Haley: UNHRC is UN’s ‘greatest failure’

Elad Benari

Ambassador Nikki Haley defends her country’s decision to leave the UN Human Rights Council.

Reuters / Nikki Haley

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley on Wednesday defended her country’s decision to leave the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), describing the body as the “greatest failure” of the United Nations.

Haley told the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington that the Geneva-based body had “provided cover, not condemnation, for the world’s most inhumane regimes.”

“Judged by how far it has fallen short of its promise, the Human Rights Council is the United Nations’ greatest failure,” she said, as quoted by AFP.

Haley announced last month that the United States was quitting the council, accusing it of bias against Israel and condemning the “hypocrisy” of its members including China, Egypt, Venezuela and Cuba.

The human rights council has been “not a place of conscience, but a place of politics,” Haley said, adding that it had focused its attention “unfairly and relentlessly on Israel.”

Haley took aim at the council for failing to speak out in support of anti-government protests in Iran, to condemn the violence in Venezuela and over the election of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the council after its security forces faced allegations of atrocities in the Kasai region.

The U.S. move followed previous threats by the Trump administration to withdraw from the Human Rights Council over its anti-Israel bias.

In March, Haley issued a statement after the UNHRC adopted five resolutions condemning Israel while adopting only one resolution each against North Korea, Iran, and Syria. This has become an annual ritual, as every March, the Council sets aside only two sessions to debate human rights violations and abuses in all countries and another entire session just to debate a single country, Israel.

“When the Human Rights Council treats Israel worse than North Korea, Iran, and Syria, it is the Council itself that is foolish and unworthy of its name,” said the American Ambassador.

Haley also condemned the council after it voted to establish a commission of inquiry to examine possible war crimes committed by Israel during the recent confrontations on the Gaza border.

On Wednesday, she again took a swipe at rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for failing to back the U.S. bid to reform the council through a resolution at the General Assembly.

After the U.S. withdrawal, Amnesty International posted a sarcastic tweet on the issue, listing 10 reasons for the U.S. to leave the UNHRC, all of which were blank.

Jerusalem Israel Song – Shira Chadasha Boys Choir Music Video

    ShiraChadasha2

Swedish parliamentary candidate suggests deporting all Jews from Israel

JTA

Oldoz Javidi subsequently retracts idea of transferring Jews to US, made in interview aboard ship sailing to break Gaza blockade

Swedish parliamentary candidate Oldoz Javidi aboard a boat attempting to break the Gaza blockade. (Screen capture: YouTube)

A candidate for the Swedish parliament suggested transferring Israeli Jews to the United States to achieve peace.

Oldoz Javid made the comment in an interview and subsequently asked that the line be retracted because the notion might be “misinterpreted.”

Javidi, an actor with Iranian roots who is a candidate with the Feminist Initiative party, said Tuesday that she had requested the retraction of the passage from an interview published Friday by the Feministiskt Perspektiv website.

“My unofficial opinion as an individual is a bit more fantasy based,” she said in the interview, which she gave while sailing with other pro-Palestinian activists in the direction of Gaza. She accused Israel of “stealing land” and livelihood from Palestinians and the United States of doing the same, presumably to Native Americans.

“So why not invite their friends over to their land and make room for them on the farm?” she wrote of Israeli Jews and Americans. “They seem to enjoy each other’s company. And the Palestinians can live in peace and again build up the country that once was theirs. I can allow myself at least get a dream about such a solution, right?”

But on Tuesday, Javidi wrote on Facebook: “I have asked FemPers to remove the last quote in the current article because it does not in any way express the policy of Feminist Initiative, nor was it a proposal for a political solution, but a fantasy that I now understand could be misinterpreted or misunderstood.”

Several Swedish Jews criticized her words as anti-Semitic.

“Moving Jews against their will to solve a problem? Sounds like a final solution to me. Solid feminist politics,” Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, a pro-Israel Swedish activist, wrote on Facebook.

The Ship to Gaza aboard which Javidi is sailing is an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which is run by the Hamas terrorist group. Dozens of activists are participating in the sail, which is expected to be intercepted and redirected in the coming weeks by the Israeli Navy if it approaches the blockaded area.

