“UN COMMITTEES HAVE CROSSED THE LINE” BY SAMANTHA POWER
http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/
Remarks at the Israel Middle East Model United Nations Conference on “Building a More Model UN”POWER:
Before this speech, Power’s best line was “Hillary Clinton is a monster”and she has generally been perceived as hostile to Israel. Thanks to Tom Gross whose dispatches are essential reading we have this :….on a visit to Israel, she made very vocal remarks denouncing the UN for its anti-Israel bias. Power is, of course, now the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Remarks such as the ones below are rare not just from Power, but from any member of the Obama administration. –
“Thank you for the generous introduction, and for reading the book on Sergio. And a special thanks to all of the organizers who put this amazing conference together, particularly Aviva, who puts heart and soul and everything into this. [Applause.]
Before diving into the issues that have brought us here, let me start off by acknowledging the people without whom many of you would never have heard or thought about Model UN, much less known how to get a resolution through the Third Committee. And I’m speaking, of course, of your faculty advisors. One of the greatest diplomats my country has ever produced, Benjamin Franklin, once said: “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” Well, your faculty advisors have not only taught you, they have involved you in a way that will forever leave its mark on you and will make you engaged citizens of your communities and of the world. So please join me in giving those faculty advisors a huge round of applause. [Applause.]
Now, when I was your age, I never would have imagined that I would get to sit at the United Nations behind a placard that said “The United States of America”. I grew up in Ireland, and my mother brought me to the United States when I was nine years old. By the time I got to high school in Atlanta, Georgia, my dream was to play professional sports – preferably basketball. When it became abundantly clear that I was not going to play professional sports or break the gender barrier to the NBA, I decided to do the next best thing which was to try writing about sports.
That’s what I was doing the summer after my first year in college, when I took an internship at a local news station. And one day, I was sitting there at that news station taking notes on an Atlanta Braves game so I could help cut the sports highlights for the evening news, when footage from another screen caught my eye; and it was footage from Tiananmen Square, in China, where kids my age – and your age – were peacefully gathering to demand basic freedoms like the right to vote, and where they were being brutally beaten and mowed down as a result of having done so. It was raw and it was incredibly disturbing – and honestly, to this day I don’t know if I hadn’t been sitting where I was, when I was, that I would’ve seen it and focused on it in the way that I did. But once I did, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And that was when it hit me that this was what I really wanted to be focused on. I wanted to focus on what was happening in the world to real people. I wanted to focus on those young people and the dreams that they had and the aspirations they had, even though I had huge doubts whether I could ever do anything that would be helpful or supportive. This propelled me first to become a war reporter, which I did in the Balkans in the 1990s. Then I became a human rights advocate, trying to raise my voice about atrocities like the ones I had witnessed in the former Yugoslavia. And ultimately, all of this led me to go and work for a young Senator from the city of Chicago named Barack Obama. Now if there is a lesson to be learned from the path that I took, I don’t think it is to go and work your first year in college at a sports station, necessarily. It is just to keep your eyes open. Whatever you do, just look up. Especially those of you who are on your gadgets and your smartphones the entire time – you have to look up, just to see what will catch your imagination – what will inspire you.
While I eventually – after a lot of bumps on the road from watching the footage in Tiananmen Square to where I am now – but when I eventually became American Ambassador to the UN, I found myself in a chair that sometimes felt like a front row seat to watching the world unravel. There’s the great Shakespeare line from The Tempest, where sometimes it feels that “hell is empty and all the devils are here.” Do you ever feel that way? Not here, at the Model UN conference, but when you read the newspaper, when you watch television, that’s how it can feel. And you, I think, appreciate that uniquely living in one of the most dangerous regions in the world.
The global refugee crisis continues to get worse. Not only are more people displaced today than at any point since the Second World War, but wars are lasting longer, so those people who get displaced can’t go home. The war goes on, they remain out of their country. They long to get back to their homes, but they can’t because the conflict that displaced them persists. Now some communities have welcomed refugees, others though have turned them away, or even persecuted them. Just last week, an anti-immigrant rally in Prague drew some 8,000 people; and shortly thereafter, a group of thugs firebombed a center that helps refugees. Rather than condemn such xenophobic acts, some politicians – including in my own country – have argued that we should start using religious criteria to determine who should be allowed into our nations, simply because a minority of individuals and groups perversely use faith to justify their acts of terrorism.
We see people being lined up in villages in Nigeria, in schools in Iraq, in university dorms in Kenya, in a kosher supermarket in France, and being asked the same question: “What is your religion?” – and being executed if they give the wrong answer. We see the monstrous terrorist group ISIL enslaving women and girls, simply based on their religion or their ethnicity, and selling them – young girls – like cattle at markets.
