When the people of Israel exercise their inherent right of self-defense, they are forced to withstand an additional onslaught from today’s morally bankrupt United Nations.
The 20th century job description of the United Nations was “to maintain international peace and security” based on “the sovereign equality of all its members,” and to do “nothing [to] impair the inherent right of self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the UN.”
But the UN of the 21st century has an exception clause. Every time Israel is attacked, not only does the UN fail to maintain peace and security – it attempts to gut Israel’s inherent right of self-defense.
In accordance with this pathology, UN actors manufacture a cycle of violence that begins with Israeli aggression; assert a moral equivalence between Arab terrorists and their Israeli victims; and concoct a litany of Israeli human rights abuses. They conclude that Israeli actions in self-defense are crimes, and Israel’s enemies are understandably, if a tad too fervently, protecting human rights.
Ceasefires are just opportunities to shift gears from alleging crimes to demanding punishments.
The events of the past week have been a textbook demonstration of this toxic formula.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued a “situation report” on July 9, 2014. It provides a “background on the crisis” that states: “the latest escalation round started on 11 June when Israeli forces targeted and killed an alleged member of an armed group, along with a child accompanying him, and Palestinian factions responded by shooting rockets at southern Israel.”
OCHA could have started with something else that occurred on June 11, 2014 – a rocket sent from Gaza that narrowly missed a main artery in southern Israel. Or the UN body might have started with the rocket attacks perpetrated by the targeted Hamas operative himself, such as the rocket shot at Sderot on April 21, 2014. Or it could have chosen any of the other 200 rockets fired into Israel in the first six months of 2014.