The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), an organization with an established record of anti-Israel bias, is poised next week to condemn the Jewish state for its conduct during last year’s Operation Protective Edge, noted an op-ed published Friday in The Boston Herald by Jeff Robbins, a former UNHRC delegate.
Next week the U.N. Human Rights Council, which includes such human rights luminaries as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, is expected to release its “report” on last summer’s war in Gaza between Hamas and Israel. This was a conflict not only initiated by Hamas, but perpetuated by it for 50 days, in violation of innumerable truces to which it first agreed, and on which it then reneged.
The conflict was the third separate time in six years that Israeli civilians were subjected to some 5,000 rockets fired by Hamas, rockets both intended to harm Israelis and calculated to bring about the deaths of Palestinian civilians used by Hamas as human shields. It differed from similar conflicts in 2008 and 2012 in two respects. By last summer, Hamas could — and did — reach 80 percent of Israel’s population with its rockets. And Hamas added an elaborate system of tunnels built under Palestinians’ homes extending into Israel, for the purpose of staging raids that Hamas hoped would kill hundreds of Israelis.
Naturally, the U.N., owned for all practical purposes by the powerful Organization of Islamic Conference and the enviable petrodollars that Arab states bring to bear, is expected to issue another report condemning Israel. Its report, originally set to be released in March, was delayed after its lead investigator, William Schabas, was forced to resign amidst disclosures that not only had he declared Israeli leaders “criminals” before he asked to be hired to investigate them, but that he had recently been paid by the PLO for advocating on its behalf. After denying for months that there was anything about any of this that faintly resembled a conflict of interest, he stepped down just before the report was to be released, announcing that his work had been completed anyway.
Robbins pointed out that a number of studies authored by military experts in recent months have found Israel’s conduct during Operation Protective Edge was well within the bounds, and sometimes exceeded the standards, of international law. A March study commissioned by the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs concluded that “IDF operations in Gaza exercised considerable restraint and exceeded the requirements of [international law].” Earlier this month, a study conducted by a multinational delegation of senior military and political leaders observed that “none of us is aware of an army that takes such extensive measures as did the IDF last summer to protect the lives of the civilian populations.”
Hillel Neuer spelled out some of the reasons why Israel should not expect to get a fair hearing from the UNHRC in Why the Schabas Report Will Be Every Bit as Biased as the Goldstone Report, which was published in the March 2015 issue of The Tower Magazine.
Do we have any reason to expect a fair, objective, and credible report?
Not if we consider the built-in prejudice of the commission’s founding mandate, spelled out in resolution S-21/1 of July 23, 2014, which preemptively declares Israel guilty….The resolution mentions Israel 18 times. Hamas is not mentioned once.
Not if we consider that Schabas, the activist chairman who says that he “devoted several months of work” to the project, is someone who performed undisclosed paid legal work for the PLO—on the subject of how to prosecute Israelis in international courts—and who famously declared barely three years ago that the leader he most wants to see in the dock at the International Criminal Court is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
[The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’s] bias was manifest from day one in their agency chief’s farcical selection of Schabas—of all the law professors in the world—to lead the inquiry. OHCHR knew that, a few months earlier, he had been rejected by a committee of five ambassadors for a similar UN mandate to investigate Israel—on the grounds that he lacked impartiality. Georgetown Law School professor Christine Cerna, herself a one-time UN candidate, has stated that Schabas was chosen specifically because of his well-known positions against Israel. Even Aryeh Neier, a colleague of Schabas at Sciences Po in Paris, founder of Human Rights Watch, and an NGO icon known as a defender of the UN, said of Schabas, “Any judge who had previously called for the indictment of the defendant would recuse himself.” The same OHCHR that recruited Grietje Baars to staff Goldstone I chose Schabas to head Goldstone II.
[Photo: Tom Page / Flickr ]