then Israel would not be sharing space
with militaries whose sole raison d’être is the murder, torture and
wholesale destruction of innocent civilians.
That is why Jews have every right to feel
betrayed by Guterres. At least his predecessors, who included the late
Austrian Nazi Kurt Waldheim, never raised our expectations and never
cheated us into thinking that the United Nations was changing direction
on Israel. Guterres dangled precisely that hope and then snatched it
away.
Now he has lent his imprimatur to one of
the worst antisemitic blood libels to emerge from the halls of the
United Nations—and there have been many. The twisted logic that places
Israel on such a list could easily be applied to the United States, the
United Kingdom and France—all permanent U.N. Security Council members
whose militaries have faced war-crime charges in countries like Algeria,
Iraq and Afghanistan. But only Israel faces this treatment because
targeting the Jewish state has become routinized and normalized in the
U.N. setting.
That will only change when a successor to
Guterres honestly appraises the world body’s own record of antisemitism
and pledges to end it, first of all by dismantling all the elements—the
committees, the various “independent” commissions, the anti-Israel
agenda items set in stone—that contribute to this institutional bias.
Only then can Jews gain any kind of trust in the United Nations. And
that, for the foreseeable future, isn’t going to happen.
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