Anti-Israel bias still a hurdle to overcome as countries stick with their old voting patterns to condemn Israel in latest UN voting.
The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan used their old anti-Israel voting patterns this week at the United Nations despite the recent advancements in peace the three countries made with Israel.
On Monday, all three nations voted to adopt a resolution that referred to Jerusalem’s Temple Mount solely by its Muslim name of Haram al-Sharif, one of seven resolutions passed that singled out or condemned Israel at a committee of the United Nations General Assembly.
Israel’s new ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, called the resolution an “audacious attempt to rewrite history.”
Erdan noted that the the pressure to denigrate Israel at the UN is still a big hurdle to overcome, but tweeted before the vote that he would “not allow this anti-Israel vote to go uncontested.”
He said the UN voted on “the annual ‘Palestinian package’ of resolutions” that single out Israel for condemnation.
Despite the Israeli envoy’s efforts to “call out the hypocrisies and lies of these resolutions, and the damage done by the countries that support them,” he admitted that he was making an “impassioned but ultimately unsuccessful plea for countries to reject the motions.”
The human rights watchdog group, UN Watch, noted that the UAE and Bahrain, which signed the Abraham Accords and established peace treaties with Israel, as well as Sudan, all voted against Israel. Sudan is expected to establish diplomatic relations with Israel in the near future.
“The UN today showed contempt for both Judaism and Christianity by passing a resolution that makes no mention of the name Temple Mount, which is Judaism’s holiest site, and which is sacred to all who venerate the Bible,” said UN Watch head Hillel Neuer.
“Today’s farce at the General Assembly underscores a simple fact: the UN’s automatic majority has no interest in truly helping Palestinians, nor in protecting anyone’s human rights; the goal of these ritual, one-sided condemnations is to scapegoat Israel,” said Neuer.
Kelly Craft, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, told the meeting that the United Nations takes up a disproportionate number of texts that are critical of Israel.
“Anti‑Israel resolutions only lock both sides in an intractable conflict,” Craft said, explaining why the U.S. would vote against the resolutions.
For two of the resolutions, the U.S. was the only country supporting Israel, but in one resolution that tried to accuse Israel of human rights violations against the Palestinians, Israel got support from the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, the Czech Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Malawi, Micronesia and Nauru.