And yet, faced with these and so many challenges, the kinds of challenges for which the United Nations was created 70 years ago to confront, the UN – the real one – can seem at best ineffective, or at worst part of the problem. Russia, a permanent member of the Security Council, occupies part of neighboring Ukraine. The government of Syria, a UN member state, blocks humanitarian assistance to people in besieged areas and starves them to death. UN peacekeepers deployed to war-torn countries like the Central African Republic end up sexually abusing the people who look to them for protection.
Consider an example that hits closer to home. As you all know, the UN Charter guarantees “the equal rights of nations large and small,” and yet we have seen member states seek to use the UN Security Council, the General Assembly, and even the most arcane UN committees in ways that cross the line from legitimate criticisms of Israel’s policies to attempts to delegitimize the state of Israel itself. The only country in the world with a standing agenda item at the Human Rights Council is not North Korea, a totalitarian state that is currently holding an estimated 100,000 people in gulags; not Syria, which has gassed its people – lots of them. It is Israel.
Bias has extended well beyond Israel as a country, Israel as an idea – it even extends to Israeli organizations. Some of you may know the group ZAKA – an Israeli humanitarian group that helps save lives in disasters and ensures proper burial for the victims of those tragedies. ZAKA not only works here in Israel, but it responds to natural and manmade disasters worldwide, as it did in New York after 9/11, and in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Yet when ZAKA was nominated in 2013 for accreditation by the UN’s NGO committee – and this accreditation is what gives NGOs the right to participate in UN meetings, the right to assert their voices, the right to raise causes that really can matter in the world – when ZAKA was put forward it was denied approval. Five subsequent times the committee met, and five times member states blocked ZAKA – not because of the quality of its work, people weren’t that interested in the quality of its work, but simply because ZAKA is an Israeli organization.
Of course, bias at the UN is not limited to Israel. At present, of the 193 UN Member States, only 36 have women as their permanent representatives. Thirty-six out of 193. I find myself now the only woman ambassador on the 15-member UN Security Council. One woman out of 15, in 2016 – what’s up with that? Since the UN was created 70 long years ago, the General Assembly has had 70 presidents. Two women in 70 years. And as you may know, there has never been a woman Secretary-General. This problem is not limited to the United Nations. The United Nations is a reflection, of course, of a larger phenomenon in the world. Only around one-quarter of Knesset members are women, a proportion that is better than the U.S. Congress, where women account for less than one-fifth of members.
Now, hearing me rattle off all the ways in which the UN is failing to live up to its principles, you might think that I was trying to dissuade you from trying to make the institution more of a model United Nations. But the opposite is true.
One of my predecessors and mentors Richard Holbrooke used to say that blaming the UN for the world’s problems is like blaming Madison Square Garden when the New York Knicks play badly. It’s a building. Now, adapted for this audience, that’s like blaming Bloomfield Stadium when Maccabi Tel Aviv loses. [Laughter.] That works better. But he was right! Whether it is on the basketball court or in international diplomacy, it is the players who make the game – it’s not the building. When we see bias, injustice, or the continuation of strife within the United Nations, it is not because the UN created all of this. It is because the UN gathers governments and gathers problems and being in the UN doesn’t change the biases of those governments, or doesn’t change the approach of those governments to those problems. But that need not stop us all from investing in addressing these problems, in changing the UN, in changing the world. And if enough individuals come together, if enough countries dedicate themselves to finding answers and to promoting common security and common humanity, the UN will be a representation of that. Just as at its best it is today.
For all of its flaws, there is still no substitute for the legitimacy that the UN can offer, and the one-of-a-kind platform it gives to unite the international community around tackling common threats. Often threats that no one country, no matter how powerful, could ever conceive of tackling by itself.
Just look at what this UN has gotten done in the last year alone. More than 11,000 people lost their lives in the deadly Ebola epidemic in West Africa – the profound loss from which is still being felt by their families and their communities, and by thousands of survivors still struggling to overcome the stigma. But that toll would have been so much higher – we’d still be dealing with it – if we and other nations, including Israel, had not rallied the international community to step up at the United Nations. And the world did step up. There was a curve that the scientists showed us – the epidemiologists – about how many people were going to be infected by Ebola. It was more than a million people. And the world came together first to bend the curve, and then finally to end the curve.
The tough multilateral sanctions put in place by the UN on Iran – amplifying those that the United States and our European partners had put in place – force multiply. These sanctions played a critically important role in bringing the Iranian government to the negotiating table, and to keeping it there until a deal could be reached that cuts off Iran’s pathways to a nuclear weapon.
Today, more than 100,000 UN peacekeepers are deployed – two-thirds of them to active conflict areas – where they’re doing everything from disarming violent militia, to protecting civilians under attack, and to ensuring humanitarian aid reaches communities in need. And most of these peacekeepers – because they are not defending their own countries, they’re not defending their own families, their own communities – they come home, they don’t get parades, they don’t get celebrated; half the time people in their country and their communities don’t even know where they’ve been – it’s far away. They’re risking their lives for strangers. They’re saving strangers.
