The U.N.’s ‘Year of Solidarity’ with the Palestinians

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/joseph-klein/the-u-n-s-year-of-solidarity-with-the-palestinians/

In yet another display of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel bias, the United Nations decided that observing the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People annually on November 29th was simply not enough. November 29th was the date in 1947 when the UN General Assembly approved its partition plan resolution that would have given the Palestinians a state of their own more than six decades ago, side by side with Israel. The UN General Assembly voted late last month to declare the entire year of 2014 the “International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.” The vote was 110 in favor, 7 opposed and 54 abstaining. This action comes about one year after the UN General Assembly voted to grant the Palestinians observer state status. The General Assembly passed other anti-Israel resolutions as well last month, including one that called for Israel to return the Golan Heights to Syria and another telling Israeli authorities to stop imposing their jurisdiction on Jerusalem.

In case anyone is interested in keeping count, 21 resolutions specific to Israel were passed during this year’s General Assembly session. That’s one less than the number of General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel that passed last year. That’s a lot of solidarity with the Palestinians’ distortion of the truth.

Indeed, we’re likely to see at UN headquarters in New York, and at UN facilities all over the world, during the “International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People,” a whole raft of still photos and videos purporting to show incidents of Israeli atrocities that never happened or doctored to make what was photographed look worse than it really was. Will images of rockets launched by Hamas into Israeli territory targeting Israeli civilians or of Israeli victims of Palestinian terrorist attacks be shown at the UN? Not a chance.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People will decide who is allowed access to events held on UN property in connection with the year of solidarity, even if the events are supposed to be open to the public without discrimination. This committee has already flexed its muscles. Apparently as part of its “exercise of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” the Committee insisted that a UN accredited non-governmental organization which does not toe the Palestinian line be barred from attending events held on UN premises in observance of the 2013 day of Palestinian solidarity. UN staff, including from the Division for Palestinian Rights and UN security, played the role of the Palestinians’ bouncers. That’s just a preview of what to expect in 2014 when the Palestinians and their advocates will have the run of the place that U.S. taxpayers have spent billions of dollars to subsidize.

Anne Bayefsky, director of The Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, the Jewish human rights group barred from access to a public UN-sponsored event in observance of the 2013 day of Palestinian solidarity, warned that 2014 will become a “year of excluding pro-Israel Jewish organizations from the United Nations.” And in a slap at the Obama administration’s ineffectiveness in blocking this blatant display of anti-Semitism enabled by UN staff, Anne Bayefsky added: “U.S. taxpayers have paid over half a billion dollars renovating U.N. Headquarters in the middle of New York City, and yet the Obama administration has ceded access to public meetings therein for the first time ever to the UN Division for Palestinian Rights. It’s an outrage, and must be challenged immediately.”

Already, the United Nations is reported to be spending $6 million annually on the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Division for Palestinian Rights of the Secretariat, and the Special Information Programme on the Question of Palestine of the UN Secretariat’s Department of Public Information. Even more money has been spent over the years on special “investigations” and one-sided reports emerging from the inappropriately named UN Human Rights Council. That too is just a prelude to 2014, when the United Nations will be spending lavishly to feed the Palestinians’ propaganda machine all year long.

The fact is that every year the Palestinians bleed the UN and its member states of more and more money, particularly for the United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestinian Refugees (“UNRWA”). The budget for UNRWA’s core activities (general fund) for 2013 is approximately $663 million. On top of that are monies pledged and earmarked for special emergency funds. The United States is by far the largest contributor. The U.S. contribution totaled $233.3 million for FY2012. Since its inception, U.S. government contributions to UNRWA have amounted to approximately $4.6 billion. The neighboring Arab countries, despite all their bluster about the plight of the Palestinians and expressions of “solidarity” with them, contribute a pittance by comparison.

UNRWA is about as old as the United Nations itself. The General Assembly created it in 1949 as a “temporary” relief agency providing humanitarian assistance to Palestinian Arabs, who had left their homes in Israel in 1948. There were somewhere between 600,000 and 760,000 such refugees at the time. More than sixty years later, UNRWA is a permanent UN fixture, far larger than any other United Nations sponsored humanitarian relief agency. Palestinian refugees represent less than 18% of the world’s refugees, yet UNRWA is the only UN agency devoted to just one refugee group – the Palestinians – spending one third of all UN resources earmarked for refugees.

Today, a fifth generation of Palestinian Arab refugees is served by UNRWA. Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants registered with UNRWA now number around 4.9 million, and are scattered throughout Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank. The refugees’ neighboring Arab states have refused to provide permanent homes and citizenship to their fellow Arabs. Not exactly the kind of solidarity that would make a real difference.

The International Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People will be a year-long circus of events meant to show as much pity in the international community for the Palestinians as they show for themselves and to demonize Israel as the sole cause of their problems. Trying to get the Palestinians to start taking responsibility for the many mistakes they have made and the harms they have caused to themselves and others for more than six decades will not be on the agenda. Showing uncritical solidarity instead with the Palestinians’ wrong-headed policies is self-defeating. As usual, however, the United Nations is all in as the Palestinians’ enabler.