Update from AIJAC

 

06/22 #02

 

This Update focuses on both the achievements and the increasingly shaky position of Israel’s 8-party ruling “coalition of change” Government, which was sworn in one year ago but is not expected by most political observers to last much longer, given recent defections. It also has an important and insightful piece on the latest “report” issued about Israel-Palestinian issues by an unprecedented  Commission of Inquiry set up by the UN Human Rights Council – and the larger pathologies it reflects at the world body.

We lead with Washington Institute for Near East Policy expert on Israeli politics David Makovsky. He focuses mainly on the successes of the current Israeli Government led by Naftali Bennett over the past year,  in terms of governance, foreign policy and Arab-Jewish relations, before moving toward the reasons it looks unlikely to survive. He finishes up with some lessons from this past year’s political experiment in Israel. For all of Makovsky’s insights, CLICK HERE.

Next up is Jerusalem Post editor Yaakov Katz – who discusses some myths and facts about the reason for this Government’s likely collapse. In particular, he disputes the claim made by Nir Orbach, the MK whose defection triggered the current coalition crisis, that it’s the “experiment” of having an Arab party in Israel’s governing coalition that has failed. He offers an alternative theory for the Government’s troubles, before detailing what might happen next. For Katz’s useful look at what really went wrong for this diverse Israeli coalition, CLICK HERE.

Finally, British columnist Melanie Phillips dissects the travesty of the latest UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC)  Commission of Inquiry into Israel and its report, and what happens next. She looks at the absurdity of the report itself, the obviously biased nature of the Commission, whose personnel were appointed in violation of the UN’s own rules, and the long history of pernicious bias at the UNHRC and the UN more generally. She is also critical of Western governments for their lack of action in the face of the corruption of the UN. To read it all,  CLICK HERE.

Readers may also be interested in…

• AIJAC’s Ahron Shapiro, in the Australian on Friday, June 17, took on the report from the UNHCR Commission and its destructive implications.
• Australia’s diplomat In Geneva made a welcome statement critical of the report on behalf of the government, while the US orchestrated a group of 22 other countries to also criticise the report.
• A wider dissection of the UNHRC’s terrible record in promoting human rights, even beyond its Israel obsession, from Charlotte Lawson.
• Criticism of the US Administration for not doing more about the UNHRC and its biases from former senior US official Richard Goldberg. 
• A good analysis of the Netanyahu-led opposition’s position and intentions in the current political crisis in Israel, from Shalom Yerushalmi of the Times of Israel. 
• In the wake of the conviction this week of the former head of World Vision in Gaza, Mohammed El Halabi, on charges of diverting funds to Hamas, an interview with NGO expert Prof. Gerald Steinberg on what went wrong with the charity and why it refuses to accept his guilt.
• Some examples from the many stories and comments now appearing at AIJAC’s daily “Fresh AIR” blog:
  • AIJAC’s media release on the new Australian Government’s statement critical of the report from the UNHCR Commission.
  • Judy Maynard reports how the World Health Organisation (WHO) continues to single out Israel in a politicised way – but also on how some within WHO are beginning to push back against the bias and misinformation being spread.
  • Oved Lobel debunks some false claims about a far-right terrorism threat emanating from foreign fighters participating in the war in Ukraine, in a piece published in European Eye on Radicalisation.
  • A short AIJAC video about Pride Month in Israel.

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Bennett on the Brink: Israel’s Precarious Coalition One Year On

 

David Makovsky

Washington Institute PolicyWatch 3619
June 13, 2022

 

Despite the government’s progress on deepening foreign ties, safeguarding domestic institutions, and bringing Arab Israeli leaders into national decisionmaking, it may soon be brought down by opposition maneuvers and fallout from terrorist attacks.

On June 13, Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett’s coalition government marks its one-year anniversary—a noteworthy accomplishment given the long sequence of flash elections and political gridlock that preceded it. Yet even as it reaches this milestone, the coalition’s existence remains precarious at best. Its days seem numbered, even if it is somehow able to survive the summer parliamentary session.

Successes of the Bennett Government
One of the coalition’s organizing principles was a belief that the independence of Israel’s law enforcement and judiciary institutions was at risk amid the corruption trial of former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. And at the most basic level, the Bennett government’s successes on this front can be seen in its daily functioning. While Netanyahu viewed annual budgets and regular appointments as a constraint on his power, the current government passed a budget last fall—the first since 2018—and filled dozens of diplomatic and judicial posts that had been held in abeyance for years.

