"Last November, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres declined to renew the contract of U.N. Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide Alice Wairimu Nderitu, who did not label Israel’s war against Hamas a genocide, even while other U.N. officials have either done so or released reports which make this claim.
On November 26, an editorial in The Wall Street Journal cast Nderitu’s ousting as part of an unofficial U.N. campaign against the Jewish state and called her ‘refusal to endorse a lie in service of a political agenda’ a ‘profile in courage.’
But it wasn’t until this week, after attending Monday’s 80th commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz in Poland, on the site where more than 1.1 million people, the vast majority of them Jews, were murdered in the Holocaust, that Nderitu decided to speak out to tell the story of her contentious U.N. tenure.
‘This push that I should say that there’s a genocide going on in Gaza? They knew that I’m not a court of law, and it’s only a court of law that can determine whether a genocide has happened,’ says Nderitu, in an exclusive interview with Air Mail. ‘But I was hounded, day in, day out. Bullied, hounded, with protection from nobody.’
‘It’s instructive that this never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for D.R.C. [Democratic Republic of Congo], not for Myanmar,’ she says. ‘The focus was always Israel.’
‘This was a war,’ she says. ‘Palestinians were killing Israelis, Israelis were killing Palestinians. It needs to be treated like other wars. In other wars, we don’t run and take one side and then keep going on and on about that one side… By taking one side, condemning it every day, you completely lose the essence of what the U.N. was created for.’...
Nderitu’s first statement on ‘the situation in the Middle East,’ issued on October 15, called for the return of the Israeli hostages as well as a ceasefire. ‘And then I spoke about Hamas,’ she says, ‘what they did. I described it.... And of course, the key thing that made me the enemy was saying that the attacks happened on Israeli territory, which they did.’
(Hamas does not recognize the existence of the state of Israel, which was founded in 1948 and admitted to the U.N. in 1949.)
‘This never happened for any other war. Not for Ukraine, not for Sudan, not for D.R.C., not for Myanmar. The focus was always Israel.’..."