Last week, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour visited Israel and the Palestinian territories. Her biased pronouncements blaming Israel for most of the problems in Gaza and Lebanon earned the Canadian Jurist the Jimmy Carter Middle East Myopia Award. She also illustrated why the United Nations has lost credibility in the age of terror by siding with the terrorists, not the terrorized.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Arbour “blamed much of the human rights problem in Gaza on the ‘policies and practices’ relating to Israel’s security measures, as well as the fiscal constraints imposed on the Palestinians by Israel and the international community.” She said, “The violation of human rights, I think, in this territory is massive… I think we can’t continue to see civilians who are not the authors of their own misfortune continue to suffer to the extent of which I see.”
This account is stunningly one-sided. Her caricature of Palestinian civilians is condescending, treating them as passive victims without any responsibility for their conditions. She forgets the 60-year war the Arabs have launched on the tiny Jewish state. She slights Israel’s attempts to make peace, especially the 1990s Oslo Accords, when Israel ceded control of more than 90 percent of Palestinian territory to Yasir Arafat and his henchmen, hoping for peace. She ignores Arafat’s refusal to make peace or even offer a counter-proposal at the 2000 Camp David negotiations. She conveniently overlooks the terrorism Arafat and the Palestinians then launched, culminating in the election of Hamas, a group vowing to destroy Israel, which is why the international community finally stopped funding Palestinian corruption.
And she neglects Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, which gave the Palestinians the opportunity to build their nation, but resulted in a growing Palestinian civil war and regular Kassam rocket attacks terrorizing their Israeli neighbours.
Arbour’s account does not acknowledge Hamas’s ugly exterminationist ideology, the cries reverberating throughout the Palestinian territories and the Muslim world for Jewish blood, or the ugly scourge of suicide bombing. Last week, a Palestinian grandmother blew herself up while trying to kill some Israelis. If Arbour had anything to say about that, it did not make the news.
Give Arbour the benefit of the doubt.
Assume she received a snow job in the Gaza desert and saw no evidence of the vile, violent, political culture Palestinian terrorism spawned. Assume that with her busy human rights agenda she is ignorant of the conflict’s history. Alas, when speaking about her specialty, international law, Arbour was once again outrageously one-sided.
Jousting with Israeli reporters, Arbour denounced Israel’s attempts at self-defense in the north against Hezbollah this summer, while pooh-poohing the Hezbollah rocket barrage aimed at civilians. She recognized Hezbollah’s “very objectionable intent – the intent to harm civilians, which is very bad, but effectively not a lot of harm” was “actually achieved” – news, of course, to the dozens of Israelis murdered in the north. Israel, she continues, “may not” have had “an intent” to harm civilians but behaved with “recklessness” because “civilian casualties” were “foreseeable.” In pronouncing Israel guilty, she proclaimed: “The culpability or the intent may not sound as severe, but the actual harm is catastrophic.… In terms of culpability there is not a lot of difference between recklessness and intent.”
In her zeal to condemn Israel, Arbour outlawed military responses to terrorists who hide behind civilians. Article 52 of the Geneva Convention says “Attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives….” The challenge Israel faced this summer, and has repeatedly faced along with other Western powers, came from unconventional attacks. When terrorists cower in civilian neighborhoods, in basements, in mosques, they make their hiding places valid military objectives. This is especially true when the terrorists build their infrastructure in civilian structures.
Once again, Louise Arbour absolves those civilians who are serving as human shields of any moral responsibility. Someone who harbours terrorists, who rents out a basement and allows fortifications to be built and armaments to be stored, must bear responsibility and expect to be targeted.
All this raises the deeper question: Why is Louise Arbour’s analysis so one-sided? Her willingness to condemn Israel and her apparent indulgence of Israel’s enemies follows an all-too-typical pattern of UN bias against the Jewish state. Arbour seems to be in line with former US president Jimmy Carter, who this month accused Israel of practicing “apartheid,” a lie that disrespects the suffering the South African Afrikaans imposed on blacks for decades. Arbour is also following in the footsteps of Mary Robinson, the UN Human Rights Commissioner who presided over the Durban debacle of 2001, which turned into a massive lynch mob against the Jewish state. Since leaving the UN, Mrs. Robinson has repeatedly apologized for her insensitivity and distanced herself from the anti-Semitism her sloppy leadership fed.
Louise Arbour is still in office. She should read up on the conflict, think through the challenges of fighting terrorism today and start building UN credibility in the region rather than slavishly rationalizing the trendy pile-up of autocrats and Jihadists against democratic Israel.
Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University. He is the author, most recently of “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today,” and “Hillary Rodham Clinton: Polarizing First Lady.”