Successes have been achieved in other arenas as well. Right before Bennett came to power, Israel fought its fourth conflict with Gaza since 2009, causing widespread destruction and forcing citizens into bomb shelters. Over the past year, however, virtually no Gaza rockets have been fired at Israeli communities—just six, in fact, compared to more than a thousand during the war. The May 2021 conflict also featured riots in several Israeli cities where Jews and Arabs live in adjoining neighborhoods. Yet none have occurred since the new coalition came to power. At the request of its Arab partner, the government has prioritized heightened policing in long-neglected Arab towns, reducing organized crime in these neighborhoods by as much as 30%.

Indeed, one of the government’s biggest experiments has been the inclusion of the Islamist United Arab List (UAL) as a partner. At the center of this effort is UAL leader Mansour Abbas, who has evinced political and personal courage by not challenging Israel’s character as a Jewish state, instead prioritizing greater budgets and services for Arab Israelis while articulating a pathway of Jewish-Arab coexistence. According to the results of a March 2022 poll conducted by Hebrew University, his moderate course seemed to make significant inroads among Jewish Israelis. In a previous January 2021 poll, Jews had rejected the idea of integrating an Arab party in a governing coalition by a margin of 56% to 25%, and by a margin of 76% to 7% among those on the political right. By this March, however, the numbers were close to parity among Jews in general (37% approval vs. 41% rejection) and had improved somewhat on the right as well. (Notably, though, other surveys show that respondents who do not like Bennett’s government tend to prefer that Jews and Arabs live apart.)

Regarding Israeli relations with the United States, Bennett, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, and Defense Minister Benny Gantz have sought to avoid the collisions with Washington that occurred under Netanyahu. It helped that President Biden is likewise a believer in solving differences with Israel quietly. The goal of both governments is to avoid making Israel a partisan issue in the United States while also healing some of the wounds suffered during the Obama administration. Nowhere is this approach tested more than on the Iran nuclear deal, a complex issue that has been a recurrent source of tension and requires its own analysis. Yet the Biden administration has supported Israel’s opposition to delisting Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as part of a nuclear agreement.

A major foreign policy success for the new government has been its ability to deepen ties with key regional leaders such as King Abdullah of Jordan (who had a bitter relationship with Netanyahu), President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, and President Muhammad bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates. Bilateral ties with the UAE had already shot up since the Netanyahu government signed the Abraham Accords, but personal ties between the two capitals have deepened under Bennett, particularly after Israel extended military assistance to Abu Dhabi in the wake of Houthi rebel attacks from Yemen.

The capstone of this Israeli government’s diplomatic achievements was the Negev Summit in March, which saw Israel host the foreign ministers of Bahrain, the UAE, Egypt and  Morocco, as well as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken. (Photo: US State Department)

The capstone of this rapprochement was the five-country summit held this spring at Sde Boker, home of iconic Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion. Attended by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the summit saw Lapid establish close communications with four of his Arab counterparts via the WhatsApp and Signal messaging services, then set up six working groups on issues such as security, climate, and health, providing a new framework for deepening ties among the countries. Yet while relations have improved between governments that are party to the Abraham Accords, this list may not broaden unless President Biden’s planned visit to the region next month prompts first steps between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

Seeking Balance on Palestinian Affairs Amid Right-Wing Attacks
Despite the coalition’s accomplishments over the past year, right-wing fury has kept it from enjoying a day of peace in the Knesset. Much of this anger has been directed personally at Bennett and his party for taking votes away from the right to form a hybrid government with leftist and centrist parties. In some cases, party members and their families have faced intimidation in their own neighborhoods, spurring at least two and possibly three parliamentarians to withdraw from the coalition. Bennett’s popularity was also hurt by terrorist attacks conducted during Ramadan, when nineteen Israelis were killed. Historically, such attacks have tended to move Israelis rightward—indeed, recent polls show a gain for Netanyahu, putting him close to the number of projected votes needed to force the formation of a new government, while the hopeful March poll numbers on Jewish-Arab coexistence have gone backward since the Ramadan attacks.

In navigating its political challenges, the government has sought to strike a balance on the hot-button Palestinian issue over the past year. Although Bennett has ruled out political negotiations with the Palestinians for now, he has allowed Gantz to pursue economic dialogue on projects that will provide 20,000 new jobs for Gazans in Israel—a factor that is seemingly constraining Hamas’s willingness to fire rockets for the time being. In general, however, Palestinians regard what Israel has offered as insufficient.

