By Jonathan S. Tobin
Friday, March 17, 2017
It isn’t easy to get worked up at the United Nations, an
institution where the egregious is merely business as usual. But even veteran
observers of the world body had to sit up and take notice when its Economic and
Social Commission for Western Asia published a report about Israel that
Secretary General Antonio Gutteres himself immediately disavowed. The lengthy
document purported to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the state of
Israel was guilty of “the crime of apartheid” according to international law.
As such, it didn’t merely criticize Israel’s policies in the West Bank; it
called into question the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself, even with
pre-1967 borders.
The immediate reaction to this piece of libel from both
the head of the U.N. and the U.S. government was quick and appropriate. Through
his spokesman, Gutteres said he was not consulted by the report’s authors and
its contents did not reflect his views. Nikki Haley, the American ambassador to
the U.N., said that the United States was “outraged’ by the report and demanded
that the secretariat officially withdraw it.
Gutteres agrees, and today said the report should be
withdrawn from the U.N. website where it was published. But whether or not it
is pulled from that site, the damage is already done. The report is a
pseudo-scholarly compendium of specious charges, distortions, and outright lies.
Even for an institution in which agencies devoted to human rights are run by
representatives of Saudi Arabia and Iran — an institution that has made grossly
unfair accusations against Israel something of a sport over the years — this
one stands out, because it goes beyond merely smearing the Jewish state
offering legal justification for future attacks against Israel and Jews. Never
before has the U.N. officially tied Israel to apartheid. At a time when,
despite the efforts of the Trump administration to revive talks, Middle East
peace seems more unlikely than ever, the report’s findings will make it even
harder to persuade the Palestinians to compromise and finally accept the
necessity of giving up its war on the Jewish state. And by putting the U.N. seal
of approval on the “apartheid” libel, the report will provide aid and comfort
to those whose anti-Zionist incitement provides a thin veil of legitimacy for
the growth of anti-Semitism across the globe.
The report is the work of two Americans, Princeton Law
professor emeritus Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley of the University of
Southern Illinois. As a 9/11 truther and an anti-Israel extremist, Falk is
particularly unqualified to evaluate the conflict. Yet together with Tilley, he
has put together a document that lists Palestinian grievances while ignoring
those of Israel in a complex conflict where both sides have suffered. And
that’s not all: Rather than merely claim that Israel must evacuate the
territories it won in a defensive war in 1967, as most of its critics assert,
their report goes straight to the heart of the matter by using Israel’s very
existence as a Jewish state to justify the apartheid charge.
By arguing in this way, it dismisses the obvious
differences between what happened in South Africa — where a tiny white majority
denied all rights to the black majority — and Israel, a Jewish-majority country
where the Arab minority has full rights, including suffrage, representation,
and equality under the law. It similarly considers irrelevant the fact that the
standoff over the disputed territory of the West Bank is the result of
Palestinian unwillingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist within any
borders, stubbornly maintained through repeated refusals of peace offers that
would have created a Palestinian state. And by denying legitimacy to Israel’s
basis for existence as the one Jewish state on the planet, surrounded by
multiple nations that are explicitly Muslim or Arab, it implicitly legitimizes
the century-long war that has been waged against the Zionist effort, positing
that Jews may be legally denied rights granted to others as a matter of course.
The report comes at a particularly inopportune time for
those hoping President Trump’s surprising interest in reviving peace talks
might bear fruit. The Palestinians rejected President Obama’s efforts to tilt
the diplomatic playing field in their direction. They torpedoed the
negotiations sponsored by Secretary of State John Kerry, embracing efforts to
get the U.N. to grant them statehood without first requiring them to make peace
with Israel. Their unwillingness to make compromises will only be strengthened
by a report that encourages them to regard Israel as having no rights
whatsoever. They are likely to make Falk’s and Tilley’s findings the basis for
renewed efforts to sue Israel in the International Criminal Court, as well as
for renewed provocations in other U.N. bodies such as the Human Rights Council
or even UNESCO, which in the past year has taken up measures that denied the
historical Jewish ties to Jerusalem and some of Judaism’s holiest sites.
Just as unfortunate is the way the report will be used to
buttress the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement against Israel,
which is one of the primary engines of anti-Semitic incitement both in Europe
and the United States. While BDS claims to be merely a protest against Israel,
wherever its banner is raised, anti-Jewish hate speech and actions soon follow.
Those who subscribe to the notion that the Jewish state has no rights that need
be respected are not merely promoting bias on the international stage, but also
are part of an effort that leads inexorably to anti-Semitic hate speech.
Liberal groups have labeled President Trump as the main
source of encouragement for the uptick in anti-Jewish incidents in the United
States. This is due in part to his inflammatory statements during the election campaign,
the support he received from anti-Semites in the small but loud alt-right and
far-right elements of his base, and his refusal to quickly disavow such hate
once he became president. Partisans have overstated this argument while failing
to take into account Trump’s close Jewish ties, his support for Israel, and the
things most of those actively promoting anti-Semitism actually care about. The
U.N. report is a reminder that in our time, the singling out of Jews for
discriminatory treatment is primarily driven by anti-Israel propaganda, which
serves as a thin veil for a new and insidious form of anti-Semitism. Those
looking for the reason behind the rising tide of hate against Jews around the
globe would do better to read Falk and Tilley than to read Trump’s tweets.
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