In Sydney, Netanyahu Lauds 'Clear-Eyed Australia' for Blasting UN

"Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday praised Australia for being 'courageously willing to puncture UN hypocrisy' on resolutions singling out Israel for condemnation.

His counterpart Malcolm Turnbull had marked the first visit to Australia by a serving Israeli leader with an opinion piece in Wednesday's The Australian newspaper that backed Netanyahu's criticism of the United Nations.

'My government will not support one-sided resolutions criticizing Israel of the kind recently adopted by the UN Security Council and we deplore the boycott campaigns designed to delegitimize the Jewish state,' Turnbull wrote in an op-ed in The Australian newspaper, referring to a December 23 resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem as a 'flagrant violation' of international law.

During a press conference with Turnbull, Netanyahu said he was delighted to read the article at the start of his four-day Australian visit.

'Australia has been courageously willing to puncture UN hypocrisy more than once, including this absurd resolution that said the Western wall, the most sacred site for the Jewish people for thousands of years - thousands of years even before the rise of Islam - that this is occupied Palestinian territory,' he told reporters.

'So the UN is capable of many absurdities and I think it's important that you have straightforward and clear-eyed countries like Australia that often bring it back to Earth,' Netanyahu said..."