Australia / Israel Review

The United Nations has declared an existential war on the state of Israel. Last year, the UN Human Rights Council contrived a unique “Commission of Inquiry” after Israel responded to another round of Hamas rocket attacks. The Inquiry has just issued its first report.

Now emanating from the UN’s top human-rights body is a brazen attempt to resurrect the old 1975 lie that a Jewish state is a racist state. The report’s allegation that discrimination by Jews against non-Jews lies at the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict is actually at the core of modern antisemitism.

The “Commission of Inquiry” is chaired by Navi Pillay, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Zealously anti-Israel during her tenure, Pillay publicly slandered Israel with the apartheid label long before the so-called “inquiry” even began.

There are other tell-tale signs that the fix was in. Early on, the “inquiry” issued a call for submissions and the identification of victims. For the first time in UN history, such a call was answered by the delivery of more than 5 million unique submissions and individual names of Jewish victims of Arab incitement to Jew-hatred and violence. They emanated from a network of non-governmental organisations (which I facilitated), and their transmission was carefully logged. But the report says “the Commission has received several thousand written submissions” and featured a tiny subset of select Israel-bashing “stakeholders”.

Pillay’s report claims (1) the root cause of conflict is the “perpetual occupation” – that is, it’s Israel’s fault; (2) discrimination by Jews – as she defines Jewish self-determination from the start – drives the violence; and (3) the solution lies in prosecuting the criminals and eliciting third-party responses (economic boycotts) from states and private actors.

This misinformation operation is outrageous: The report finds no Palestinian terrorist, no Palestinian terrorist organisations and no Palestinian terrorism. The UN inquisitors merely speculated that the actions of Gaza’s “de facto authorities” and anonymous “Palestinian-armed groups” could “spread terror among the civilian population in Israel.” As for Hamas, it was only named definitively as engaging in the “exercise of government-like functions.”

The submissions that the “inquiry” ignored, however, testify to a different story.

Our submissions documented the unrelenting violent attacks on Jews from before Israel’s independence in May 1948 until today. The goal: eliminating Jews from the river to the sea. 

The “inquiry” touted that it would “adopt a victim-centred approach in all of its work.” So, we submitted the identities of 4,220 Israeli and other civilians remorselessly struck down in the various campaigns to eradicate the modern Jewish state. 

The UN “inquiry” claimed it was looking for “systematic discrimination.” So, we submitted the details of 598,000 Jewish refugees and victims of Arab persecution in Middle Eastern and North African nations over the past 75 years – a partial list of the more than 800,000 who constitute, together with their descendants, the majority of Israel’s current Jewish population.

The inquisitors claimed they were seeking “overall patterns, policies, historical legacies and structural inequalities that affect the enjoyment of human rights.” So, we gave them another 46,862 submissions containing weekly situation reports, video and photographic evidence, legal documents and analysis.

They had rock-solid evidence that: the Palestinian Penal Code forbids Palestinians from selling land to Jews on pain of “life imprisonment with hard labour;” Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas refers to Jews as “filth” to be shunned; the Hamas Covenant openly commits those running Gaza to genocide; the PA pays bounties for the killing of Jews; the PA and Hamas maintain a system of antisemitic indoctrination in schools, training camps, official media and public affairs of all kinds; PA leaders publicly avow Jews will not be permitted to live in a Palestinian state.

But the report repeatedly claims Jews discriminate against non-Jews and could not muster a single example of the reverse. 

Throughout the report, the standard of “proof” is United Nations say-so, regurgitations of the same UN system of entrenched anti-Israel prejudice and unfairness. In fact, Pillay relies heavily on prior UN hatchet jobs that she herself had a key role in advancing as High Commissioner.

Although this charade is obviously tainted and flawed, indifference to it would be a grave mistake. The “inquiry” has no end date and is being financed in perpetuity. There are now two reports on the UN schedule annually, a perpetual drumbeat of modern antisemitism – the delegitimisation of the Jewish state.

Dr. Anne Bayefsky is the director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, and President of Human Rights Voices. © Jewish News Syndicate (www.jns.org), reprinted by permission, all rights reserved.