Seventy years ago today, with the Holocaust still fresh in the minds of global leaders, the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to partition Palestine in two, with the goal of establishing one state for Jews to reclaim their historic homeland and another for the Arabs who were also living there.
So, one must wonder what those global leaders would think of today’s United Nations – which operates a single-minded campaign of opprobrium against Israel for its alleged human rights transgressions against Palestinians, but which largely ignores the far more serious human rights abuses of regimes that stretch from Beijing to Moscow, Tehran to Riyadh and Havana to Caracas.
In the latest manifestation of the U.N.’s Israel obsession, its Human Rights Council (which is perhaps the U.N.’s most comically misnamed institution) is preparing in the coming weeks to release a “blacklist” of about 200 companies around the world that do business in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The list is apparently designed to shame them into severing their business ties with those Israeli-run areas.
Some 130 Israeli and 60 international companies received letters recently from the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights – whom the Human Rights Council asked to create the list nearly two years ago – to inform them that they’re being “blacklisted” for “acting contrary to international law and U.N. decisions.” The companies reportedly include Israeli banks, supermarkets and restaurant chains as well as such U.S. companies as Caterpillar, TripAdvisor, Priceline.com, and Airbnb.
The request to create such a list not only reflects the Human Rights Council’s outsized focus on the Jewish state, but also reveals the rank hypocrisy of its membership, which includes some of the world’s worst human rights abusers.
The list will have no force of law, but it could still prove harmful to Israel if companies decide that doing business in those Israeli-run areas isn’t worth the risk to their corporate reputations. It’s another manifestation of the global campaign by public institutions and private activists to destroy Israel not by defeating it on the battlefield but by delegitimizing it in the court of public opinion. Among other things, the list would provide further fuel for the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement against Israel that’s popular in Europe and on U.S. college campuses.