Israel maintains a security blockade on Gaza to prevent Hamas, the Islamist terror group which rules the Strip and seeks to destroy Israel, from importing weaponry.

OPPOSING SEGREGATION

JPOST EDITORIAL

Struggling against segregation is not just about one law. It is about the larger struggle for coexistence and having more contact between Israel’s numerous diverse communities.

Protests against the nation-state bill in Tel Aviv, July 14th, 2018. (photo credit: COURTESY STANDING TOGETHER)

The nation-state bill has caused controversy across Israel, in the Diaspora and in the West with criticism that it will enshrine in a basic law forms of discrimination, racism and segregation. That was the message of protesters Saturday night in Tel Aviv.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought out a compromise on the bill to water down the clause that was viewed as encouraging segregation. “The state will encourage, establish and strengthen Jewish settlement in a way that will make clear that encouraging Jewish settlement is a legitimate way of implementing the Zionist vision and is not unacceptable discrimination or inequality,” the new clause reads. Previously the bill had said that the state may allow communities to maintain separate nationalist or religious communal settlements.

Ostensibly the nation-state bill enshrines into law what already exists in Israel, that the country is the nation state of the Jewish people. It anchors in law the menorah as the state’s symbol, Jerusalem as its capital, Judaism’s holidays and other aspects of the state’s Jewish identity.

The nation-state debate is one that has overshadowed Israel since the pre-state era. What kind of state will Israel be? A cultural home for the Jewish people. A binational state. A Soviet-style communist country or an American-style country of secularism and division of religion from state.

In reality, the state combines aspects of all of the streams of Zionism which built it. It enshrines privileges to Orthodox Judaism. It has hundreds of communities that openly discriminate based on religious and national factors. The education system offers several streams to citizens but in essence segregates them into separate Arab and Jewish systems, and within the Jewish system into different religious streams. It is a compromise state in this respect. No one would mistake the State of Israel for anything but the nation state of the Jewish people.

But right-wing religious parties fear that these aspects of the state could be eroded in the future and want them anchored in law. “Those who do not know how to defend Israel as a Jewish state in a practical way should return their keys and go home,” MK Bayit Yehudi MK Bezalel Smotrich said on Sunday, criticizing Netanyahu’s attempt at compromise. Aymen Odeh, chairman of the Joint List, argued Saturday that it was important to raise a hand against creeping “fascism” in the country.

Foreign diplomats have also weighed in. EU Ambassador to Israel Emanuele Giaufret encouraged MKs to oppose the bill, according to a Channel 2 report. US Congressmen have reached out to Israel’s ambassador to oppose the bill. Jerry Silverman, president of the Jewish Federations of North America, is also coming to Israel to oppose the bill.

Since a Supreme Court case in 2000 brought by Adel and Iman Kaadan, discrimination against Arabs seeking to move to or join Jewish cooperative settlements has ostensibly been against the law. But the ruling didn’t bring the equality that rights activists thought it would. The NGO Adalah was still fighting cases in 2016 against the Israel Lands Authority regarding a company’s refusal to sell homes to Arab Israelis. Most recently, protests were held in Kfar Vradim and Afula after plots there were sold to Arabs.

This points to widespread de facto discrimination and segregation between communities. Some of this segregation is put down to the fact that different communities self-segregate. But rights activists have asked why, for instance, Negev Beduin were not permitted by the state to build communal settlements on state land the way kibbutzim or moshavim were over the last 70 years. Opposition to the nation-state bill and compromises therefore only address part of the elephant in the room. Arab and Jewish citizens should not have to go to court to move to a community. In a community near Sderot discrimination against Mizrahi residents forced them to seek legal redress to move in. Ethiopian Jews have faced hurdles in access to housing.

Struggling against segregation is not just about one law. It is about the larger struggle for coexistence and having more contact between Israel’s numerous diverse communities. The discussion of the nation-state bill should give impetus to a discussion about how we can bridge gaps in society and coexist. The state is a Jewish state, but in its soul it is also a state where coexistence should be a powerful value underpinning its strength in a region where intolerance too often dominates.