It is because the UN has this potential – and because today’s world presents such daunting threats – that we have to continue to work, day in day out, to make the UN a tool that helps eradicate injustice and conflict, rather than reflecting injustice or exacerbating conflict.
And we’re seeing progress toward this end. Remember the example I gave of ZAKA – the Israeli humanitarian group that was unfairly blocked for five straight sessions, denied accreditation. Well, we resolved to change that, and together with our partners in the Israeli mission to the UN, we methodically worked the phones, we cornered diplomats in the hallway or as they left the restroom – a very important diplomatic tactic I urge you to employ. We lobbied in capitals – just a very simple goal; just look at the facts, look at what this organization does. We pushed and we prodded and one by one the votes changed. We moved votes from no’s to abstentions, and from abstentions to yeses. And just a few weeks ago, ZAKA finally won the accreditation it had long deserved. [Applause.] And it will now get to bring its perspective to the United Nations. But that’s what it takes; you’ve got to work it one campaign, one issue at a time.
And fighting for Israel’s equal treatment at the United Nations is incredibly important. We don’t do this because of the outsize contributions that Israel and Israeli organizations like ZAKA have shown that they can make when they are given equal opportunity, but we also do it because we recognize that any bias at the UN, where one state gets treated differently – whether it’s against a nation, a religion, or a human being because of who he or she loves, another very common bias at the UN – any bias actually ends up undermining the legitimacy of the UN itself – the principles of equality and non-discrimination that it needs to stand for.
That is why it is so critical that we work to make the UN also an ally in combating anti-Semitism, particularly in a climate of rising attacks around the world. For some of you in this audience, this issue is deeply personal. Some seniors out there may know Lea Chocron who was up here minutes ago, who played a leading role in your model UN a few years ago.
Lea and her family lived in Paris until she was nine, when they moved to London so her father could take a job. It was while abroad that they started to hear of more attacks on Jews back in France. It started when two of Lea’s friends, both just 11-years-old at the time, were called “dirty Jews” and beaten on the Paris metro. More incidents followed. Their neighbors from Paris told them of anti-Israel rallies where anti-Semitic chants were shouted, and of synagogues being defaced. When the family visited France for a bar mitzvah, Lea’s father no longer wore his kippah outside of synagogue, carrying it instead in an unmarked bag. After several years in London, when the opportunity arose for Lea’s family to move back to Paris – the city that had long been their home – they decided to move to Israel instead.
It is because of rising anti-Semitism that the United States worked with Israel, the European Union, and Canada to organize the first-ever UN meeting on anti-Semitism last year, pressing countries to come with concrete pledges to confront the problem. In the same assembly chamber where, 40 years earlier, the General Assembly had adopted the infamous resolution declaring “Zionism is racism,” that same assembly hall, more than 50 countries committed to taking steps to stop anti-Semitism, such as appointing a special envoy to counter anti-Semitism’s spread.
Rooting out entrenched discrimination of any kind can be extremely challenging, even in established democracies like the United States. It has been more than six decades since the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for black and white kids to go to separate schools, effectively outlawing segregation in America. Yet a string of high profile killings of young black men and women by police has brought to the surface an enduring sense among African Americans that, even though our laws guarantee equal rights for all, in real life too often inequality persists and those laws are not applied equally across race or circumstance. And while criticism of these problems is at times difficult for our government and our communities to hear, that criticism, that debate, are crucial parts of strengthening our democracy.
Now, tackling these kinds of challenges may feel far off, but you don’t have to wait to become UN ambassadors to help tackle problems like these. You can begin to make the change right here. And many of you, I gather, are already doing that.
Take a bias I mentioned earlier – the underrepresentation of women at the UN. Look around the room at your fellow delegates and you will notice that in the UN that you have created, there are as many young women as young men. In fact, I’ve been told that this year, young women actually outnumber young men at the conference. [Applause.] And while the UN – the real UN – has never itself had a woman Secretary-General, three of the last five Secretary-Generals here at Model UN have been young women – including Lea Chocron. [Applause.] That is a model United Nations – a true model United Nations. So to the young women in the audience today I say: I hope that one day one – or even several of you – will be sitting behind the placard that reads “Israel” at the United Nations; or when the day comes that the parties negotiate a two-state solution, the placard that reads “Palestine.” I hope that that day comes for young girls in this audience, that you represent your people. [Applause.]
Or why not Secretary- General? Why not? Now, to the young men in the audience I say, you should fight for more seats at the table for your female colleagues – not only at the UN, but also in the Knesset, in boardrooms, in classrooms, and everywhere else that they can lead. [Appluase.] You know what your friends can do, you know what your sisters can do, you know what your mother has done, you know the difference it can make.
Let me give you another example, which relates to an issue that is front and center in many of your lives – ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There are more than 650 students here today from over 40 high schools. Your Model UN members include Jews, Muslims, and Christians; Bedouins and Ethiopian-Israelis. You’ve come from Nazareth, Haifa, and Lod – to name just a few places. You have representatives here from East Jerusalem.
