The UN Commission of Inquiry is not only continuing its track record of anti-Israel bias – it is surpassing it and dragging the bias to new lows.
“The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel,” to give it its full title – or UN COI as it is known in brief – was approved and funded by the UN General Assembly in December 2021. Its establishment came following the 11-day war the previous May that started when Hamas in Gaza launched rockets at Jerusalem and much of the rest of Israel.
The COI is an unprecedented, open-ended war crimes probe against Israel. Since no such open-ended investigation has ever been instigated against any other UN member, nobody should have been under any illusion that the reports would be fair or unbiased.
The UN’s biased panel members
The composition of the three-member panel should have indeed dispelled any remaining thoughts that the UN might approach Israel and the Palestinians with an open mind. All three members – former UN high commissioner for human rights and current COI Chair Navi Pillay, Chris Sidoti and Miloon Kothari – were all well-known for their anti-Israel stances. The results were a foregone conclusion.
The commission’s mandate allows it to investigate any alleged Israeli human rights violations in sovereign Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. According to the draft of its latest report, released on June 8, even that scope is not enough. As Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices, noted in an opinion article in this paper on Monday, the report contains an unprecedented attack on Israel and its defenders, “including private individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) ‘worldwide.’”
Members of the International Court of Justice attend a hearing for alleged violations of the 1955 Treaty of Amity between Iran and the U.S., at the International Court in The Hague, Netherlands August 27, 2018. (credit: REUTERS/PIROSCHKA VAN DE WOUW)“The move is a dramatic attempt to extend the global reach of a highly controversial venture initiated by the UN Human Rights Council in May 2021, at the behest of Islamic states, without any Western support,” Bayefsky wrote.
While the 78-page report is too long to summarize here in detail, highlights include: “In March 2023, a Knesset lobby for the fight against antisemitism and delegitimization was announced by Likud members of the Knesset, with a focus on combating the ‘undermining’ of Israel by foreign countries that finance human rights and civil society organizations.”
In other words, the COI finds Israel guilty of – among its other “crimes” – daring to tackle delegitimization and antisemitism.
The panel’s limited criticisms of Palestinian leadership
The panel – perhaps in an effort to appear evenhanded – does criticize the Palestinian Authority and Hamas (although not by name) for their treatment of Palestinians under their control, but it does not condemn, or even mention, the Palestinian terrorism and ongoing rocket attacks aimed at Israeli civilians.
As well as condemning Israel for fighting back against rockets and terrorism, the COI censures the Jewish state for its investigations that have revealed links between certain NGOs and terrorists. For example, the commission defended Al-Haq, a Palestinian NGO that Israel has classified a terrorist entity due to its links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, even though the US and Europe classify the PFLP as a terrorist organization.
The report declares: “The Israeli authorities’ use of anti-terror legislation to categorize civil society organizations as terrorist organizations aims to delegitimize and isolate them and undermine their activity, and to harm their international funding and support.” The COI can’t even entertain the thought that these organizations might actually be supporting terror.
Bayefsky details how the report was skewed to dismiss the massive number of submissions her organization and others send in, “which Pillay publicly disparaged in a news conference as ‘all pro-Israel’” while considering only the submissions that would back the committee’s desired findings.“The report that emerges from this rigged kangaroo court attacks not only Israel, but all of its nongovernmental ‘supporters’ who must be ‘urgently’ held ‘accountable for human rights abuses’,” she wrote.
Reports like those by the COI ensure one thing: perpetuation of the conflict. The UN probe attacks the Jewish state while emboldening its enemies and detractors.
Anyone who truly cares about human rights must stand firm with Israel and call out the UN COI for the farce that it is.
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