Meanwhile, Bennett has tried to push back on right-wing attacks by highlighting Netanyahu’s host of incorrect doomsday predictions—namely, that the new government would cave on key issues with Washington (e.g., settlement activity; the reopening of a U.S. consulate in west Jerusalem), come under fire from Gaza, and halt all covert activity against Iran. None of those predictions panned out.

Obviously, however, any Israeli attempt to merely put aside the Palestinian conflict for long stretches of time would be difficult, if not impossible. Yes, Gulf leaders have shown that they have other priorities, but they cannot ignore when clashes break out on the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif during Ramadan, resonating religiously throughout Arab countries and media outlets (e.g., the UAE sent Israel a firm demarche on this matter last month). Moreover, the Bennett government did not count on Netanyahu’s astounding insistence that the Likud Party vote with the Joint List of Arab parties outside the coalition on key laws related to the Palestinian conflict. The fact that Netanyahu has no qualms about allying with factions that oppose Israel’s Jewish character is richly ironic given his frequent charges that the Bennett government is insufficiently Zionist.

As a result, the government is feeling pressure at both ends. One member of Bennett’s party is threatening to leave unless parliament reaffirms a law enabling Israeli settlers to fall under Israeli jurisdiction, while two members on the coalition’s left edge are vocally opposing the same law. The government is facing this extremely delicate situation amid ongoing efforts to convince internal critics to resign in favor of members who are more supportive of the leadership’s policies. Given Netanyahu’s surge in the polls since the terrorist attacks, one cannot rule out new elections by year’s end.

Conclusion
A few main lessons have emerged from the coalition government’s first year in power. First, it has demonstrated that parties can work together across the aisle when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not center stage—and that doing so can improve ties with Washington and the Gulf states. Paradoxically, however, this conflict affects too much of Israel’s daily life for it to be ignored altogether, especially when members of the right-wing political opposition are willing to exploit the situation tactically by voting alongside parties that run counter to their central tenets. It is too soon to know if the experiment of integrating Arab Israelis in government decision-making will endure, yet terrorism seems once again to be moving Israelis rightward—just as it has for decades—putting the hybrid coalition in deep peril.

David Makovsky is the Ziegler Distinguished Fellow in The Washington Institute’s Koret Project on Arab-Israel Relations and creator of the podcast Decision Points.

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Failure isn’t coalition with Arabs, its PM without legitimacy

 

by Yaakov Katz

Jerusalem Post, June 16, 2022

Ultimately, when the prime minister lacks legitimacy, the public lacks trust in that government, and the foundation upon which that government rests starts to fray.

 

Israeli PM Naftall Bennett: His problems in office have been less about his performance than about his lack of legitimacy as a result of his tiny parliamentary base (Photo: Roman Yanushevsky, Shutterstock)

On June 6, in a blow to Naftali Bennett’s coalition, the Knesset failed to pass an important and divisive West Bank bill, a failure that seems to be leading in one direction: the collapse of the current so-called “Change Government.”

During that late-night Monday vote, it appeared as if an altercation was about to break out in the plenum when Yamina MK Nir Orbach jumped out of his seat, walked over to Ra’am MK Mazen Ghanaim – the coalition member who seconds earlier had voted against the bill – and yelled: “You don’t want to be partners. The experiment with you has failed.”

Those who know Orbach were surprised. For a calm and mild-mannered individual, Orbach’s lurch from his seat was completely out of character. It didn’t take long to understand why. The whole thing, sources close to the MK revealed this week, had been orchestrated. So was what he yelled at Ghanaim – he had it written on his phone ahead of time.

As seen this week with his announcement that he will no longer vote with the coalition, Orbach that day wanted something right-wing to use as his excuse to break up the government. There is no better right-wing hill to die on than legislation that if not passed by the end of the month will lead to 500,000 Israelis living over the Green Line being turned into citizens without basic rights and protections.

There is also a problem with the use of the term “the experiment failed,” something Israelis have heard repeatedly these past few weeks as the coalition has been crumbling day by day. The experiment refers to the participation of an Arab party in the coalition, and the attempt to have Jews and Arabs – no matter their place on the political spectrum – sit together and jointly determine the fate of this country.

Lacking any other way to bring down the government and crown – once again – Benjamin Netanyahu, Orbach fell back on the longstanding fault line that has reigned in this country for 74 years: the division of Jews and Arabs.