And yet, you don’t need me to tell you that these days it is extremely rare that a group as diverse as yours comes together under one roof – or even in one neighborhood. For some of you, joining Model UN was the first time you had the chance to meet people of different faiths. And that is why it is so important that you are here together. You’re living at a time in which many voices in your world are telling you that even the simple act of meeting with the other side is dangerous, naïve, or disloyal. You have to continue to prove them wrong. No path has ever been built to peace without sides coming together to listen to one another. All of our faiths teach us that, as does our history.
And you must strive not only to come together, but ultimately to wade side-by-side into the toughest issues. Because it is you and your children and the generations following them who will reap the benefits of the peace you build, or else endure the suffering of ongoing strife. And I know it may feel discouraging to know that so many before you have tried and not succeeded. But remember that even your most modest efforts have the power to show your families, your communities, and ultimately the world that what seems insurmountable is in fact within reach.
Just ask some of your peers from the Conflict Resolution Program here at Model UN, which is made up of a few dozen of your colleagues. Instead of representing nations, the students in this program represent themselves, and the challenges they tackle are their own. The aim is to foster an honest dialogue with “the other side,” whoever that “other” is for each student.
Let me close by sharing two stories that show why programs like this are so important.
A few days before one of the group’s meetings, an Arab-Israeli carried out a terrorist attack in which three people were killed – two Jewish-Israelis and an Arab-Israeli. As it happened, an Arab-Israeli student in the conflict resolution program came from the same town as the attacker. After the attack, new security measures were put in place in and around this town. The student’s parents said to him: We don’t want you to go to the next meeting; it’s not safe. The journey was a long one and they worried that, in the charged atmosphere following the attack, something could happen to their boy. The student was scared too – not only about traveling to the meeting, but also about how his peers might see him differently in light of the attack. But he decided in the end that that was exactly the reason he had to go to the meeting. So he convinced his parents and, when the day came, he set out on the trip. He took longer than usual, and he felt on edge the entire way there, but he made it to the meeting.
And when he arrived, he told his fellow students about the attack and how different his town felt after it. He said, “I was afraid to come here today, but I knew it was important to show that what happened does not define me, and it should not stop me from taking part in this effort.”
Now, just think for one moment about how much courage it took for that young man to make the journey, and to say what he did. I doubt his colleagues – some of you, I’m sure – will ever forget the choice he made, because it showed from the kind of brave decisions, it showed that those decisions can be made, that each of us has agency. And his story shows how the actions of just one person – a high-schooler like you – can help lay the groundwork for greater empathy and trust between the sides as we face our fears, as we put ourselves in the shoes of others.
Now for the second story. Last weekend, the student participants traveled to a community center in Lod, where their facilitators – an Arab-Israeli woman, Faten, and a Jewish-Israeli man, Dror – split them up into groups. Each group was assigned to meet with a representative of a different community in Lod – Arabs, Ethiopian Jews, and modern Orthodox Jews – and each was assigned to interview them about their lives. What brought them to Lod? Why did they stay in a mixed community? What were the challenges of coexistence?
Later in the day, the three student groups were given a scenario: Imagine the community is given a donation to open a playground for small kids to play. How should it be set up in a way that would benefit all communities in Lod? Each group was asked to play the role of the community that it had interviewed. Arab-Israeli students found themselves speaking for Lod’s Ethiopian Jews, Orthodox Jewish students for Lod’s Arab-Israelis. Some wanted separate days for their group; others felt everyone should be allowed to come to the playground when they wanted. The groups argued. They listened. And after a few hours, they arrived at a compromise: certain weekdays would be assigned to individual groups, and other days would be open to everyone. That way, every group would feel that they had a chance to use the resource.
After they had reached a compromise, the facilitators Faten and Dror shared something unexpected with the students: this scenario had actually happened in Lod. And just like the students, the three communities had come together with mediators to figure out how to set up a playground. And amazingly the students, by putting themselves in the shoes of others, had reached almost the same compromise as the real people of Lod.
This experience had a profound impact on the participants. A young Arab-Israeli student wrote that the exercise had taught her to stop looking at people as just Arabs or Jews. Instead, she said, “Now I look and I see humans that are trying to find safety and equality.” She said that being able to reach a compromise, and knowing that actual communities in real life had done the same, felt empowering and gave her hope. “If we young Arabs and Jews could sit together and debate and find a resolution,” she said, “also those in the higher positions such as our government could sit down together and compromise.”
Today, you sit behind placards of countries that are not your own. You speak in their voices. You advocate for their interests. But when you walk out of this conference, you will take on a more challenging role – you will represent yourself. You’ll be the ambassador of you. And you will do so at time of profound conflict, in your communities and in the world. And it can be tempting, given all the prejudice, and injustice, and violence in the world to want to just throw up your hands and say I give up – these problems are too big, too intractable.
