The Security Council Echo Chamber of Israel Bashing

The United Nations Security Council’s quarterly open debate on the Middle East invariably focuses on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Israel is invariably the punching bag. The April 21st session was no exception.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon started things off by calling upon Israel to re-affirm its commitment to the two-state solution and “to take credible steps to foster an environment conducive to a return to meaningful negotiations, including a freeze of settlement activity.” Nothing was asked of the Palestinian leadership, which time and again has walked away from opportunities to secure an independent state of their own on terms that would have given them virtually all of the West Bank as well as Gaza. Instead, the Secretary General praised the so-called “Palestinian reconciliation,” which is a euphemism for the Palestinian Authority’s willingness to partner with the terrorist jihad group Hamas. The Palestinian Deputy Representative Feda Abdelhady-Nasser followed the Secretary General, delivering a lengthy tirade against Israel. She said that the crisis of the Palestinian people had become “existential,” all of which she asserted was Israel’s fault. She criticized the Security Council’s failure to pass last December a resolution proposed by the Palestinians and sponsored by Jordan, which would have set strict deadlines for a final settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on the Palestinians’ terms, including Israel’s withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 lines. “The failure to act has greatly fostered Israel’s impunity and compounded the conflict, with the heaviest price paid in human suffering and the credibility of the international system,” Ms. Abdelhady-Nasser claimed. She demanded urgent action by the Security Council to bring about what she called the “globally endorsed” solution. Israel’s UN Ambassador Ron Prosor provided the singular voice of truth in the Security Council chamber. He said in his remarks that the two-state solution the Palestinians have in mind would consist of two Palestinian states because President Abbas insists that Palestinian refugees be allowed to flood the Jewish state alongside the other new state they are demanding. Abbas claims to oppose terrorism, Ambassador Prosor said, but Abbas’s government has forged a pact with Hamas, paid salaries to convicted terrorists and incited violent attacks against Israelis.

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“The very last thing Israel can afford is another terror state in its backyard. Just imagine what this state would look like,” Ambassador Prosor said. We got a preview when Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005. Hamas took over the Gaza Strip and created a terror stronghold.” After noting that the conflict was not really about the right place for Israel’s borders, but “about Israel’s right to exist in the first place,” Ambassador Prosor declared:

“War has never been the choice of the State of Israel. Our choice is and always has been the path of peace. But when war and terror are forced upon us, we will not surrender and we will not back down. For nearly 2,000 years, the Jewish people were stateless and powerless in the face of hatred and indifference. Those days are no more.”

In short, Israel is willing to negotiate a two-state solution, but not with terrorists whose avowed objective is to destroy Israel, or on terms that would radically transform the demographics of pre-1967 Israel by overwhelming the Jewish state with millions of so-called Palestinian “refugees.” U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power spent most of her speech discussing the devastation in Syria and calling once again for an end to Syrian President Assad’s rule. Pointedly, she did not re-affirm the United States’ long-held position that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict can only be resolved by direct negotiations between the parties and not through the United Nations. “A two-state solution is the only way for Israel to ensure its future as a Jewish and democratic state,” Ambassador Power said. However, she left unsaid whether the Obama administration will now allow the UN Security Council to dictate the terms of a faux two-state solution along the lines demanded by the Palestinians and supported by France, which is actively seeking consensus on just such a Security Council resolution. Nasser Judeh, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Expatriates Affairs of Jordan which is serving as Security Council President this month, kept the refugee issue on the front burner. He made the incredible claim that even though most Palestinian refugees were already Jordanian citizens they still deserved to be treated as “refugees.” Under the so-called right of return these Jordanian dual citizen-refugees could choose to emigrate to pre-1967 Israel, even though they already have a home and citizenship protection amongst the majority Palestinian population residing in Jordan. Switching from Arabic to English, Mr. Judeh turned towards Ambassador Prosor and challenged him to stop making excuses for not reaching a peaceful solution. Ambassador Prosor was not afforded an opportunity to reply to this direct challenge. He told me afterwards that he would have reminded the Jordanian Foreign Minister that Israel’s record of peacemaking is demonstrated by the agreement it reached with Jordan itself, which is still in effect. The United Nations is at its worst when dealing with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Lies and hypocrisy are the order of the day. At the UN, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is often portrayed as the underlying root cause of virtually all of the tensions in the Middle East. This fictional narrative provides the Syrian and Iranian regimes an easy out and turns a blind eye to the toxic Islamist ideology fueling much of the jihadist terrorism spreading throughout the entire region today. At the UN, Israel is often assigned the full blame for the Palestinians’ plight. This fictional narrative relieves the Palestinian leaders of any responsibility for betraying the aspirations of their own people and for taking ill-advised actions that cost civilian lives amongst Palestinians as well as Israelis. Shame on the Obama administration if it further enables this travesty.