To illustrate his disdain for the United Nations' bias against Israel, Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan dramatically tore up a report by the organization’s UN Human Rights Council during an address before the UN General Assembly.
“It’s always open season on Israel at the Human Rights Council,” Erdan told the General Assembly in New York on Friday.
Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan's speech at the UN General Assembly, October 31, 2021. (Credit: ISRAEL MISSION TO THE UN)
Since the council’s inception in 2006 it has issued 142 condemnations against UN member states, of which 95 were leveled against Israel, Erdan told the General Assembly as it debated an annual report by the council summing up its actions.
This included the passage of four resolutions against Israel. A special session was also held during which the UNHRC voted to open a permanent probe against Israeli alleged human rights abuses in Gaza and the West Bank as well as within sovereign Israel. Israel is the only country against such an open-ended investigation.
To help put the issue in perspective, Erdan noted that the UNHRC had issued 35 condemnations against Syria and 10 against Iran.
Ambassador Gilad Erdan at the UN General Assembly (credit: ISRAEL MISSION TO THE UN)
“The voices of the victims of the terrible crimes against humanity that we have already seen in the first decades of this century cannot be heard over the obsession of the so-called Human Rights Council with targeting Israel,” Erdan said.
As a result, “The suffering of the victims of humanity’s greatest crimes goes unnoticed. Shame on you, shame on you, shame on you!”
Erdan said the UN had a history of anti-Israel bias and referred in specific to the infamous 1975 General Assembly resolution declaring Zionism to be racism, which was revoked in 1991.
When it was passed in 1975, former ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog famously tore up the document in his speech to the UN General Assembly.
In recalling that moment, Erdan said, “It was on this stage, at this very body, that the very right of the Jewish people, to have a national home, was itself declared to be racist. A decision that was justly overturned.
“A decision that Israel’s ambassador at the time, Chaim Herzog, tore up, before the United Nations.
“And this is exactly what should be done to this antisemitic, distorted, one-sided report. For just as that 1975 resolution, equating Zionism with racism was itself a gross form of anti-Jewish racism, which has no place in this international body, so too, the Human Rights Council’s obsessive anti-Israel bias, embodied, once again, by this report, should have no place in anybody concerned with human rights, security or peace.
“Its only place in the dustbin of antisemitism, and that is exactly how we shall treat it,” said Erdan as he tore up a copy of the report into four pieces and then walked away from the podium.
UNHRC President Nazhat Shameem, Fiji’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, was in New York for the UN General Assembly debate.
At a press briefing with reporters later in the day, she defended the UNHRC against charges of anti-Israel bias. She also pushed back against queries about the inclusion of abuser states on the 47-member Human Rights Council.
Shameem said, “There was no country in the world with a perfect human rights record.
“If we were to say that the UNHRC is only for countries that have no violations of human rights, I am not sure that we would be left with anyone at all.”
With respect to UNHRC debates, she said Israel has been a constructive and helpful partner when it comes to overall debates.
“We have heard Israel’s voice on a number of constructive matters,” she said.
Shameem said they had 420 country-specific resolutions of which 92 were on Israel, but she did not expand further on the disproportionate UNHRC focus on Israel, except to state the council had many productive conversations on many matters.
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