The United Nations Headquarters is a distinctive complex in New York City that has served as the official headquarters of the United Nations since its completion in 1950. (Source: Wikipedia)
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
The Palestinians’ Non-Resolution, the Blacklist and How Jerusalem Emerged: Lahav Harkov, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 14, 2020
Breaking Down the UNHRC Blacklist: Ben Cohen, JNS, Feb. 12, 2020
BDS Wins But the Palestinians Lose: Ben Dror Yemini, Ynet, Feb. 13, 2020
Conrad Black: Chasing Seat on the Dysfunctional UN Security Council is a Waste of Canada’s Time: Conrad Black, National Post, Nov. 29, 2019
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The Palestinians’ Non-Resolution, the Blacklist and How Jerusalem Emerged
Lahav Harkov
Jerusalem Post, Feb. 14, 2020
This was a week of ups and downs for Israel at the United Nations and its various institutions, with victory, disappointment and diplomatic squabbles. Israel’s diplomats in New York, Geneva, Brussels, Jerusalem and around the world worked around the clock to keep up with the drama.
The Palestinians didn’t submit a resolution, via surrogates, against Israel to the UN Security Council, but the UN Human Rights Council dropped a bomb on Wednesday with its blacklist of companies operating in settlements, and all along, the spat with Belgium over its conduct in the UNSC continued.
Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly for Israel in the UN this week.
The good:
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas got a lot of attention for his speech at the UN Security Council, in which he compared the Palestinian state depicted in the Trump peace plan to Swiss cheese and said the plan strengthens “apartheid,” and for his subsequent statement to the press with former prime minister Ehud Olmert.
But things could have gone exponentially worse if there had been an actual UNSC resolution going up for a vote.
The Palestinians seemed to have assumed that they would have a repeat of December 2017, when the US vetoed their resolution against American recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. All 14 other members of the Security Council voted in favor of the Palestinian resolution.
But the Palestinians made a strategic error last week when they began circulating a draft resolution, meant to be submitted by UNSC members Indonesia and Tunisia, in having it criticize the US specifically for proposing a peace plan that they said breaches international law.
They immediately lost support of most of the European Union states in the Security Council, as well as the UK and Dominican Republic, which, together with the US, meant that there was not enough support to even hold a vote at all.
Meanwhile, senior adviser to the US president, Jared Kushner, presented the peace plan to the Security Council last week. Avi Berkowitz, US assistant to the president and special representative for international negotiations, stayed in New York to try to negotiate the resolution away, rather than have the US use its veto against all the other members of the Security Council yet again.
The Palestinians amended their resolution slightly to take out the specific mention of the US, instead saying that the plan only “departs from the internationally endorsed terms of reference and parameters for the achievement of a just, comprehensive and lasting solution to this conflict, as enshrined in the relevant United Nations resolutions.” That view was repeated in many of the speeches given in the Security Council on Tuesday. They also added a line condemning violence, which is what Europeans in the UN tend to view as adding sufficient balance in resolutions against Israel. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Breaking Down the UNHRC Blacklist
Ben Cohen
JNS, Feb. 12, 2020
In the halls of the United Nations, they’re calling it a “database,” but it’s more commonly and accurately known as a “blacklist.” It’s a list of more than 100 companies conducting business activities with Jewish communities and Israeli enterprises in the West Bank that was published, a good four years after it was first mooted, by the U.N. Human Rights Council last Wednesday.
Given the litter of authoritarian states and theocracies that compose the UNHRC, as well as its notorious “Item 7”—an annual fixed agenda item that focuses the HRC on alleged Israeli misdeeds only—the eventual release of the blacklist has not come as a huge surprise. The justification for its existence expressed in the official report of Michele Bachelet, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, is nevertheless worth a closer look.
The list comprises companies deemed by the UNHRC to be complicit in encouraging, building and maintaining “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.” There are 10 categories that the UNHRC uses to determine exactly how this complicity functions, so if you are conducting business with these Jewish communities, and you are engaged in “listed activities” in the construction, demolition, private security, banking, natural resource or transport sectors, chances are that you will be on the blacklist.
Theoretically, the blacklist is global in its ambition, with a mandate to examine “business enterprises, whether domiciled in Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territory or abroad, carrying out listed activities in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” But when you break down the list of companies by country origin, two features stand out.
First, of the 112 companies blacklisted, 95 are Israeli. A plurality of the remaining 17 is American, with the remainder made up of Europeans and one Thai enterprise. Second, despite the 10 categories listed by the UNHRC as justification for inclusion on the blacklist, the vast majority of the companies included fall into only three of them. These are: “The provision of services and utilities supporting the maintenance and existence of settlements, including transport” (category E); “Banking and financial operations helping to develop, expand or maintain settlements and their activities, including loans for housing and the development of businesses” (category F); “The use of natural resources, in particular water and land, for business purposes” (category G).
Instructively, two of the remaining categories were entirely absent from the blacklist.
No companies were found to have made “[U]se of benefits and reinvestments of enterprises owned totally or partially by settlers for developing, expanding and maintaining the settlements” (category J). Nor were there any companies responsible for the “[C]aptivity of the Palestinian financial and economic markets, as well as practices that disadvantage Palestinian enterprises, including through restrictions on movement, administrative and legal constraints (category I).” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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BDS Wins But the Palestinians Lose
Ben Dror Yemini
Ynet, Feb. 13, 2020
The West Bank settlements remain a central point of contention in Israeli society. Most Israelis like the settlers themselves. They are considered the salt of the earth, the first to volunteer, first to join combat units in their military service and first to give back to their communities. But most Israelis do not support the settlements. A 2017 study shows a majority of Israelis oppose settlement expansion beyond the blocs, and 69% of Israelis would support a withdrawal from the settlements in the event of an agreed resolution to the conflict with the Palestinians.
