RUTHFULLY YOURS

The applause in the Security Council room Friday was directed at Samantha Power, the American ambassador who declined to veto an anti-Israeli resolution, an act of diplomatic warfare against the Jewish state.

The three-page text, now part of international law, can hurt all Israeli citizens and institutions. It will also likely harm any hope of renewal of peace talks between Israeli and Palestinians.

And America’s loss of global leadership — don’t even get me started.

Consider: Egypt, the Arab member of the Security Council, circulated the resolution’s draft Wednesday night. Then President-elect Donald Trump issued a statement calling on the US to veto it. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke with Trump and with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Sisi called Trump, who leaned on him to withdraw the resolution. Sisi agreed.

The Egyptian leader looks forward to renewed relations with Washington, which have been icy. He evidently values strategic relations with Israel more than his fraught ties with Palestinian leaders. He also cares more about Trump than the outgoing president.

Meanwhile, during all this frantic activity, President Obama watched from Hawaii, where he’s on an end-of-year vacation.

For months, as the Palestinian-initiated resolution was brewing, America declined to reveal intentions, leaving UN diplomats wondering what it would do. But when Egypt withdrew from presenting the resolution on Thursday, Obama’s lieutenants finally got busy, leaking anonymously that they were going to let the resolution pass.

That signaled others to revive the resolution. Sure enough, Malaysia, Senegal, New Zealand and Venezuela brought the text up for a Friday vote.
Caracas’s UN ambassador, Rafael Ramirez, who lives high on the hog in New York while Venezuelans can’t get food or medicine and while crime ravages their streets, lectured Israel on all the injustice it inflicts on Palestinians.

President Obama’s refusal to veto the sickening UN Security Council resolution against Israel yesterday was an act of pure malice.

The resolution, demanding an immediate halt to all Israeli “settlement” construction, was proposed by New Zealand, Malaysia, Venezuela and Senegal after its original sponsor, Egypt, had withdrawn. No-one can be in any doubt, though, that the resolution’s real sponsor was Obama, acting behind the backs of the US Congress and the American people.

Clearly it makes a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians very much harder, since the Palestinians will now have no incentive to negotiate the boundaries of a future Palestine state.

Worse than that, it seeks to draw the border of Israel along the ceasefire lines established in 1949, when Israel fought off the Arab attempt to exterminate it at its rebirth. These ceasefire lines have been called the “Auschwitz borders” because they leave Israel militarily indefensible against its enemies. These include the Palestinians who remain committed to destroy Israel – and whose infernal cause the UN, manipulated by Obama, has now backed.

Worse even than that, the resolution is legally illiterate and perpetrates the Big Lie about Israel: that the “settlements” violate international law and that they are the major obstacle to peace.

They do not violate international law and no UN resolution can make them unlawful. Israel is legally entitled to build on this territory. This is principally because 1) it was never sovereign land belonging to any other state and 2) because it was land where the UN’s precursor body pledged that the Jews should be settled on account of their unique right to do so.

The idea that the settlements are the greatest obstacle to peace is ludicrous. There were no settlements before 1967, yet the Arab war of extermination against Israel had already gone on for decades

The vicious condemnation of Israel at the UN Security Council on December 23, 2016 is a watershed moment in U.S.-UN relations – albeit not as President Obama hoped. Following the vote of fourteen in favor and one American abstention, Palestinian representative Riyadh Mansour and American Ambassador Samantha Power exchanged a telling handshake. Evidently, President Obama believes that he has put one over on Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the incoming Trump administration. But here’s another possibility: treachery at the UN will not be cost free.

Let’s be absolutely clear about what has just happened. The Palestinians have completed the hijacking of every major UN institution. The 2016 General Assembly has adopted nineteen resolutions condemning Israel and nine critical of all other UN states combined. The 2016 Commission on the Status of Women adopted one resolution condemning Israel and zero on any other state. The 2016 UN Human Rights Council celebrated ten years of adopting more resolutions and decisions condemning Israel than any other place on earth. And now – to the applause of the assembled – the Palestinians can add the UN Security Council to their list.

Resolution sponsors Malaysia and New Zealand explained UN-think to the Council this way: Israeli settlements are “the single biggest threat to peace” and the “primary threat to the viability of the two-state solution.” Not seven decades of unremitting Arab terror and violent rejection of Jewish self-determination in the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

This is not just any lie. This is the big lie of modern antisemitism. This is the lie that drove a Palestinian teenager in June of this year to creep into the home of 13-year old Hallel Ariel and butcher her with a knife in the back as she slept in her bed.

The bed was located in the “settlement” of Kiryat Arba – on Arab-claimed territory whose ownership – by agreement – is subject to final status negotiations instead of back-stabbing UN resolutions. So to skip the UN-eze, today’s hate fest was diplomatic terrorism.

Obama’s failure to veto the resolution is at odds with long-standing American foreign policy that has insisted on peace through negotiations, and not UN-fiat, as the only way to ensure genuine and long-lasting recognition and cooperation. His excuse for throwing bipartisan wisdom overboard was delivered by Ambassador Power, in one of the most disingenuous statements in the history of American diplomacy.

Power began by likening Obama’s deed to Ronald Reagan’s treatment of Israel. She repeatedly claimed that the move was nothing new and “in line” with the past, though “historic” is how speaker-after-speaker and the President of the Council himself described it. She noted “Israel has been treated differently than other nations at the United Nations” and then doubled-down on more of the same. She complained that Council “members suddenly summon the will to act” when it comes to Israel, after the White House had actively pushed the frantic adoption of the resolution with less than 48 hours’ notice.

At its core, this UN move is a head-on assault on American democracy. President Obama knew full well he did not have Congressional support for the Iran deal, so he went straight to the Security Council first. Likewise, he knew that there would have been overwhelming Congressional opposition to this resolution, so he carefully planned his stealth attack.

He waited until Congress was not in session. Members of his administration made periodic suggestions that nothing had been decided. There were occasional head fakes that he was “leaning” against it. He produced smiling photo-ops from a Hawaiian golf course with no obvious major foreign policy moves minutes away. Holiday time-outs were in full-swing across the country. And then he pounced, giving Israel virtually no notice of his intent not to veto.