Nir Orbach, the MK from Bennett’s own Yamina party who looks set to bring down the Government, claimed the “experiment” of having an Arab party in the coalition “failed.” But it is not clear he is right. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons). 

But all that has changed.

The participation of Ra’am in the government is something that will not be reversed. Even Netanyahu, who openly attacks Mansour Abbas now, will call him tomorrow and give him whatever he wants to have Ra’am sit in his coalition.

This does not mean that the coalition with Ra’am was easy. It never was. Nevertheless, the coalition functioned, relatively, and stayed away from any extreme moves. Ra’am did not push a Palestinian agenda, but instead remained focused on the desperately needed domestic interests of its Israeli-Arab constituents.

There are lessons to be learned. One, for example, is that while having an Arab party in the coalition is important, it cannot – at least for now – make up the 61-core majority. That way, the Arab MKs won’t have to vote for legislation that goes against their agenda and undermines their credibility among Israeli-Arabs, and the Jewish MKs won’t have to vote for what goes against theirs.

Is that possible?

In the event of a new coalition, we will find out.

With that said, there is one failed experiment that does need to be highlighted: the decision to appoint as prime minister a politician with a severe legitimacy deficit.

Not to take away from the prime minister’s accomplishments. Bennett has run this government responsibly, and for the most part has worked in coordination with his ministers – unlike his predecessor – while knowing how to share the credit, instead of hogging it for himself.

Do his ministers work well? Yes. Did his government pass a budget, after Netanyahu refused to for three years? Yes. Has he initiated a new policy vis a vis the fight against Iran that seems to be bearing fruit? Also true. And has he managed to do all this without fighting with the Biden administration? Yes.

Nevertheless, he is currently a prime minister with only four seats in his party. “It’s funny to recall that there was a point that we thought seven seats was a lot,” one senior member of the coalition joked recently when speaking about Bennett and the number of seats he won in the election, and before three members of his party jumped ship.

Running a coalition in a democracy as boisterous as Israel is always going to be complicated. Doing so with just a handful of seats goes against tradition, according to which the largest party (or at least one that is close to it) is the party whose leader becomes Israel’s prime minister.

Even worse, Bennett lacks public support – and that is a fundamental problem. While it is completely legal, the question is whether it is right. A prime minister cannot remain in office without legitimacy and a large public following. He or she needs to have a wide swath of support from the people. Otherwise, not only will that prime minister suffer from a legitimacy deficit, but the government that he or she runs will suffer as well, and will eventually fall apart.

Ultimately, when the prime minister lacks legitimacy, the public lacks trust in that government, and the foundation upon which that government rests starts to fray. That is exactly what has been happening in recent months.

Can Bennett regain the legitimacy? Probably not, but it makes no difference, as nothing can seemingly stop this government from heading toward collapse. The only questions that remain are: when will it fall apart (possibly by the end of the month), and who will be prime minister when that happens (possibly Yair Lapid)?

Bennett’s options are not great. If he is not prime minister, some of his close associates are envisioning a scenario in which he will resign from politics – leave as a prime minister and sit on the sidelines, either to never return or to begin planning his return.

Another option would be to run at the head of Yamina. Will Ayelet Shaked stay with him? Not certain. If Shaked jumps ship he can probably forget about crossing the threshold on his own, but even if she stays with him that remains questionable.

What is important to keep in mind is that Bennett and the polls have never been in synch: ahead of every election, he has polled far better than he ended up doing in the actual vote. That’s because the polls were always taken before Netanyahu began his successful tactic of pulling Bennett voters away just days before the election.

In the next election, Bennett is unlikely to even try to go after Likud voters, like he always did, but instead will vie for voters in a crowded field. His potential supporters come from the same place as Yesh Atid voters, Blue and White voters and New Hope voters. Will everyone stand by and let Bennett steal votes? No.

That leaves a third option: that he merges with another party. The most likely is New Hope, led by Justice Gideon Sa’ar, which is also just barely crossing the threshold in current polls.

While merging might sound appealing, it’s not so simple. Bennett and Sa’ar aren’t exactly a love story – they don’t like each other, and don’t really get along. In a blatant sign of what he thinks about the prime minister, Sa’ar calls Bennett in cabinet meetings by his first name. Not “Mr. Prime Minister” or “Sir.” Naftali. Just like that.

