GENEVA, Nov. 8, 2016 – The U.N. General Assembly nearly completed voting today on 10 resolutions against Israel, compared to three for the rest of the world combined, with one each slated for Syria, Iran, and Crimea. See full list here.
On the renewal of the mandate of a special committee to investigate “Israeli practices,” 86 voted yes, 71 abstained, and 7 opposed, with the U.S., Canada and Australia joining the Jewish state, backed by Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. Those abstaining included EU members, as well as several from Africa and Latin America, including Argentina, Mexico and Costa Rica.
The U.N.’s assault on Israel today with a torrent of one-sided resolutions is surreal
All 193 UN member states participate in the committee stage today, and then almost always vote the same way when adopting them finally at the GA plenary in December.
“The U.N.’s assault on Israel today with a torrent of one-sided resolutions is surreal,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental watchdog organization.
“Even as Syrian president Bashar Assad is preparing for the final massacre of his own people in Aleppo, the U.N. is about to adopt a resolution — drafted and co-sponsored by Syria — which falsely condemns Israel for ‘repressive measures’ against Syrian citizens on the Golan Heights. It’s obscene,” said Neuer.
“While there will be a total of 20 resolutions against Israel this session, not a single U.N. General Assembly resolution is planned today for gross human rights abusers such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Venezuela, China, or Cuba.”
“At a time when Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his state-controlled media incite to the continued stabbing and shooting of Israeli Jews, the UN’s response is to reflexively condemn Israel in ten separate resolutions, each of them one-sided, each of them utterly silent on Palestinian abuses.”
The U.N.’s disproportionate assault against the Jewish state undermines the institutional credibility of what is supposed to be an impartial international body
The resolution drafted annually by Syria condemns Israel for holding on to the Golan Heights, and demands Israel hand the land and its people to Syria.
“It’s astonishing,” said Neuer. “At a time when the Syrian regime is killing its own people by the hundreds of thousands, how can the U.N. call for more people to be subject to Assad’s rule? The timing of today’s text is morally galling, and logically absurd.”
“Today’s resolutions claim to care about Palestinians, yet the U.N. is oblivious to the dozens of Palestinians who in the past month have been slaughtered, maimed and expelled by Assad’s forces, and more than 3,000 victims killed since 2011.”
“Today’s farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the U.N.’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations remains the scapegoating of Israel,” said Neuer.
“The U.N.’s 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 U.N. Charter promise of equal treatment to all nations large and small,” Neuer added.
UN Watch is a Geneva-based human rights organization founded in 1993 to monitor UN compliance with the principles of its Charter. It is accredited as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in Special Consultative Status to the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and as an Associate NGO to the UN Department of Public Information (DPI).
