The United Nations Security Council held its first official meeting on the subject of the hostages on September 4, 2024 –after 11 months of torture and sexual violence, and the terrible execution of six of them. Israel had requested the meeting, which could only happen with the support of Council members, and the US, UK and France deigned to agree. Then what happened?
Algeria, a member of the Council and the representative of the Arab group of states, decided to redirect the focus by asking for a meeting about Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The Slovenian President of the Council, Samuel Žbogar, decided to split the baby by combining the meeting requests. Algeria is ranked at the bottom of the scale of human rights and freedoms by Freedom House. Israel has never been a member of the Security Council in UN history.
So the Security Council held a meeting not focused on the hostages, but on “The situation in the Middle East, including the Palestinian question.” That is the same subject of meetings the Council had held on August 29, August 22, August 13, July 31, and so on.
The subject change opened the door for briefings by UN bureaucrats on a range of ugly false accusations directed at Israel. Director of Operations and Advocacy for the UN’s so-called humanitarian affairs branch (OCHA), Edem Wosornu, threw out a disgusting blood libel – with no proof provided – that was a deliberate mirror image of the atrocities actually perpetrated against Israelis. She referred to “torture & sexual violence of thousands of Palestinians taken into detention by Israeli forces.” She also repeated another Hamas talking point that there have been “40,000 killed” with no effort whatsoever to distinguish between combatants and civilians, while incongruously preaching about international humanitarian law.
The Russians took their cue and piled on. Courtesy of his UN microphone, Russia’s Deputy Representative, Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy, said: “We note the very alarming reports of…the mass graves of dead Palestinians with traces of torture and the removal of internal organs.” Nobody objected to this outrageous and lethal blood libel reminiscent of the Russian forgery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
It wasn’t as if Security Council members were prohibited from intervening or commenting. American Alternate Representative Robert Wood took the trouble to make two statements following the Russian remarks – on subjects other than the blood libel.
The Security Council President issued an unusual speaking invitation to an outsider, selecting an anti-Zionist speaker who questioned the legitimacy of a UN member state. Executive Director of the NGO B’Tselem, Yuli Novak, said: “Since Israel was founded, its guiding logic has been to promote Jewish supremacy over the entire territory under its control.” She then proceeded to push antisemitic analogies of Israelis to Nazis conducting crimes against humanity, or in her words, an “apartheid regime” running “a network of torture camps.”
Extreme historical revisionism, and apologies for atrocities against Jews, were full-throated. Security Council member Guyana said: “the situation in Palestine today did not begin on 7th October 2023. We must cast our minds back to 1948 because it was in that year that Israel first violently rejected the two-state solution.” No point of order was raised. No one reminded the assembled, and the world listening in, that the UN partition plan calling for two states was accepted by Jews and violently rejected by Arabs.
The British Ambassador, Barbara Woodward, had this repugnant announcement – in the context of a hostage-briefing that Britain itself had requested. “My foreign secretary took the decision to suspend certain UK arms export licenses to Israel earlier this week. This decision in no way undermines our unwavering commitment to Israel’s security.” Nobody guffawed at the absurdity of such a phony “commitment,” the decision to embrace BDS coming a mere 24 hours after news of the hostages’ execution.
The British abandonment of the Jewish state did not come in a vacuum. Ambassador Woodward also repeated totally unverified Hamas statistics that “over 40,000 Palestinians have been killed”—in effect lamenting Hamas casualties. With no moral leadership or moral compass from the UK, the UN Ambassador of Sierra Leone, Michael Imran Kanu, had no compunction railing about “the over 40,000 civilians who have been lost.” Apparently, he thought no Palestinian terrorist has died or that none of the dead, including the perpetrators of October 7, are terrorists.
And then there was the Swiss representative who took the floor to assume an unearned crown of international law potentate. In a meeting originally intended to address the execution of Israeli hostages by Hamas, the Swiss UN Ambassador said: “we urge the Israeli authorities to bring to justice all perpetrators of violence against civilians.” She never called on Palestinians to bring anybody to justice for anything.
As for the United States, the Harris-Biden UN Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, couldn’t manage to stay for the statement of Israel’s UN Ambassador. She walked out before Ambassador Danny Danon painfully addressed the killing of an American-Israeli hostage and five others. Her absence – from a meeting the US prompted – was the wrong signal at the wrong time.
Maybe she slunk away because of what Israel’s representative called for and the Council didn’t do. The meeting ended with no resolution, no presidential or press statement from the Council condemning Hamas for torture, starvation and execution of the Israeli hostages, and no agreement to label Hamas a terror organization. Nor did the United States put forward a resolution to do any of those things. They knew it would fail, at least without the US finally getting serious about negative consequences for UN behavior. And failure would make the administration’s weakness in the face of the Council’s moral bankruptcy more obvious. In a UN state of mind, the Council had never condemned Hamas before; why should it start with the cold-blooded execution of Jewish hostages (including an American) by genocidal mass murderers?
Israel tried to use the opportunity to attract global attention to the plight of the hostages and the suffering of Israelis. A very poignant statement to the Security Council about the hostages and their families came from Dr. Efrat Bron-Harlev, CEO of Schneider Children’s Medical Center. Ambassador Danon gave further gut-wrenching details.
But that’s not how the UN rolls. Above all, the image of an institution committed to honoring its original purposes – “to maintain international peace and security” and “the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms” – matters most, notwithstanding some glaring incompatibilities. The Russians and Chinese have a veto in the Security Council (and the majority of members of the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council are not full democracies). Thus, at the outset of the meeting, the Security Council President chose “to particularly remind all participants and speakers at today’s discussion to engage in this meeting with utmost respect and to observe appropriate standards of tone, wording, and content in their remarks.”
What he really meant was: at the UN respect is a must unless you’re attacking a Jew or the Jewish state.
