Anti-Israel bias continues unabated in U.N. agencies

"When Francesca Albanese was nominated to be the next United Nations special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories last February, critics feared her well-established anti-Israel bias would taint her work...

Albanese’s actions since then have only strengthened this argument.

The rapporteur is supposed to be an independent expert appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council tasked with investigating human rights conditions in Palestinian areas. According to U.N. provisions, special rapporteurs are expected to demonstrate ‘impartiality.’ The selection procedure dictates that there should not be ‘any reason, currently or in the past, that could call into question the candidate’s moral authority and credibility.’

This is not the case with Albanese.

Israeli officials protested her appointment last spring, saying they don’t ‘expect any fair, objective [or] professional treatment from an activist who promotes outrageous libels, compares the Holocaust to the Nakba, and advocates for the de facto destruction of the Nation State of the Jewish People.’

In Dec. 2022, Albanese downplayed Palestinian terrorist activities when she referred to Abu Hamid, a founder of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades who murdered seven Israelis, as a ‘Palestinian refugee from Al-Amar Camp, West Bank’ who ‘was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002, for alleged involvement in attacks against ISR forces during the 2nd Intifada.’

In late November, Albanese spoke at a conference held by a Hamas-affiliated think tank, along with operatives of the two most notorious Palestinian terrorist organizations, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, as well as other extremist Palestinian organizations...

The issue at hand is whether this institutional framework is used to promote unfounded claims and opposition to Israel in general. Indeed, Israel is the only country for which a permanent investigator has been assigned by U.N. authorities. No investigator has ever been assigned for human rights violations in Turkish-occupied Cyprus or the Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine...

Albanese is just the latest case in a pattern of inherent anti-Israeli bias within U.N. agencies. Previous U.N. special rapporteurs have described the situation in Palestine as ‘apartheid’ in reports that were well-received by Islamist-affiliated Palestinian think tanks.

Other U.N. agencies, such as the Human Rights Council, have constantly demonstrated bias against Israel. The previous U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, issued 14 comments against Israel during her tenure, compared to only six against China. She did not react when a member of her office spoke of a ‘Jewish lobby’ and went so far as to question Israel’s right to be a U.N. member.

The credibility of an agency like the U.N. Human Rights Council suffers when it focuses on Israel while ignoring far more pernicious, systematic human rights abuses in countries like China, Cuba and Venezuela. Since 2015, the council has approved 99 resolutions condemning Israel, more than twice the number of times it condemned Syria and seven times more than it condemned Iran. Tellingly, the Council has issued no resolutions against China or Turkey.

It seems that U.N. agencies continue their anti-Israel bias unhindered, presenting a distorted view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that indirectly legitimizes terrorism and continuing violence against Israel and its citizens."