But what you are doing here shows that these are problems that can be overcome. Whether tackling those challenges within your community or tackling challenges faced by members of the United Nations, what’s needed is actually not all that different. You’ve got to be candid and clear-eyed about the problems. You’ve got to learn to walk in the shoes of others. You cannot underestimate the transformational power that individuals have to make change. If you do that you will, in fact, bring the world closer to the model United Nations that you seek. Thank you. [Applause.]
MODERATOR: Thank you so much, and thank you to Ambassador Power for her very inspirational words. We’re very lucky that she has agreed to take some questions from our students. And we have reached out to a variety of schools in order to get several different questions and different viewpoints. So we’re going to call on two students at a time to be able to ask their questions and Ambassador Power will reply. We have ushers in the audience who are going to bring the wireless microphones to these students. And the first two are going to be Hanna Pilchga from Atid Lod and Avia Sharon from Hebrew U Secondary School.
Please raise your hand so you can be found. Hanna, would you like to go first?
QUESTION: Yes. Hello, my name is Hanna. I’m from the School Atid Lod and I would like to ask you, due to your experience of working with refugees and covering the war in Yugoslavia, what assessment would you give to the situation of the Syrian refugees in Europe, and what are the possible solutions to this humanitarian crisis?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you. Thank you for asking. It is one of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes – certainly of my lifetime, and I think of yours. You have close to 12 million people displaced, people who, for the most part, just want to live with their families, send their kids to school, do a decent day’s work, and the system – the international system that I’ve alluded to and that you all are learning so much about – is just stretched to its breaking point. People have actually – believe it or not – never been more generous than they have been in response to the Syrian crisis and the other displacement and humanitarian crises of now. Never more generous. But the demands on that system are so far outpacing that extra generosity – the private sector is more involved than they were before, individuals are giving more than they ever have before – and yet there are just so many people who are hurting and who are relying on the international community to offer them support.
So I think what’s above all important is war has to end. Conflict has to be brought to an end. The idea that there is a military solution to the conflict in Syria, which you asked about, is far-fetched. It’s not credible. The pursuit – the idea that you can bomb your way to advance your interests – it’s not going to work. All it’s going to do is cause more suffering. And that’s why Secretary Kerry has been working indefatigably to try to bring the stakeholders to that conflict to the same table – Russia and Iran, which support the Assad regime and have from the beginning of the conflict; the Gulf countries and Turkey, who have supported opposition groups; Europeans, who have now an acute interest, given the refugee flow into Europe – everybody at the same table to push for a political path forward. It’s going to be extremely challenging. After this much pain inflicted on so many, it’s going to be extremely hard to bring that political solution forward. And yet, that’s the way, fundamentally, you deal with the humanitarian crisis at its source.
In the meantime – because that will not be instant – we have to push the regime – and everyone in the world has to unite around this – to allow food into besieged areas. There are 19 besieged areas – just encircled areas where people can’t get access to food, medicine, and in some cases, water. And those who have influence on Assad have to push and use that influence in order to get food to those people.
We have to open up more slots in all of our countries – including the United States – to allow more Syrians who have been screened and vetted to be granted asylum so they can live in dignity and security with their families. Europe cannot shoulder this burden alone. The neighboring countries to Syria, which have been shouldering the burden for so long, they, too – their services are at the breaking point, so it has to be dispersed, that responsibility, and that privilege, frankly, to welcome refugees has to be dispersed more broadly around the world. Thank you.
MODERATOR: Let’s have the next two questions be asked before Ambassador Power answers so that we can hear her responses. So if Avia could ask her question and also Ty Geri before the Ambassador responds? Thank you.
QUESTION: Hello, I’m Avia Sharon from the Hebrew University Secondary School. You were part of the negotiations surrounding the Iran nuclear deal. I would like to ask you: What do you think of the final deal? What are its main virtues or weaknesses? And do you think it is sufficient to provide Israel with the security in this matter?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you.
QUESTION: Hi, my name is Ty, and I study here at WBAIS. My question is to what extent do you think the United States should pressure its current allies, such as those in the Middle East, to ease their anti-LGBT legislation at the risk of endangering the bilateral relationship?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you. Let me take the questions in order. I’m glad you asked the question about Iran, because we’ve obviously had a very lively debate within the United States. There’s been one going on here within Israel, and there’s been a debate between us, needless to say.
What this deal does, if implemented – and so far, the implementation has been strong, but it’s very early days – is it cuts off the pathways to a nuclear weapon and it gives us much more visibility into Iran’s program than we had before at the time when we were very alarmed by some of the progress that Iran has made in the past on that program. So that’s extremely important. We also – and this is really important, and for those of you who know the UN well, you will see how important it is – we have the ability in the event of breach to snap back sanctions. So the multilateral sanctions regime that I mentioned in my remarks that had played such a huge role in bringing Iran to the negotiating table – we have the ability to put those back in place.