The “Change Coalition” – as the Bennett-Lapid government is called – has already started its campaign ahead of the upcoming election. The face of it will be of one person: Itamar Ben-Gvir, the former Kach activist turned MK who will likely be able to demand and receive a senior ministerial appointment in a future Likud-led government.

Warning Israeli voters of the danger of appointing Ben-Gvir to the Public Security Ministry, for example, will not necessarily move voters from the Right to the Center-Left, but it might have an alternative impact: help rally the Center-Left and ensure high-voting numbers in places where large pockets of Yesh Atid voters can be found.

Tel Aviv is a good example. It has seen a steady decline in voting over the last seven years. In 2015, for example, nearly 80% of eligible voters cast a ballot. The election then was seen as existential, a feeling that Netanyahu might lose to the Labor Party, which was led by current president Isaac Herzog. By 2021, though, the percentage of voters dropped to 72%.

Can Ben-Gvir as the face of the campaign rally the voters and get them to come out in bigger numbers? That will be the strategy for Yesh Atid, and probably some of the other centrist parties. They know they cannot get Likudniks to cross partisan lines, but what they can potentially do is have a bigger turnout – and that might just be enough to deny Netanyahu the ability to form a coalition.

Yaakov Katz is The Jerusalem Post‘s editor-in-chief. He previously served for close to a decade as the paper’s military reporter and defense analyst. He is the author of “Shadow Strike: Inside Israel’s Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power” and co-author of two books: “Weapon Wizards – How Israel Became a High-Tech Military Superpower” (with Amir Bohbot) and “Israel vs. Iran – The Shadow War” (with Yoaz Hendel).

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The travesty of Pillay’s kangaroo court

The UN is the most conspicuous example of a fundamental mistake by the west

 

Melanie Phillips

JNS.org, June 10

The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, holding one of its numerous “special sessions on the situation in Palestine” (Photo: UN Photo / Elma Okic)

A few days ago, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, was elected as a vice president of the UN General Assembly. He will thus chair its meetings and help set its agenda when it assembles for its next annual session in September.

This was a rare diplomatic victory for Israel at the United Nations, and the latest example of the vigorous pushback being mounted by Israeli diplomats against the institution’s bigoted hostility. “Nothing will stop me — and I mean nothing — from fighting the discrimination against Israel,” said Erdan.

He’ll have his work cut out for him. On the very same day, a report by the commission of inquiry led by Navi Pillay into “alleged violations” of international law in “the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel” was posted on the UN website.

This 18-page report — to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on June 13 — is an egregious example of precisely that discrimination.

A tissue of malevolent falsehoods, distortions and misrepresentations of international law, the report makes only passing reference to Palestinian terrorism and the thousands of Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli civilians which constitute actual war crimes. Instead, it suggests entirely falsely that Israel’s “perpetual occupation” is the root cause of the conflict.

It is, in short, little more than Hamas and Palestinian propaganda. This is hardly surprising, since Pillay had consulted with Palestinian and Israeli groups dedicated to harming and destroying Israel.

Yet she has the gall to claim that her inquiry’s findings are “overwhelmingly directed towards Israel” because of the “asymmetrical nature of the conflict and the reality of one state occupying the other”. So she doesn’t even seem to grasp the basic fact that there is not and never has been a Palestinian state as “the other” for Israel to occupy.

Nor, of course, does she acknowledge that her own role is a key weapon in the war to destroy Israel through distortion, demonisation and delegitimisation.

She was chosen for this role because of her record of bigoted hostility towards Israel. Her two fellow commissioners, Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, share her bias.

The appointment of Navi Pillay, who has a long history of calling for Israel to be boycotted and sanctioned, to head the new UNHRC Commission of Inquiry only underlines that it was always intended to be a “kangaroo court” (UN Photo/Jean-Marc Ferre)

Pillay has repeatedly used the “apartheid” canard against Israel and called for it to be boycotted and sanctioned. She championed the UN’s Durban Review Conference in 2009, which sought to reaffirm the notorious 2001 Durban “anti-racism” conference that turned into a sickening anti-Jewish hate-fest.

In June last year, mere weeks after the Israel-Hamas war, Pillay signed a letter to US President Joe Biden decrying Israel’s “domination and oppression of the Palestinian people,” and calling on America to “address the root causes of the violence” by ending Israel’s “ever-expanding discrimination and systemic oppression”.

