UNHRC Bashes Israel Yet Again

The UN's 47-nation Human Rights Council is planning to launch an unprecedented assault against Israel on March 18th, when the Jewish state will be singled out for an entire day—a pariah treatment meted out to no other nation—as the council presents seven separate reports alleging Israeli war crimes.  The March 18th assault will culminate in five biased resolutions condemning Israel, the drafts of which have been obtained by UN Watch. Iran, North Korea and Syria will get only one resolution each, while there will be none on Turkey, Zimbabwe, China, Pakistan and other oppressive regimes.  An early version of one of the reports was released at a surprise press conference on Thursday, when the UNHRC's commission of inquiry into Israel's "assault" on "civilian protests" on the Gaza border accused Israel of "crimes against humanity." Meanwhile, the office of UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet launched a social media blitzkrieg against Israel to support the inquiry's war crimes allegations, calling into question the commissioners' independence from the notoriouly anti-Israeli Geneva-based staffers, who in 2009 orchestrated the infamous Goldstone Report. Significantly, the new Gaza inquiry's report calls on countries around the world to "arrest persons alleged to have committed the international crimes" — in other words, Israeli soldiers and commanders — and to subject them to "individual sanctions" including "a travel ban or an assets freeze."  The report further calls for the UN rights chief to "manage the dossiers on the alleged [Israeli] perpetrators," to be provided to national and international tribunals, "including the International Criminal Court." IDF soldiers “intentionally shot children, they intentionally shot people with disabilities, they intentionally shot journalists,” said commissioner Sara Hossain of Bangladesh. UN Watch, which submitted a series of detailed submissions of fact and law to the inquiry, expressed grave disappointment that these were entirely ignored by the UN, and released its initial response to the report, which gives a free pass to Hamas terrorists.

Visit of UN Secretary General to Israel

This week UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres is conducting his first visit to Israel since his appointment. While in Israel the Secretary General will meet with PM Netanyahu, Defense Minister Liberman and senior figures from the IDF, as well as President Rivlin.

Following are the key elements of Israel's position on the substantive issues:

·      Israel sees this visit as a welcome opportunity for a new beginning in relations with the world body, and welcome the Secretary General as a friend.

·      The UN's and its agencies' obsessive pre-occupation with Israel must end if the world body is to make a constructive contribution to peace and stability in the region. 

The Secretary General must be challenged on the full array of problematic UN activity:

o   The UN  Human Rights Council shameless singling out of Israel

o   The repeated, outrageous UNESCO decisions rewriting the history Jerusalem and Hebron to exclude the Jewish people

o   The annual circus of anti-Israel resolutions in the General Assembly and the permanent committees they create.

o   The discriminatory anti-Israel activities of different U.N. bodies and their "industry" of reports, declarations and decisions.

Further the Security Council must act more resolutely to implement its resolutions forbidding Hezbollah rearmament and entrenchment in southern Lebanon. The Security Council must act to prevent a deterioration of the already dangerous situation.

The UN must act to stop the ongoing Palestinian encouragement of terror against Israeli civilians - online, through the payment of stipends to convicted terrorists and their families, through naming town squares after murderers. These fundamental obstacles to any kind of progress with the Palestinians.

Israel has the experience and the ability to make a meaningful contribution to the UN in many fields:

o   in cyber-security, water technologies, women's' empowerment, disabled rights, combatting desertification, and more. Israel is also a partner in the global effort to combat terror. 

UN to blacklist Israeli firms operating beyond Green Line

In the UN the Israel bashing game goes on and on. Richard Falk continues his "blame Israel for everything" campaign and now wants the Human Rights Council to ban doing business with YIsraeli companies in Judea and Samaria. The trouble is he has not read the regulations controlling the activities of the UNHRC

From Yisrael Hayom the following letter sets out the continuing double standards and anti-Israel obsession in the UN 

The United Nations Human Rights Council is reportedly working on a "blacklist" of Israeli companies operating beyond the Green Line with aim of declaring them illegal.
The list, an initiative prompted by the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, is scheduled to be released in March, but a source familiar with the issue told Israel Hayom Monday it may only come out in June.

The move reportedly aims to bar the presence of any Israeli company beyond the Green Line. If adopted, the list could deem even private security firms protecting Israelis in Judea and Samaria from terrorist organizations, as illegal.

The list is said to be the brainchild of known BDS activist Richard Falk, formerly the U.N.'s special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights. Falk first came up with the idea for the blacklist six years ago, while in office, and he has been strongly advocating for it ever since, this time with the support of several Arab U.N. members.

In an effort to thwart this initiative, NGO Monitor, a watchdog group that promotes greater transparency among foreign-funded Israeli nongovernmental organizations, has recently sent the Human Rights Council a position paper explaining that such a list would be a violation of international law and the UNHRC's own guidelines against discrimination based on national origin, arguing that as no such blacklists exist for any other conflict zone in the world, it would in effect be targeting Jewish-owned businesses.

"The U.N. Human Rights Council discriminates against Israel by applying double standards to international law," the position paper noted.

"The list may also harm companies conducting business with Israel, which is consistent with the ultimate goal of [the BDS movement], which is isolating and attacking the State of Israel and undermine the Jewish people's right to self-determination."

NGO Monitor's legal adviser Anne Herzberg called the initiative "another chapter in the U.N.'s double standards and long and shameful, anti-Israel obsession."