Well you might say as good UN people: Well, OK, sure, you may want to snap back, but doesn’t Russia have a veto? Doesn’t China have a veto? We built into the deal an extremely unusual provision where even permanent members of the Security Council are not able to prevent snapbacks. So any single stakeholder in this agreement has the ability to snap back those sanctions. And so that is leverage that persists even as Iran is opened up somewhat by the sanctions relief in the deal.
And what I want to stress is – because sanctions are a tool that I’m sure many of you are using in your negotiations on different crises around the world – we never should be in a world where we’re for sanctions for sanctions’ sake. We put those sanctions in place with a set of objectives related to Iran and its nuclear program, to the threat that Iran posed to Israel, to the region, to the world. And when the opening existed, and President Obama saw there was chance to actually defang some of the threat that Iran poses – namely, the nuclear threat – he seized upon that opportunity, pursued the negotiations with our partners in those negotiations, and we’re where we are.
But you asked the important question: Do I think that Iran is no longer a threat? Iran of course is still a threat. Iran is supporting terrorism. Iran is supporting parties to conflict, like the Assad regime, which has gassed its own people. It’s supporting the Houthis in Yemen. And that is why we need to find other means to thicken – further thicken – the security relationship between us. That’s one of the reasons we’re negotiating now a memorandum of understanding. But precisely because of the threat that Iran poses, that’s why we didn’t want them to have a nuclear weapon on top of the intentions and the threats that they have posed to Israel.
LGBTI rights – this is something that I have worked on since I was at the White House. I was there for four years. President Obama directed his diplomats around the world, for the very first time, to make sure that, in the same way that we are promoting human rights writ large that we are also promoting LGBTI rights. He asked us, when we look at asylum and refugee claims, that we make sure that we pay special attention to those who are fleeing persecution because of sexual identity. He asked that, in our contracting policies, through USAID and other means by which we invest in development and emergency assistance, we ask whether those we’re giving contracts to are respecting the rights of LGBTI people.
So it’s part now of the DNA of the U.S. Government, and I’ve been trying to make it part of the DNA of the United Nations. There, our success is more limited because of the vast number of countries within the UN who themselves have laws on the books like those you mentioned, that explicitly criminalize homosexuality, and indeed some that even have the death penalty for being LGBTI. So it’s an uphill struggle at the UN, but we have secured the passage of the first-ever resolution in the Human Rights Council finding that LGBTI rights are human rights. We now have the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights reporting on the state of LGBTI rights around the world. And in places like Latin America, we have all kinds of collaboration and partnership as there’s almost a race to the top in terms of progressive legislation and, again, rights respect and rights promotion.
Your question is very important. What we ask, regardless of who the country is – whether it’s Saudi Arabia or Uganda – we always ask ourselves: What tool do we have in the toolbox, and what will the consequences – you can never tell for sure in advance, but you try to anticipate – what will the consequences be? Will raising something privately, would they be more likely to be receptive to that than some kind of public statement? If we integrated consideration of these rights in a particular training program, would that go over well or would that be anathema?
And so, what President Obama has directed and Secretary Kerry now has sustained and deepened is in every country relationship, we are asking that question. And in our annual human rights reports, for the first time – under this Administration – we actually report on conditions for LGBTI persons and on LGBTI rights, and the extent to which countries are and are not improving. And so that also requires our diplomats to be out there asking questions in a way that they haven’t asked and, again, interfacing with officials.
So, again, the tools vary depending on the circumstance – you’re always asking: Is it going to do more harm than good? And often we defer to the LGBTI communities as to which tools they think are going to be most effective.
MODERATOR: Our next two questions will come from Jamil Donho from the Jerusalem American International School and from Luay al-Shweibi from the Jerusalem School. Can you just raise your hands so the ushers can find you?
QUESTION: Hello. My name is Jamil Denjho. I am from the Jerusalem American International School. My question is: do you still believe sending airstrikes and bombing ISIS-controlled territories in Iraq and Syria to be an effective method of rooting out ISIS? If not, then what sort of method or plan do you think would be best-suited to help end this conflict with ISIS?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you.
QUESTION: Hi my name is Luay. I am from the Jerusalem High School. I would like to know why does the U.S. refuse to abide by the NPT and refrain from owning or creating nuclear arms?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you, kind of. So on ISIL, the basic question I think is about airpower and what the effects of airpower can be and how we might hasten ISIL’s demise, might be one way to put it. I think while it is the bombing that gets a lot of attention, rightly – anytime you use force against an opponent, against an enemy, that is a big piece of business for any country to engage in. You have seen debates across Europe, particularly, about the extent to which those countries want to be involved in bombing in Iraq or in Syria. And many of those debates particularly in light of the attacks in Paris and elsewhere, have now resulted in many more countries being part of the coalition, actually actively carrying out airstrikes. But airstrikes can contain a problem like ISIL, but fundamentally, there are going to need to be ground forces that move in and that work in tandem with those airstrikes.
