By Joseph A. Klein, CFP United Nations Columnist ——Bio and Archives--May 31, 2023
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The United Nations has sunk to a new low in its animus against Israel. On May 15th, the UN officially commemorated for the first time, pursuant to a General Assembly mandate, what the Palestinians refer to as Nakba (catastrophe). The “catastrophe” the Palestinians continue to whine about was Israel’s declaration of independence seventy-five years ago. The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People organized a High-Level Special Meeting to commemorate “Nakba Day,” which included a keynote address by the President of the Palestine Authority, H.E. Mahmoud Abbas.
True to form, Abbas used inflammatory language to smear the Jewish state, equating its statements with the lies of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. He called for Israel’s suspension from the UN, lamenting what he claimed was the “ongoing historic injustice that fell on the Palestinian people in 1948 and before that date, and that continues after.” Abbas blamed the United States and the United Kingdom for planting a foreign colonial Zionist entity in the “Palestinian homeland.”
Insisting on the so-called “right of return” of Palestinian “refugees” to their so-called “homeland” within pre-1967 Israeli territory, Abbas proclaimed, “I am a Palestinian refugee. I want to return to my land… I want Safed,” which is in northern Israel.
Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people, where they have had a continuing presence for thousands of years. In 1947, the United Nations proposed a compromise that called for a partition of the contested land into two states – a Jewish state and an Arab state. It was the original two-state solution. The Jews accepted the partition plan and created their own independent state. The Arabs rejected the plan and chose the path of war against the Jewish people rather than build the independent state that they could have had for the last seventy-five years.
Abbas is today’s Palestinian version of Goebbels. The UN has shamefully given this Holocaust denier a global platform to spread his vicious lies. The UN has allowed Abbas and his henchmen to propagate their false claim that Israel’s declaration of independence seventy-five years ago led to mass forcible expulsion and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.
The Palestinians have been the authors of their own self-inflicted “Nakba.” After Israel declared its independence, Palestinian fighters joined with armies from their Arab state neighbors to forcibly eliminate the Jewish state at its inception. Many Palestinians voluntarily left their homes in droves based on assurances from Arab leaders that they would be able to return very soon after the Jews were driven out of the land into the sea. Unfortunately for them, it did not turn out that way. The Jewish state prevailed.
As Brooke Goldstein, Executive Director and founder of The Lawfare Project, explained, Nakba “doesn't mourn the handful of Arab families who were adversely affected — it mourns the FAILURE of Arabs to commit a genocide against Jews.”
The Palestinians who decided to remain in their homes at the time rather than listen to the siren song of the Arab leaders were not driven out by the victorious Israeli military. They were allowed to stay put and become Israeli citizens. That is hardly the ethnic cleansing that the Palestinian propagandists and their allies charge Israel with having conducted.
A Palestinian leader at the time gave a more candid account of who was really responsible for what happened back then, undercutting the Palestinians’ false Nakba narrative that demonizes Israel.
Emil Ghoury, Secretary of the Arab Higher Committee, then the official leadership of the Palestinian Arabs, was quoted in 1948 as saying: “The fact that there are these refugees is the direct consequence of the Arab States in opposing partition and the Jewish State. The Arab States agreed upon this policy unanimously, and they must share in the solution of the problem.”
Abbas may want to go back and read his own past criticism of the harm that Arab leaders caused the Palestinian people back in 1947-48. “The Arab armies entered Palestine to protect the Palestinians from the Zionist tyranny,” Abbas said in 1976, “but instead they abandoned them, forced them to emigrate and to leave their homeland, imposed upon them a political and ideological blockade and threw them into prisons similar to the ghettos in which the Jews used to live in Eastern Europe. The Arab states succeeded in scattering the Palestinian people and in destroying their unity. They did not recognize them as a unified people until the states of the world did so, and this is regrettable.”
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Another Palestinian lie that amounts to blood libel against the Jewish state is that the Israeli military wantonly kills Palestinian children during its airstrikes in Gaza that the Palestinians charge are aimed at civilians. The Palestinians are pulling out all the stops to pressure the United Nations into adding Israel to its notorious “list of shame,” which the UN will publish as part of its upcoming annual report on children in armed conflict.
After the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist group fired over 100 rockets from the Gaza Strip towards Israel in the beginning of May, the Israel Defense Force (IDF) launched Operation Shield and Arrow on May 9th against Palestinian Islamic Jihad targets in Gaza. These targets included Palestinian Islamic Jihad weapon manufacturing sites, military sites, underground tunnels and, most notably, terrorist commanders themselves.
During the five-day conflict that ended with an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire, Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorists in Gaza fired more than 1000 rockets towards Israel. The vast majority of rockets approaching Israeli population centers were intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system before they could reach their intended civilian targets. Nevertheless, one Israeli civilian was killed, and several others were wounded, as a result of the terrorist rocket attacks.
The Palestinians suffered more civilian casualties, a quarter of which the IDF estimated were from Palestinian Islamic Jihad's rockets that fell inside Gaza. During the course of IDF airstrikes against sites the terrorists used in civilian areas, a limited number of other Palestinian civilians were inadvertently killed or wounded, including children, whom the terrorists effectively used as human shields.
The UN has tended to rely on distorted data based on Palestinians’ false tallies and explanations of deaths and injuries to Palestinian children that occurred while the IDF was conducting its operations. Israel's UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories Major General Alian met with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on May 23rd to set the record straight.
“We presented the Secretary-General with clear data proving that the majority of Palestinian minors killed in the past year were involved in acts of violence and terrorism,” Ambassador Erdan said “and this information was omitted from the UN data, along with the fact that terrorist organizations use Palestinian children as human shields and fire missiles and rockets from densely populated areas.”
Ambassador Erdan added, "Whoever is responsible for the incitement and recruitment of minors for murder and terrorism is the one who should be included on the blacklist, not the IDF, which is the most moral army in the world."
The question is whether Secretary General Guterres was listening and will not take the Palestinians' accounts of civilian deaths and injuries in Gaza at face value. If Secretary General Guterres succumbs to Palestinians’ and their supporters’ pressure to add Israel to this year’s UN “list of shame” in its latest report on children in armed conflicts, the real shame will fall on the United Nations itself for legitimizing even more hate against the Jewish state.
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Joseph A. Klein is the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom.