It is something of an understatement to say that there has been no shortage of shocking posts on social media in recent days. Up there has been the footage of the mobs chanting ‘gas the Jews’ outside Sydney Opera House and those flying the Hamas flag in London. But one above all stood out.
Step forward the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC). Yesterday, as scenes of medieval anti-Semitic savagery were playing out across southern Israel, it put out this message: ‘On Monday afternoon, [we] observed a moment of silence for the loss of innocent lives in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere.’ The only thing more conspicuously absent from that statement than the word ‘Israel’ was a general sense of reality.
Like many international institutions, the UN has long been in the grip of the basest Israelophobia
That wasn’t even the worst of it. From a video accompanying the post, you’d have thought it was the Jewish state raping, butchering, beheading, burning, kidnapping, executing and mutilating Palestinian families, not the other way round.
The Pakistani representative said: ‘This whole huge loss of lives and unabated violence is a sad reminder of more than seven decades of illegal foreign occupation, aggression and disrespect for international law.’ So that’s the reason. The Jews are to blame for their own butchery.
He added: ‘Efforts to normalise and perpetuate illegal foreign occupation is breeding violence,’ suggesting that Israel had brought the violence upon its own innocent civilians by seeking peace with Saudi Arabia. Finally, with a rather furtive expression, he called for a ‘two-state solution’ based on the pre-1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine – precisely the offer that the Palestinians have repeatedly rejected when it was offered to them, whether by the UN in 1947 or Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert in 2008.
In conclusion, he said the Jewish state’s ‘so-called declaration of war’ was ‘deeply distressing’. Presumably the UN would prefer it if the Jews put down their weapons and lined up like lambs to the slaughter? I’ve got news for them. Never again.
It was all especially disturbing because of the august context. This is an organisation that commands respect and authority around the globe, and is expected to act in a spirit of fraternity and proportionality. Yet as disturbing as it was, it was hardly surprising. Like many international institutions, the UN has long been in the grip of the basest Israelophobia.
The UNHRC was founded to address human rights abuses around the globe. Yet the Jewish state, whose population is a seventh of that of Britain, has been officially condemned more than twice as often as any other nation. At the UN General Assembly, meanwhile, there were fifteen resolutions about Israel in 2022 and just thirteen about all other countries in the world combined.
The UN has numerous formal bodies investigating Israel, including the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, and the United Nations Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
This didn’t happen by accident. The very structure of the UNHRC was set up to produce such demonisation. Its rules dictate that, on the council’s permanent agenda, Item Seven, which addresses the ‘human rights situation in Palestine’, must be discussed at every single meeting, regardless of other pressing world affairs. No other subject is permanently on the agenda, and as a result, its conferences enter the realm of absurdity.
In 2019, at its 41st convocation in Geneva, activists rallied outside to demand an end to the genocide of the Uighurs while delegates discussed the ‘rise in hate speech by political representatives and on social media in Israel’. Setting aside the deep irony of the fact that Israel is by far the most maligned country in the world on social media, it was grotesque to see tweets by Israeli politicians eclipsing the genocide of Muslims in China.
It has been this way for years. The UN’s notorious 2001 anti-racism conference in Durban famously descended into naked Jew-hatred. When it was convened again, in 2009, the only head of state to speak was the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In his speech, he smeared Israel as ‘totally racist’, called the Holocaust an ‘ambiguous and dubious question’ and claimed it was used as a ‘pretext’ for oppressing Palestinians.
In his recent memoir, Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, recalls his first days in the job. ‘I knew about the hostility at the UN and I was prepared for that,’ he writes, ‘but nobody can prepare for the volume of attacks against Israel. Some weeks we had to deal with a new crisis every day, such as resolutions, initiatives and reports. So basically, you end up working day and night to defend your position.’
In May, despite the fact that the UN had itself voted to establish the Jewish state in 1947, the organisation staged an event to commemorate the ‘catastrophe’ of Israel’s birth. At this carnival of Israelophobia, Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian leader, was allowed to give a speech lasting twice his allotted time of thirty minutes (though to be fair, he is currently enjoying the 18th year of his four-year term in office). He railed against the Jewish state in the most lurid terms.
Attempting to deny the historical fact that Jewish agriculturalists made the wasteland of Palestine ‘bloom’ in the early twentieth century – before their time, in 1867, Mark Twain had described the country as ‘a silent mournful expanse’ – Abbas even wheeled out a Nazi metaphor. ‘They lie and lie, just like Goebbels,’ he ranted. ‘They lie, lie and lie until people believe.’
The roots of Israelophobia at the UN are deeper still. Yasser Arafat, who enjoyed a close relationship with the Soviet Union, repeated Kremlin disinformation almost word-for-word in speeches at the UN. (It was the USSR which poisoned the world with Israelophobic propaganda during the Cold war.) In his famous 1974 ‘gun and olive branch’ address to the General Assembly, for example, he railed against ‘imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism, the chief form of which is Zionism’. The truth, of course, is that Israel is a post-colonial state that has a non-white majority. But the truth has never mattered to anti-Semites.
Famously, the nadir came in 1975, when after nearly a decade of Arab and Soviet lobbying, the UN passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, ventriloquising the central agitprop motif that ‘Zionism is a form of racism’. For years, the Kremlin had been trying to persuade the world that Zionism was an expression of Jewish racial superiority, a modern manifestation of a supposed ‘chosen people’ complex.
The UN resolution was a propaganda achievement even more impressive than Aids disinformation appearing on CBS. As the Spectator journalist Goronwy Rees despairingly reflected: ‘The fundamental thesis… was that to be a Jew, and to be proud of it, and to be determined to preserve the right to be a Jew, is to be an enemy of the human race.’ The resolution, which prompted British students’ unions to ban Jewish societies on campuses, was only repealed in 1991.
Such is the state of the UN. It requires root-and-branch reform and a profound shift of culture. This is unlikely to happen any time soon, but there are occasional small victories we can relish. In 2017 – a long time ago, I know, but we take what we can get – a video of a debate at the UNHRC went viral. One by one, diplomats from different Arab autocracies were seen lining up to accuse Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘terrorism’, ‘discrimination’, ‘extremism’, ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘apartheid’. At the end, the Canadian international lawyer Hillel Neuer was given the floor.
‘Once upon a time, the Middle East was full of Jews,’ he said. ‘Algeria had 140,000 Jews. Algeria, where are your Jews? Egypt used to have 75,000 Jews. Where are your Jews? Syria, you had tens of thousands of Jews. Where are your Jews? Iraq, you had over 135,000 Jews. Where are your Jews?’ He concluded: ‘Mr President, where is the real apartheid?’ Faced with its own hypocrisy, the debating chamber was stunned into embarrassed silence.
‘Israelophobia: The newest version of the oldest hatred’, by Jake Wallis Simons (Constable, £12.99), is out now
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