United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said during his trip last week to Jerusalem, in remarks addressed to Israeli students, that Israel “has been weighed down by criticism and suffered from bias — and sometimes even discrimination” at the UN. After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he said that “The time is now for Israel to be fully respected as a member of the international community.” He called in particular for “a more constructive relationship between Israel and the Human Rights Council.” Unfortunately, the Secretary General’s refreshing moral clarity on this issue lasted only a few days.
Ban Ki-moon appeared to backtrack during a press briefing at UN headquarters on August 19th when he declared, “I don’t think there is discrimination against Israel at the United Nations." In fairness, the Secretary General may have misunderstood the question to which he was responding or simply misspoke. And he did acknowledge the Israeli government’s complaints regarding bias against the Jewish state, adding that “Israel should have equal rights and opportunities without having any bias, any discrimination. That’s a fundamental principle of the United Nations Charter and thus Israel should be fully given such rights.”
Whatever the extent of Ban Ki-moon’s willingness to stick by his original unambiguous statement in Jerusalem recognizing the existence of anti-Israel bias at the United Nations, the fact is that for too many years the United Nations has unfairly targeted Israel for condemnation. At the same time, the world organization has downplayed the abuses of the world’s real human rights abusers such as Iran, and ignored the Palestinians’ own major share of responsibility for their plight.
Beginning in 1977, the United Nations has sponsored the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People on November 29th, the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its Palestine Mandate partition resolution. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called November 29th a “day of mourning and a day of grief.” The event takes place every year at UN Headquarters in New York and at the UN Offices at Geneva and Vienna and elsewhere.
In other words, every November 29th, the United Nations publicly mourns the passage of its own peaceful solution to the Arab-Jewish dispute, General Assembly Resolution No. 181, which called for the division of the Palestine Mandate into independent Jewish and Arab states. The UN is effectively repudiating its own original two-state solution, spurned by the Palestinian leadership and all of the Arab countries back in 1947, which still lies at the heart of the solution that the UN claims to support as the basis for ending the Palestinian-Israeli conflict today.
The UN Human Rights Council has singled out the Jewish state for more than 40% of the condemnations issued to the UN’s 193 member states. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly called the UN Human Rights Council a “hypocritical council with an automatic majority against Israel.”
There is no indication that anything has changed since the Obama administration foolishly decided to have the United States join this circus. Earlier this year, for example, a Human Rights Council-ordered “fact-finding mission” report stated that Israel must withdraw from all settlements, including Jewish residences in the Old Quarter of Jerusalem, or Israelis could be tried for war crimes at the International Criminal Court. By doing so, the Human Rights Council effectively pre-determined one of the so-called "final status" issues that are to be discussed during the course of the direct negotiations now underway between Israeli and Palestinian representatives. Incredibly, the Human Rights Council report recommended a position even more extreme than that embodied in the Arab Peace Plan - total Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines, now referred to by the Palestinians as the “pre-1967 borders.”
The monthly briefings to the Security Council on the Middle East by the Secretary General's deputies are also skewed against Israel. The Palestinians are invariably portrayed as the victims and Israel as the aggressor, without any context given to the reasons for Israeli defensive actions to protect its own civilians against Palestinian jihadist attacks.
The same anti-Israel bias applies to condemnations of Israel's defensive actions to contain Hezbollah's mounting threats to Israeli civilians from its launching pads in Lebanon. In the most recent August 20, 2013 Middle East report, delivered to the Security Council by Oscar Fernandez-Taranco, Assistant Secretary General for Political Affairs, Mr. Taranco acknowledged Hezbollah Chief Hassan Nasrallah's claim of responsibility for Hezbollah fighters' planting and detonating bombs in southern Lebanon, which Nasrallah said was part of a "controlled and deliberate operation." But he did not criticize Hezbollah's provocative act. Instead Taranco criticized Israel for its alleged "almost daily violation of Lebanese airspace" as well as the presence of Israeli Defense Forces at the location of the bombing, allegedly "in violation of the Blue Line and in breach of the terms of the cessation of hostilities and [Security Council] resolution 1701." If the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon had been doing its job in monitoring Hezbollah’s buildup of arms in violation of Resolution 1701, just perhaps the Israeli Defense Force would not feel it necessary to always have to do the job for them.
These are just a few of the numerous examples of the UN’s systematic bias against Israel. The United Nations’ top official, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, showed moral leadership in publicly and unambiguously acknowledging its presence. Sadly, his candor may turn out in the end to be a momentary lapse in the UN’s business as usual mode.
