United Nations General Assembly issues 17 resolutions against Israel, but only six for the rest of the world combined.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
The UN General Assembly condemned Israel Monday in two separate resolutions, concluding the world body’s 2020 legislation year with a total of 17 resolutions that either singled out or condemned the Jewish state but only six resolutions for the rest of the world combined, the human rights watchdog UN Watch reported.
Of the other countries selected for resolutions, there was one resolution each adopted for the brutal regimes in North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Myanmar and and two on the Russian invasion and occupation of Crimea.
“The UN’s assault on Israel with a torrent of one-sided resolutions is surreal,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based non-governmental watchdog organization.
“It’s absurd that in the year 2020, out of a total 23 of UN General Assembly resolutions that criticize countries, 17 of them—more than 70 percent—were focused on one single country: Israel. Make no mistake: the purpose of the lopsided condemnations is to demonize the Jewish state,” said Neuer.
“The UN’s disproportionate assault against the Jewish state undermines the credibility of what is supposed to be an impartial international body. When the General Assembly gives in to politicization and selectivity by discriminating against Israel, it violates the UN Charter’s guarantee of equal treatment to all nations, large and small,” Neuer added.
“We note that the UK and EU states like France, Germany and Spain voted Yes to more than two thirds of the UNGA resolutions singling out Israel in 2020. Yet these same nations failed to introduce a single UNGA resolution this year on the human rights situation in China, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Cuba, Turkey, Pakistan, Vietnam, Algeria, or on 175 other countries,” Neuer noted.
Neuer called Monday’s UNGA vote a “farce” that “underscores a simple fact: The UN’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations is to scapegoat Israel.”
However, UN Watch noted that there was some modest positive progress in the changing voting patterns of some countries.
For the first time ever, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria changed their votes and opposed the annual resolution that renews the mandate of the 25-nation “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People,” one of the UN’s most notorious anti-Israel bodies. Likewise, Iceland and Uruguay moved from voting “Yes” last year to “Abstain.”
UN Watch noted the countries that opposed the resolution as they did in 2019: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Colombia, Honduras, Hungary, and the United States.
Similarly, Switzerland and Slovenia for the first time ever voted “No” to the annual resolution that renews the mandate of the UN’s Division for Palestinian Rights, which employs 15 full-time staffers, at a cost to taxpayers of millions of dollars, to organize anti-Israel events worldwide. Regrettably, France did not oppose the resolution, and once again abstained.
For a second year, UN Watch commended the Czech Republic, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, and Slovakia for breaking from EU consensus earlier this month and voting to oppose the UN resolution funding the UN’s 15-member Palestine division.
In testimony delivered recently in the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem, Neuer explained why the UN resolutions matter.
“The UN assault on Israel poisons the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions worldwide. It grants the imprimatur of international legitimacy that fuels the boycott movement. It sends a signal to Hamas and other terrorist groups that the world is with them,” said Neuer.
“We need to demand that democracies like the UK, France and Germany respect the UN’s founding principles—which they claim to believe in—by ending their support for the UN’s obsessive scapegoating of the world’s only Jewish state, and to instead work on protecting human rights for the victims who need it most,” Neuer told the Knesset committee.
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