And in Iraq, because there is an Iraqi government that wants very much to bring about ISIL’s defeat sooner rather than later, the government that at one point faced ISIL – that it looked like it might even come to Baghdad in the early phases of the conflict, now is clawing back territory, sacrificing an enormous amount on the ground, in order to take towns back that ISIL has been using to terrorize people and as a base from which to plot even more dastardly actions. So I think you see there, on the military side, how it can work and it’s why in Syria it’s so important again to have a political solution where the parties aren’t fighting each other but they’re all turning their sights against ISIL and against al-Qaeda in Syria.
But my answer to you so far is very incomplete, because even when you get the military part right and you have more synergy between ground forces and an air campaign, that’s not going to provide an enduring solution to a challenge like ISIL. You’ve also got to cut off their finances. You’ve got to diminish their appeal – they’ve made again horrific, but at times successful use of social media, in order to lure people to this romantic, utopian quest for a caliphate. More and more, the stories of people who escaped ISIL, or who went, in fact, to even try and be a part of the caliphate and then realized that they were just sent – either became human shields or were sent to the frontline without any training, or were treated in all the ways that we know that ISIL treats people who live under their jurisdiction – those stories now coming out deterring people from actually boarding a flight and risking their lives, leaving their families and their communities. But also within our communities, we got to be better at identifying people who find ISIL’s message attractive, and that is the whole countering violent extremism effort, but it is also dealing with governance issues, indignities, a sense of exclusion that people feel in a lot of communities in the broader Middle East and well beyond.
So fundamentally, the better governance, more inclusive governance, respect for human rights, cutting off the financing, cutting off the flow, alongside airstrikes and a ground campaign to take over territories that ISIL vacates, all of that is going to be needed.
And then on the NPT, President Obama in a speech he gave in Prague, very soon after he became president, it was deliberately one of the first speeches he gave, committed to the goal of creating a world without nuclear weapons. We negotiated with the Russians the START treaty and our position has been that countries that do not have nuclear weapons should not obtain them – witness our effort on Iran and our ongoing effort on North Korea, which of course just recently did a nuclear test; that countries should be able to access nuclear energy, peacefully; and that those of us who have nuclear weapons need to work very aggressively on disarmament.
One of the unfortunate features of the difficulties that the United States and Russia have faced since Russia moved into Ukraine, tried to take over Crimea and eastern Ukraine and given our difficulties on Syria and other issues – is that we aren’t talking as much as we were about the disarmament agenda, which is so important between us, but it remains, again, a huge priority and we are hopeful that the United States will elect a president also that recognizes the danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
MODERATOR: Thank you. We have three final questions and we will try to address them altogether. One of them is from Avishai Burguss at the Brotherhood School which touches more on Ambassador Power’s political agenda and the other two are more personal in nature from Omar Naziri from Atid Lod and Lausanne Younes from Jerusalem Anglican School. So, Avishai, will you?
QUESTION: I’m Avishai Burgusss from the Brotherhood School. How would you address the claims that the U.S. is not an honest broker in the peace process because it gives greater latitude to Israel than the Palestinians?
QUESTION: I’m Omer Naziri from Atid Lod High School and my question to Samantha is: what were the main lessons that you, as someone who has seen the war in Yugoslavia, learned from the war in Yugoslavia?
QUESTION: I’m Yazan Younis, from the Anglican International School in Jerusalem and my question is: in what instances are you allowed to give your own opinion and take decisions as an important U.S. Ambassador?
AMBASSADOR POWER: Thank you so much. Thank you for all of your questions, which were excellent and suitably challenging. So let me address the honest broker question first. We as an administration have dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy to the pursuit of a two-state solution, to trying to help the parties here, in Israel, in the West Bank, in order to move forward and bring about the outcome that so many say they seek which is two sides living side-by-side in peace and security and dignity. And, so far, that hasn’t produced the results that we have sought and that above all, the people of this region have sought and deserve. We will continue to pursue that and again there is such bipartisan support in the United States for Israel’s security, such a recognition of the shared values that I would expect that pursuit to continue and right now, again, we are very hopeful, we hope that the parties will take steps that will move them closer, again, to being in a positon to re-start negotiations which is not a position they’re in right now.
And we will dedicate ourselves to that as long as we are in office, we have Ambassador Shapiro here, who so ably represents the United States here in Israel [Applause.] every day, dedicating himself to that cause. And that is about, again, helping, using, nudging, facilitating, encouraging, urging, pleading, trying to bring about a solution again to bring about that security and that dignity.
I think at the United Nations it’s just important for everyone to bear in mind that, as I indicated in my remarks, Israel is just not treated like other countries. So in the General Assembly, every autumn there are resolutions that are brought on human rights situations and other challenges around the world, and every year there is one resolution brought, directed at President Assad and his regime and some of the horrible crimes he has committed against his people. Against Israel, again, and there are legitimate criticisms that one can make and you hear us make criticisms of settlements and other aspects of Israeli policies. On Israel, around the same time there is one on Syria, there’s 18 on Israel.
