Assisting The Process

"There won't be working relations with them, conversations, passing papers, making visits, exchanging information, consulting one another, attending meetings. That's work, and it will not take place."
"We had been participating in meetings, discussions, arranging visits to Israel. All that is over. We are not working with them any more."
"They systematically and serially make all kinds of decisions and condemnations against Israel without even symbolically considering our positions."
Yigal Palmor, Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman

What took so long? And why on Earth would Israel have continued to have formal diplomatic ties with the very most dysfunctional, hypocritical agency tied to the United Nations? Finally, Israel has taken the step of severing official contact with the UN's Human Rights Council. All it took was the umpteenth instance of unjustified, blatantly insulting, demagogic accusations of human-rights injustices against Israel.

"I have no doubt that it is in the interest of Israel to cooperate with the Human Rights Council on this investigative mission, not least so that it can explain its own policies and actions to the independent commissioners once they are appointed."
"The most recent example of refusal to cooperate is Syria, which did not permit either the Human Rights Council mandated Fact-finding Mission or the Commission of Inquiry to enter the country." President of the UN Human Rights council, Laura Dupuy Lasserre

Such innocence of purpose, such a surprised reaction that Israel has finally had enough of being demonized by the Human Rights Commission, the very body that accepts and honours nominations on behalf of the most egregious human-rights abusing countries in the world. Hugo Chavez ran for a seat on the Council, as did the Libyan Ghadafi regime and Syria's al-Assad regime; now there's human rights legitimacy for you.

This is the world body's outstanding forum for focusing on the observation of human rights throughout the Globe, where it sits to consider blatant instances of human rights abuses, taking care not to 'name and shame' and apportion blame, but to chide, to move the errant country closer to approximating what any intelligent being would recognize as the basic requirements of human rights entitlements.

But naming and slandering is what occurs regularly from that human rights body when it comes to one single state: Israel. The Human Rights Council has seen fit to issue no fewer than 91 decisions of condemnation, and of those 39 highlight Israel's presumed lack of attention to its obligations in observing human rights. In contrast, three decisions of condemnation related to Syria, and one, one single condemnation toward Iran.

At no time does the Human Rights Council consider the Palestinian Authority's lauding of the martyrdom of those Palestinians whom it encourages to invest in "resistance", the code word for violent action against Israel and Jewish settlements. This is the authority that lionizes murderers of children and entire families, paying their own families handsome sums in reflection of rewards for their sacrifice of a terrorist son.

It is the Palestinian Authority that resists returning to the bargaining table to resume peace talks, insisting that Israel must, without equivocation, surrender to the PA's demands as a prior condition before talks can resume. The illogic of the demand seems to escape the PA, for should Israel agree to all demands, what use then is there of peace agreements; there would be no Israel to bargain with, if it met all the demands. And therein lies the strategy.

Leaving the Palestinian Authority the usefully manipulative option of mewling to the UN body to condemn Israel for occupying portions of the land it plans to use for its own Palestinian state - the message that goes out to the international community, to screen the real intention of managing by any means conceivable, the retaking of the entire geography that Palestinians claim belong rightfully to them.

The name of the game, both with the Palestinian Authority through its clever, but transparent ploys - opaque to those who wish to see nothing untoward - is to discredit Israel. And it is succeeding admirably, only because it has such an eagerly willing collective of ears to impress with its 'side of the story', sitting comfortably in their pews at the Human Rights Council.

The resolution to "dispatch an independent, international, fact-finding mission, to be appointed by the President of the Human Rights Council, to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem"... will commence apace, and reach its foreordained conclusion.

Unless it harbours a suicide wish, why would Israel seek to assist in the process?