UNDERSTANDING
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT

But the greatest scandal of all in its general proceedings is its treatment of the state of Israel, to which it devotes fully one third of its condemnatory resolutions and which it consistently attempts to marginalize and exclude. A case in point: from 1947 to the present, the UN has passed 146 resolutions dealing with the plight of the Palestinian refugees but not one referring to the ordeal of an even greater number of Jewish refugees expelled from their homes in Arab countries.

Let us go down the list.

The United Nations Environmental Programme curiously refers to Egypt, with its nearly all-controlling central government, its 60,000 laws (some relics of Ottoman times), its fraudulently-elected leaders, and its ban on free assembly and the right of protest, as “a western-style democracy”—no doubt Israel must be a theocratic oriental-style tyranny. The UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People refers in its September 2004 workshop to “such sterile paradigms as ‘Israel’s self-defense’. ” (The Palestinians are the only irredentist group in the world with its own UN Committee, a privilege no other stateless group, neither Tibetans, Kurds, Tamils or Basques, currently enjoys.) The UN International Protection Workshop calls for “a boycott of Israeli goods” without mentioning Palestinian terror operations or systemic Palestinian corruption. The UN Interreligious Mobilization Workshop approves of “challeng[ing] Christian Zionism in moderate Christian communities.”

Kofi Annan in his opening speech to the General Assembly on September 21, 2004 cited only one country on earth for violating international law—Israel. Nothing on China in Tibet, Syria in Lebanon, the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe, Russia in Chechnya, Sudan in Darfur (the word “Sudan” is never mentioned), or Palestinian rocket attacks and suicide bombings in Israeli towns and cities. In February 2006, Annan criticized Israel’s policy of targeted killings of terrorists as “executions without trial”—he made no mention of the suicide bombings of Israeli civilians, planned and carried out by these same terrorists. And on June 14, 2006, referring to an explosion on a Gaza beach that killed eight people and was almost to a certainty caused by a Palestinian mine, Annan told the Al-Hayat daily, “I don’t believe it is plausible that the Palestinians planted charges in a place where civilians often spend their time”—which, in point of fact, is a common Palestinian practice. UN envoys subsequently laid the blame on Israel, a pro forma gesture, since they did not examine the evidence put forward by Israel nor, obviously, did they peruse the full retraction printed by Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung which had originally accused Israel of the atrocity.

The UN human rights report, prepared by UN Human Rights representative John Dugard and presented to the General Assembly in October 2004, charged that Israel was guilty of “massive and wanton destruction of property” and called for international sanctions, but made no reference to Palestinian rocket attacks against Israeli communities such as Sderot, gunrunners’ tunnels or suicide bombings. As keynote speaker at an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on July 5, 2006, Dugard described Israeli conduct as “morally indefensible” and called the Israeli arrest of Hamas cabinet ministers in the wake of the June 25 crisis a violation of the Geneva Convention article prohibiting the taking of hostages. He had nothing to say about the event which sparked the crisis, the Palestinian raid into Israeli territory and, yes, the taking of a hostage, young Gilad Shalit who remains in captivity to this day.  

Dugard, we might recall, had notoriously praised the Palestinian terror groups for their “determination, daring and success.” The UNDP, under UN deputy secretary-general Mark Malloch Brown (now exercising his anti-Israeli animus from the UK Foreign Office), regularly transferred funds to Palestinian charities, such as Zaka Jenin and the Tul Karem Charity Committee, known to be fronts for terrorist groups. A typical example of the double standard at work in UN deliberations, brokering peace at the cost of Jewish lives, was its outcry against the IDF demolition of “houses” used as weapons storage depots and sniper emplacements in Rafah, the Gaza terrorist nest along the Egyptian border, and its continued threat to brand Israel as a war criminal for defending its citizens. 

Moreover, the UN can always be counted on to sandbag Israeli initiatives in the field or pro-Israeli resolutions in the General Assembly. The tepid response of Kofi Annan and the UN to the Hizbullah attack on Israel in July 2006, coupled with calls for Israeli “proportionality”—this in the face of 15,000 Iranian and Syrian supplied missiles targeting Israel, many of which were launched against Israeli towns and cities—was only another example of the institutional prejudice which governs its affairs. When UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon)—which had done absolutely nothing to prevent Hizbullah cross border raids or the buildup of its rocket arsenal and even suppressed video footage of Hizbullah incursions—was struck during fighting in the summer 2006 war by Hizbullah rockets that fell short of their targets in Israel, an officer of the command post immediately blamed Israeli artillery fire.  

When an UNTSO (United Nations Truce Supervision Organization) base in southern Lebanon was mistakenly struck by the IAF in the midst of a chaotic war zone, Kofi Annan, flouting both impartiality and common sense, went on record as saying that Israel was guilty of an “apparently deliberate” attack. Not only did Annan not retract this accusation, he was conspicuously silent when twelve days later Hizbullah rockets hit another UN command post. And when the IDF launched a commando raid into Lebanon onAugust 19, 2006 to intercept a transfer of Syrian arms to Hizbullah—an ongoing process from which the UN has studiously averted its gaze and which ensures another and more bitter round of hostilities—this same perfidious windbag censured Israel for “a violation of the cease fire.” 

Meanwhile, UNIFIL forces under the direction of France threatened to fire on Israeli jets conducting reconnaissance missions but has allowed Hizbullah to restock its missile supply via Iran and Syria—according to Time magazine, the terrorist militia now had 20,000 short-range rockets in its arsenal. (Current estimates have raised the number to 40,000.) New reports indicate that tons of sophisticated weaponry, including long-range missiles, have been smuggled across the Syrian border by truck convoys operating at night. Yet the provision of weaponry is in clear violation of UN Resolution 1701, brokered by Annan, which calls for the disarming of all militias, including Hizbullah, and especially of Paragraph 8 which embargos “sales or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by its government.” But UNIFIL is not to be deterred. According to the Spanish commander of the UN force, as revealed during a video conference on June 10, 2009, it has been active “looking for Israeli spies.”  

Louise Arbour, at the time UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, responded to the conflict by issuing a statement stipulating the “personal criminal responsibility” under international law of those “in a position of command and control” for violating the “obligation to protect civilians during hostilities”—a thinly veiled threat against Israel’s leaders since terrorists do not have fixed addresses and do not answer summonses. Fresh from a “fact-finding” tour of the Middle East in November 2006, Arbour had no trouble blaming Israel more than Hizbullah for the summer war, deploring Israeli security checks in the West Bank that are directly responsible for the reduction in suicide attacks, and sympathizing overtly with the Palestinians despite the numberless provocations emanating from the Gaza Strip, the continued arms smuggling through the Philadelphi Corridor, the kidnappings, incursions and Kassaming of the southern Negev. (This is the same Louise Arbour who attended the conference of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), chaired by Cuba, in Tehran on September 3, 2007, implicitly giving her support to the Iranian crackdown on dissidents of the regime and refusing to meet with members of the National Council of Resistance in Iran. On the day after her departure, 21 political prisoners were publicly hanged.)