And so part of our posture in New York is dedicated to trying to ensure that the criticisms of Israel are about policies and not of the existence of the state itself, which is what it still feels as though a lot of that criticism is motivated by. And remember there are many countries that still either whisper or even say outright that they wish Israel did not exist and so we will always defend Israel from those kinds of attacks and we will always stand up again for its security.
In terms of the questions that are a little more personal, maybe I can merge them a little bit. When I was a journalist in the former Yugoslavia, I was in my early twenties, and what I experienced was up close and personal what the effect of ethnic conflict, sexual violence against women and girls, torture, shelling, life in a refugee camp, the indignity that that entails, the sense of powerlessness that parents feel to be able to properly educate or even clothe their children – all of that was very visceral for me. I was young, I was impressionable, and I just found the whole thing heartbreaking.
Flashing forward, many of the issues that I mentioned are now are part of my day job, whether it’s ethnic or religious conflict, the rampage of sexual violence against women and girls and even boys that occurs in conflict areas around the world. Peacekeepers who I met for the first time again when I was a reporter in the former Yugoslavia, now it is my job to try to reform peacekeeping to try to ensure that if a peacekeeper would actually abuse someone who’s counting on them for protection, that they be held accountable, and if they are not held accountable, that the unit that they are a part of be sent home. These kinds of issues, all of them are now part of my daily bread.
And I feel a great sense of privilege because I think a lot of people read what I read or process the news, and they wish they could do something about it. So I feel very blessed that I get to at least try, and again, my batting average – as we would say – isn’t so great. I haven’t achieved for the people who are out there counting on the United States and counting on the UN, I haven’t achieved as much as I would have wished, but every day that is what motivates me and my amazing team who are here with me in Israel. When we go to work every morning, it is just that privilege of knowing there are people out there who don’t have the voices and they need to know that there is someone looking out for them who has their back and who will turn over every stone to figure out what tool in the toolbox might be used that might help allow them go back to their home or help ensure that they need not fear a UN peacekeeper but may, in fact, receive protection from them.
And related to the question was sort of speaking my mind and whether I get to speak my mind. There were a lot of people who were worried when I went into this job that I would be a little loudmouthed and not very diplomatic as a diplomat. But I am so lucky because in addition to being UN Ambassador, I am also a Member of the President’s Cabinet, so anything undiplomatic that I need to say, where we are debating what our policy should be on any particular issue, I get to say it as part of my team. And I get to say it to the President of the United States – which is an amazing thing – and he listens and will often seek me out, knowing that I may not be thinking exactly like everybody else is thinking, or that I might have experienced something out in the field on a trip, that might be worth factoring into the calculus.
So I think that it’s very, very important when you work for the United States or for any government, and many of you maybe will go on to do that, that you feel your voice is heard, and then when you are out representing your country and your government in the world, you represent the policies that you have come up with together.
The one amazing – I have a lot of discretion about how I negotiate and I have a lot of discretion also in how I share my sense of what’s actually happening, again, where people are hurting out in the world. And so that’s where my background as a journalist has come in very handy. Because bringing human stories into the United Nations – I don’t know what it’s like for you all as Model UN – but in the real UN it can be very dry, and very automated and sometimes I feel people are reading their talking points from like 25 years before and they’ve just dusted them off and they’re saying the same thing and we’re in these…but what we’ve tried to do is bring actual people into the Security Council. So at the height of the Ebola epidemic, we brought a health worker from Liberia – we couldn’t bring him to the United States because he was busy trying to save lives in Liberia – but we brought him on the big screen – descended and suddenly there was this man describing having to turn a father away who was carrying his daughter who was dying from Ebola. And the father having to leave the daughter on the street in front of a Doctors Without Borders clinic because he couldn’t bring the daughter back to the family for fear she would infect everybody else. And this health worker is telling the Security Council that, and he literally says: if you do not help us world, Security Council, we will all be wiped out and you could have heard a pin drop. That’s going to be a lot better than some sterile briefing from a UN bureaucrat telling you statistically how this is a terrible thing.
And so bringing those voices in, survivors – we had the first-ever Security Council meeting on human trafficking and we brought in a young Yazidi woman, Nadia, who had watched five of her brothers executed before her eyes, and then had been enslaved sexually by ISIL. Now, when we try to mobilize people to join the coalition to contribute financially, to train some of those ground forces I mentioned earlier, or to be part of the air campaign, to be investing in journalists and social media to be sure that ISIL is not shaping the message. After they’ve heard Nadia’s story, and that story itself is a means to counter violent extremism and amplifying it around the world so that people know what ISIL does to people. But bringing that human story and those individuals into the hallowed chambers of the United Nations, I think, is something that I have been, again, very fortunate to have been able to do and I hope that, having done it, that my successors will do the same because that’s what it’s all about – it’s those people who don’t have a voice, and it’s our job to give them one. So thank you.
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