Digging through archives sometimes bears fruit. I was browsing the web and found a link that Allison Kaplan Sommer posted to an article she wrote back in 2002 on why the UN hates Israel.
In it, Allison does a very good job of exposing how the very structure of the UN puts Israel in a nearly impossible position:
The UN’s anti-Israel bias is rooted in the organization’s very structure. In the General Assembly, 130 of the 190 member nations will, almost automatically, vote against Israel.
[ . . . ]
Given the UN’s overwhelmingly third-world majority, the official says, the case against Israel is easy for the Arab states to make. Zionism is depicted simply as an extension of the history of European colonization of Asia, Africa, and South America–and just as these powers withdrew from their former colonies and granted them independence, they argue, so should the Jewish residents give up “occupied Palestinian territory.”
Allison quotes Montreal-based MP and human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler extensively. She discusses Israel’s exclusion prior to 2002 from any regional groups, and the effect it has had on the country’s ability to develop parity. She has plenty to say about the UN’s so-called “human rights commission”, at which 30% of resolutions are directed against Israel, and where accusations ranging the gamut from blood libel to Nazi equivalencies have been passed as resolutions. And she explains in layman’s terms why Israel remians a pariah state in the UN, while countries with much worse human rights records have been given a free pass:
“While theoretically this wide group does not need to vote together, their common history of fighting Western imperialism still binds them together,” says Becker. “Add to this the simple fact that, for the vast majority of these countries, it is simply not worth it from a practical point of view to anger the wealthy and oil-rich Arab world by opposing anti-Israel resolutions. They have a great deal to lose and not much to gain. It just pays for them to side with the Arabs.” “There is an institutionalized set of double standards,” adds Professor Cotler. Powerful countries with wide spheres of influence, or groups of countries, such as Russia, China and the Arab world, agree tacitly to ignore one another’s human rights violations. Israel has no such leverage.
The anti-Israel crowd loves to quote UN resolutions when it suits their purposes, failing of course to realize how biased they are. Other organizations have done plenty to expose the bias as well. AIPAC has a fact sheet, for example, and the Jewish Virtual Library keeps a record of all anti-Israel resolutions passed by the General Assembly by year.
The thing is, the UN’s anti-Israel bias isn’t exactly news. But sometimes it’s worth recalling some of these facts, because with all the shouting from the anti-Zionist crowd about resolutions that Israel is supposedly violating, it tends to get forgotten.
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