When international organizations interject themselves into the legitimate, internal discourse in Israel, they help those on the extreme right who advocate an expansion of settlements. These organizations are not seeking a resolution of the conflict and are comprised of predominately non-democratic member states. Though some of them have relations with Israel – overtly or otherwise – they are consistent in their long-held anti-Israeli positions.
The UN Human Rights Council, which on Wednesday published a blacklist of companies operating in the West Bank settlements, voted to accept 18 resolutions condemning Israel in 2019; in contrast, just seven resolutions were passed condemning the entire ills of the rest of the world. With Venezuela that persecutes its own citizens, Iran that kills anti-government protesters, Myanmar that carries out ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya minority and China that imprisons millions of Muslims in re-education camps, Israel is still the problem.
Criticism of settlements is not anti-Semitism, but according to the definition of anti-Semitism in the guidelines adopted by the EU in 2016, the anti-Israel obsession of the UNHRC is indeed a manifestation of this phenomenon.
There are no immediate implications expected as a result if the publication of the list, but it has to be said that a major company like SodaStream, best known as the maker of the consumer home carbonation products, had to close down its West Bank production plant because of international pressure from supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS).
Companies named on the UNHRC list may find themselves in a similar situation. The industrial areas of the West Bank employ close to 20,000 Palestinian workers. They are not taken advantage of, nor are they abused by a colonialist system. Palestinians working for many of the companies hold senior positions and earn up to three times the salaries paid by companies operating within the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s government had itself attempted to sway Palestinians away from these positions and enforce a boycott of companies and products, but failed when employees opted to keep their jobs. Their income is a vital part of the Palestinian economy and its removal would have long term implications they could not support. SodaStream’s move out of the West Bank was seen as a win for the BDS movement, but it cost hundreds of jobs and the Palestinian employees paid the price.
Israeli companies named on the blacklist may suffer consequences down the road, but their Palestinian workers will be those who will pay the price.The discussion over the legality or future of the settlements is a legitimate and important one to have – but it is far removed from the boycott campaign that opposes Israel’s very right to exist. If and when an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reached, industrial parks with Israeli companies will be necessary in order to provide jobs.
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Conrad Black: Chasing Seat on the Dysfunctional UN Security Council is a Waste of Canada’s Time
Conrad Black
National Post, Nov. 29, 2019
From all accounts, the great foreign policy effort of the semi-re-elected federal government is to win a two-year term on the Security Council of the United Nations. This is as inane and worthless a policy objective as could possibly be devised.
The UN is a moribund and corrupt organization that instead of providing the first step to world government is primal scream therapy for the world’s most poorly and despotically governed and economically impoverished countries.
According to the UN’s own figures, 91 of the UN’s 192 member states have average per capita incomes of less than 10 percent of Canada’s (and Canada has descended to number 14 in the prosperity list, leaving out petro-states and tax-haven states — Kuwait, Monaco, Luxembourg, etc.).
Approximately half of the member-states seriously fail to comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adherence to or at least believable ambition to achieve the goals of which is supposedly a criterion for membership in the UN. The declaration, largely composed by Canadian John P. Humphrey, with important contributions from such luminaries as René Cassin and Eleanor Roosevelt, legally binds all members of the UN to its definition of “fundamental freedoms and human rights.”
The UN was founded at the insistence of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been a member of the Woodrow Wilson administration that devised the League of Nations but failed to secure American entry into the League, helping to ensure its complete failure. Roosevelt intended for the permanent members of the Security Council to be much more active in preserving peace and stopping atrocities than they have been. Roosevelt saw that the United States would have half of the world’s economic product, an atomic monopoly, and that the other four permanent members of the Security Council (China, France, the United Kingdom and the U.S.S.R., whose seat was allotted to the Russian Federation on the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991), would be heavily indebted to the U.S.
He meant the UN to be a method for calming isolationist fears in the U.S. by showing that the U.S. was leading a co-operative movement of the world’s leading powers; and also to disguise and make less objectionable by partly collegializing the effective American pre-eminence in the world.
Had he lived to complete his fourth term as president, he would be able to exert greater influence on the whole world than anyone in history and certainly intended to do so benignly. The Latin American and British Commonwealth countries were expected to vote with the Americans and British, assuring their control of the General Assembly. Of course, FDR died, the Cold War began, the membership of the UN more than tripled in number, and everything has changed in these 75 years, except the U.S. remains the world’s most powerful country. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
The Blacklist: All 112 Companies UN Says are Operating in Settlements: Times of Israel, Feb. 12, 2020 — The UN Human Rights Council on Wednesday published a “database” of 112 companies it says are conducting business in West Bank settlements.
Israel Takes Fight to UNHRC Following Release of Settlement Blacklist: Israel Hayom, Algemeiner, Feb. 13, 2020 — Following Wednesday’s release by the United Nations of a blacklist of companies connected to Israeli settlements, Israel’s Foreign Ministry has asked the country’s US consulates to reach out to the governors of states in which targeted companies are headquartered to request that they denounce the UN initiative.
The UN Blacklist, U.S. Laws, and U.S. Policy: Orde Kittrie, FDD, Feb. 13, 2020 — The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published on Wednesday a “database” of companies doing business with Israeli settlements. The list includes 112 firms, 94 of them Israeli and the other 18 from six other countries, including the United States.
Pompeo Says Settlement Blacklist Shows UN’s ‘Unrelenting Anti-Israel Bias’: Raphael Aren, Times of Israel, Feb. 13, 2020 — The top US diplomat expressed outrage Thursday at the UN rights chief’s publication of a blacklist of companies that do business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
