The global police agency Interpol has rejected the Palestinian Authority’s bid for membership, The Times of Israel reported Tuesday.
The Palestinians had sought a vote on membership during Interpol’s annual meeting this week in Bali, but 62 nations voted in a preliminary hearing against placing the proposal on the agenda. “Many others abstained, in a forum where many countries traditionally automatically support the Palestinian agenda,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Israel Police noted in a joint statement.
“The Palestinians once again attempted to politicize a professional organization,” the statement also read. “This is part of the ongoing Palestinian campaign to try to to evade direct negotiations, and to transfer the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to professional international bodies, which disrupts their work.”
“Interpol is an important professional organization tasked with helping its members fight crime and ensure public safety,” Israeli Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan said last week. “It cannot be turned into a political body driven by extraneous considerations, as the Palestinians are trying to do.”
The Times of Israel also reported that the Israeli government feared that Interpol’s sensitive information could be leaked to terrorists if the PA became a member.
The Palestinian strategy to avoid bilateral negotiations and instead join international bodies to exert diplomatic pressure on Israel was laid out by PA President Mahmoud Abbas in a 2011 New York Times op-ed. He wrote that the PA sought full membership in the United Nations in order to “internationalize” the conflict and “pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.”
Since then, the Palestinian Authority has hijacked the missions of other international organizations to wage diplomatic war against Israel.
Having joined the UN’s cultural agency UNESCO in 2011, the Palestinians and their diplomatic allies have passed two resolutions that denied the Jewish and Christian historical connections to Jerusalem, despite continued discovery of archaeological evidence to the contrary.
The PA also campaigns to expel Israel from FIFA, the governing body of world soccer. Aiden Pink observed last year those efforts were “another facet of the Palestinian Authority’s escalating efforts to isolate and delegitimize Israel in bodies like the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court—politicizing organizations that could theoretically serve a noble purpose if they weren’t so consumed with anti-Israel animus.”
David Daoud similarly argued that the PA’s goal at the International Criminal Court was “to improperly use international law as a tool to bring about the establishment of a Palestinian state with or without Israel’s consent.” This assessment was confirmed by Palestinian Authority leader Nabil Sha’ath, who described joining the ICC as part of a “continuous battle” against Israel and “a first step towards waging a total and continuous political and judicial battle.”
[Photo: Massimiliano Mariani / WikiCommons ]