UN Blacklist Insanity
The UN Human Rights Council is wellknown for its hostility toward Israel, but a project it’s about to complete puts it into truly bizzaro territory.
UN rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein (who last year compared then-candidate Donald Trump to ISIS) is set to release a blacklist of companies that operate in Israel’s West Bank settlements, as part of an HRC-ordered “investigation” of their impact on Palestinians.
That’s right: The council believes companies doing business in the settlements somehow constitutes a human-rights violation. Never mind that many of these firms provide jobs for Palestinians in the area and that the blacklist could cost many of them meaningful work.
Or that the companies provide needed goods and services to anyone, no matter their background or where they live.
Ignore, too, the fact that the panel, as the Israelibased Kohelet Policy Forum notes, has never voiced any human-rights concerns about firms in “occupied territory” settlements elsewhere in the world, even where ethnic cleansing has taken place. And that numerous legal opinions and rulings OK such practices, with some citing language in the Fourth Geneva Convention.
The World Bank itself has lent billions to companies in occupied territories around the world. Heck, even the United Nations’ own legal adviser, in a 2002 memo on Western Sahara, concluded that such a practice raised no humanrights concerns.
But then, the move by the HRC isn’t really about fighting human-rights abuses (or, for that matter, making rational and consistent policy of any kind). It’s about trying to hurt Israel in any way possible and gin up opposition toward it.
Toward that end, the council has long served as an anti-Israel propaganda machine. Which is why America’s UNAmbassador Nikki Haley threatened a US pullout from the organization if it didn’t end its obsession with unfairly slamming Israel.
“When the council passes more than 70 resolutions against Israel, a country with a strong humanrights record, and just seven resolutions against Iran, a country with an abysmal human-rights record, you know something is seriously wrong,” Haley pointed out last summer.
US and Israeli officials fear a UN blacklist could deter businesses that are based in their countries and hurt the companies’ shares. They’re racing to contain the damage. Yet other nations with companies in the settlements could also be hurt.
Meanwhile, the council and Hussein’s office get hundreds of million of dollars every year, much of it from the United States. Surely there are better uses for that money.