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| Amb. Haley: Some fat can be trimmed at the U.N. |
A just-published United Nations report that claims to find Israel
guilty of the “crime of apartheid,” is only one element of a broader
legal and propaganda offensive being pushed by an obscure U.N.
regional commission to stigmatize America’s close ally and build support
for the Palestinian cause, according to documents examined by Fox News.
The offensive has been gestating for at least two
years within the U.N.’s Economic and Social Commission for West Asia
(ESCWA), whose entire membership are Arab states, and is timed to this
year’s 50
th anniversary of the 1967 war between Arab states
and Israel, which resulted in Israel’s control of the occupied
territories of the West Bank and Gaza.
At least one additional
report commissioned by ESCWA,
attempting to create an “innovative” and “scientific” methodology for
estimated the cost of Israel’s 50-year control of the territories, is
still in the works, with the aim of demanding billions in reparations
for Palestinians.
A third aspect of the strategy is an elaborate
proposed propaganda campaign
against the Israeli occupation, making use of U.N. institutions and a
variety of diplomatic and media channels, to create a new , sympathetic
“brand” for Palestinians as victims “that would cause a snowball
effect, thus altering public opinion globally in record time,” as an
ESCWA background paper puts it.
All three elements, including the now-notorious
apartheid report, were given a thorough airing at the biennial high
level meeting of ESCWA’s 18 members, one of them being the State of
Palestine, held in Doha from December 13 to 15, 2016.
ESCWA is ostensibly a forum for regional economic
coordination and development; the meeting was touted largely as an
occasion to examine the U.N.’s ponderous Sustainable Development Goals.
Nonetheless, a preliminary version of the
apartheid report,
containing much of its final wording, was one of the documents
circulated at the session, and a resolution passed at the end of the
meeting called on ESCWA’s secretariat to publicize the explosive
apartheid study as much as possible.
The
resolution
also called for an “ESCWA media and communications strategy aimed at
increasing global awareness,” of, among other things, “Israeli
violations of Palestinian rights and international law,” and orders the
bureaucracy to “increase activities on Palestine and organize special
activities to mark” the 1967 anniversary.
The
apartheid report
caused an eruption of outrage from U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki
Haley when it was officially published under U.N. auspices on March 15.
She noted it came “from a body whose membership nearly universally does
not recognize Israel,” and demanded the U.N. officially “withdraw” the
report from circulation.
Haley heaped additional scorn on the co-author of the 306-page document:
Richard Falk, a notoriously anti-Israel academic
who often provoked U.S. irritation for his anti-Semitic statements and
anti-U.S. diatribes during a six-year term as U.N. special rapporteur on
the rights of the Palestinian people.
Falk has, among other things, cast doubt on the
“official version” of the 9/11 attacks as the work of Islamic terrorists
and after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings remarked that the “American
global domination project is bound to generate all kinds of resistance
in the post-colonial world.”
In her counter-blast against the ESCWA-sponsored
report, U.S. Ambassador Haley called him “a man who has repeatedly made
biased and deeply offensive comments about Israel and espoused
ridiculous conspiracy theories.”
Falk stepped down from his U.N. job in May, 2014,
but has kept up his anti-Israel agitation as a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has made frequent references to the Israel-apartheid theme.
For his part, U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres
distanced himself from the document, and an official close to him
asserted he was blind-sided by its appearance.
A U.N. official pointed the finger of blame for the
publication at ESCWA’s Executive Secretary, Rima Khalaf, a Jordanian and
longtime U.N. bureaucrat who was appointed to her job by former U.N.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2010.
Khalaf was slated to step down within weeks as part
of Guterres’ initial management shuffle, but instead abruptly resigned
on March 17 after Guterres asked that the report be removed from ESDWA’s
website.
At a Beirut press conference, an unrepentant Khalaf
reportedly hailed the report as the “first of its kind” from a U.N.
agency to condemn Israel, and added, “It was expected that Israel and
its allies would put enormous pressure on the United Nations secretary
general to renounce the report."
The U.N. official observed that Khalaf “was in New York recently and did not mention [the apartheid report] to anyone.”
“One of the responsibilities of U.N. economic
commissioners,” the official noted, “is to move information up the chain
of command” to avoid such problems.
That may well be so. But an official summary of the Doha session is also available on the ESCWA website, accessible to all.
Among other things, it notes the elements of the ESCWA 50
th
anniversary actions, issuing broadside condemnations of Israel’s
actions in the territories without reference to acts of terrorism or
other assaults on Israelis, and calling for creation of a “specialized
unit on issues related to Palestine and its people,” including further
monitoring of “Israeli violations of the Palestinian people’s rights and
of international law.”
Along with ESCWA members and officials, the report
notes, representatives of at least 15 other U.N. offices and agencies
were present. One of them was the Office of the U.N. Special
Coordinator of the Middle East Peace Process, although only a
lower-level official was listed in attendance.
Questions emailed to ESCWA by Fox News about the
apartheid report and the other elements in the organization’s
anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian campaign, including some of its future
plans, were acknowledged but not answered before this story was
published.
Guterres’ claim of ignorance about the Falk report is
made more credible by the fact that he has only been in the U.N.’s job
since January 1 -–less than three months.
But the ESCWA campaign also offers a smudged window
into the maze of bureaucracies, agencies and free-floating organizations
that make up the sprawling U.N. system—and their lurking biases and
often invisible channels of influence.
Their topmost official of each is usually appointed
by the U.N. Secretary General, and their supervision by U.N. member
states—their nominal bosses—is often cursory at best.
There are
more than 30 funds, agencies and programs
alongside the bulky U.N. Secretariat, plus a flotilla of regional
commissions (including ESCWA), research and training institutes,
facilitating networks, and a bewildering array of other entities, spread
around the globe, often with overlapping mandates and spheres of
influence.
ESCWA, for example, is a $70 million body ostensibly
concerned with social and economic coordination and development in the
Middle East. Its biennial budget is part of the U.N.’s regular budget,
meaning that 22 per cent of the total is paid by the U.S.
Yet alongside its regional work, ESCWA is also the
author of a report issued by the U.N. Secretary General himself, on the
living conditions of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories.
The report focuses contributions from a wide variety
of other U.N. and U.N.-supported organizations in a 20-page
condemnation of allegedly illegal Israeli practices, ranging from
illegal detention and displacement of civiians to possible “sustained
extensive soil damage, including the removal and destruction of
topsoil,” during a 2014 Israeli anti-terrorism offensive in Gaza.
Among other things, the report adds: “According to
UNEP [the U.N. Environmental Program], the 2014 offensive may also have
resulted in loss of wildlife and native plants.” The document offers no
specific evidence at all for the extremely hypothetical claim.
ESCWA’s most recent compendium of Israel crimes was published in July, 2016—as a Note from then-Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