Ignoring the fact that Palestinian Arabs had turned the Al-Aqsa mosque into a theatre of war from which they hurled rocks down at Jewish worshippers and Israeli police, she claimed that Israeli forces had conducted “aggressive actions” against “peaceful protesters and worshippers”. This amounted to the “forced dispossession of Palestinians” and was the “latest evidence of a separate and unequal governing system”.

As head of UN Watch Hillel Neuer has commented: “Appointing Navi Pillay to investigate Israel has all the credibility of appointing Vladimir Putin to investigate Ukraine.”

Her commission of inquiry itself has all the trappings of a mind-twisting kangaroo court — verdict first, evidence to follow — straight out of the Soviet playbook.

For the United Nations gave it a mandate in perpetuity to report annually on alleged war crimes and discrimination going right back to the establishment of the State of Israel. Applied to no other country, the world body has thus singled out Israel for a permanent inquisition which has already decided on its guilt by virtue of Israel’s existing at all.

The UNHRC itself has a long history of eye-watering hostility and injustice towards Israel. The infamous Item 7 on its standing agenda singles it out for a unique category of criticism in every session.

A graphic illustrating the vast number of gross human rights abuses either downplayed or ignored by the UN Human Rights Council, as it devoted more than half its total resolutions between 2006 and 2016 to condemning Israel (Image: UN Watch). 

As a body ostensibly devoted to upholding human rights, the UNHRC is a farce. Tyrannies such as China, Russia, Cuba and Pakistan are among the 15 countries that have won seats on the council.

It routinely ignores violations by despotic regimes while perversely and egregiously targeting its condemnations instead at Israel. Since 2006, the council has adopted 90 resolutions condemning the Jewish state — more than all the resolutions against Syria, North Korea and Iran combined.

What is intolerable is the acquiescence of the leaders of the free world to this betrayal of the core mission of the United Nations.

Both Britain and America are members of the UNHRC. The United States rejoined it last year, reversing the decision by the Trump administration in 2018 to leave it over its “chronic bias” against Israel.

This week, the US State Department criticised the Pillay report for its “one-sided, biased approach”. It said: “The existence of this [Commission of Inquiry] in its current form is a continuation of a longstanding pattern of unfairly singling out Israel.” It added: “Israel is the only country subject to a standing agenda item at the HRC and has received disproportionate focus at the HRC compared to human rights situations elsewhere in the world.”

All very true. But it’s no use then saying, as it did, that the United States “rejoined the HRC in part to be in a better position to address its flaws, including this one, and we will continue to seek reforms”.

If this is to have any meaning at all, the United States must ensure Pillay’s removal. After all, her appointment contradicted the UN’s own guidelines which, as UN Watch said in its request for Pillay to recuse herself, make clear that members of commissions of inquiry must have “a proven record of independence and impartiality”.

Even Pillay’s removal, however, wouldn’t address the core problem — the institutionalised bias of the United Nations itself. For it acts as the crucible of the campaign to delegitimise and destroy Israel.

Since 2015, the UN General Assembly has passed 125 resolutions condemning Israel, compared with six against Iran; seven against North Korea; nine against Syria; 18 against Russia; eight against the United States; and none against China, Cuba, Libya, Turkey, Pakistan or Venezuela.

Last September, the UN Economic and Social Council condemned Israel alone for allegedly violating women’s rights, even though Israel is the only upholder of women’s rights in the Middle East.

All this reflects the fundamental flaw at the heart of the United Nations itself. Committed to promoting freedom, justice and human rights for everyone, it is dominated by countries that stand for the negation of those things. So it betrays its core commitment virtually every day.

The fact that it singles out Israel for condemnation as a human-rights abuser when it is in fact the sole democracy in the Middle East and deeply committed to human rights is a travesty. The fact that it has now put in charge of this onslaught a woman who has endorsed the anti-Jewish lynch mob at the United Nations’ own disgusting Durban conference is obscene.

Yet America and the rest of the free world continue to treat it as the legitimate arbiter of global peace and justice.

The United Nations is the most conspicuous example of the fundamental mistake the free world makes over and over again. This is that, by refusing to acknowledge the true and unique characteristics of antisemitism, it fails to understand that the world’s oldest and most enduring hatred doesn’t just affect the Jewish people. It also signals the corrosion and eventual destruction of the culture that spawns it.

The continuing support by the free world of the fundamentally corrupted United Nations is a major factor behind the destruction of the west’s moral compass and its current spiral of decline.