ISRAEL AND THE UN

• First, Goldstone argues that Israel deliberately and systematically attacked civilians and made them suffer.  Amazingly, the report finds little or no evidence that Hamas, a terrorist group that controls Gaza and refuses to recognize Israel, deliberately fired rockets from civilian houses, stored weapons in mosques or used the basement of one of Gaza’s hospitals as a military command center.  The report does not even mention Hamas by name.  Israel refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s fact-finding mission and has always made the argument that the war against Hamas was to stop Hamas from firing its rockets into Israeli population centers.  In fact, since 2004, those rockets have killed 16 Israeli citizens, injured many more and terrified thousands of Israel citizens.  Correctly, Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, contends that Goldstone would not have written the report the way he did “if [his] children lived in Sderot under the threat of constant attacks.”  In July the Israeli government issued an interim report on the war listing measures it had taken to keep civilian causalities as low as possible.  It had aborted, for example, air strikes when the risk to civilians was too great, dropped warning leaflets, made telephone calls to Gazans and declared humanitarian pauses in the fighting.  Hamas never has done so!  Even as the fighting ensued, some Palestinians were able to complain about humanitarian issues directly to Israel’s Supreme Court for immediate rulings.  Legal advisers were also involved in the planning and were deployed during the fighting around the clock.  As an indication of Israel’s transparency, official Israeli investigators are looking into upwards of 100 Gaza-related complaints; 23 criminal investigations have been opened so far.  The UN Human Rights Council has a long history of focusing on Israel while ignoring the human rights abuses in other member states like China and Saudi Arabia, for example.  The Council’s resolution adopting the Goldstone report goes far beyond the Goldstone report, including a long section about the control of Jerusalem, land confiscation and settlement expansion in Israel and the West Bank.  The resolution calls on the UN to refer Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICC).  Thankfully, the United States joined five European nations in voting against the report.  But there is an alliance developing in the UN comprised of the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab Group and the Organization of the Islamic Conference for a General Assembly resolution that will seek a ruling on Israel’s conduct by the ICC.

• Second, the Israeli government has declared that the report’s release and the Council’s endorsement have roiled the Middle East peace process.  An Israel spokesman has argued that “it will make it impossible for us to take any risks of the sake of peace.”  The Human Rights Council was created by the UN in March 2006 to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission, which had spent so much of its time concentrating exclusively on Israel but no other human rights abuses of other nations.  President Bush refused to join this new body, but President Obama has had the US now participate.  This report and subsequent Council action demonstrate that Obama's policy of engagement is making no difference at all.  It demonstrates once again that the UN is anti-Israel!  Quite incredibly, when the UN Human Rights Council vote was taken, Russia and China voted for the report’s endorsement; Japan, South Korea and several European governments abstained; and France and Great Britain did not vote!  These facts demonstrate rather conclusively the anti-Israel bias of the UN. 

See John Bolton in the Wall Street Journal (19 October 2009); Howard Schneider and Colum Lynch in the Washington Post (16 October 2009); Neil MacFarquhar in the New York Times (17 October 2009); and The Economist (19 September 2009), pp. 57-58.

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