UNM Israel Alliance

Caroline Glick, Jerusalem Post

The growing power of the UN-based international community is one of the gravest emerging threats to Israel’s national security.

This threat stems from two sources. First, the UN-led system of global governance is working to redefine international law by on the one hand whitewashing war crimes by states associated with the majority, and on the other hand rendering it illegal for unpopular countries to take action to protect themselves against aggression. Second, and most important, Israel has become the scapegoat of the UN-led international community. The 57-member Islamic bloc has built an automatic majority for its unrelenting and ever-escalating assaults on Israel’s right to exist.

The new – and false – interpretation of international law gives every General Assembly resolution the weight of binding Security Council resolutions and international treaties. Among this new “legal” regime’s most dangerous features is its bid to overturn state sovereignty by subjecting leading citizens of weak states to politically-motivated criminal prosecutions under the rubric of universal jurisdiction.

With Israel’s right to exist – let alone to defend itself – being denied in an avalanche of General Assembly and Human Rights Council resolutions, the acceptance of universal jurisdiction is a short step away from turning every Jewish citizen of Israel into an international outlaw.

THIS ESCALATING threat is already hurting Israel’s ability to carry out routine relations with foreign countries. Just last week the IDF was compelled to cancel plans to send a delegation of its officers to England for a joint conference on asymmetric warfare after British authorities were unable to promise that their guests from the IDF wouldn’t be arrested over spurious war crimes allegations during their stay.

During her visit to Israel this week, British Attorney-General Patricia Scotland made clear that the British government is unwilling to cancel Britain’s universal jurisdiction law despite the fact that anti-Israel activists exploit the law to abuse Israeli officials visiting her country.

In her view, the most important thing is for Britain to maintain its commitment to universal jurisdiction. Any mitigation of the right of unaccountable, anti-Israel British judges to issue arrest warrants would, in her mind, water down this most precious of legalisms.

While Britain demonstrates that it prefers international legal conceit to both justice and its bilateral relations with Israel, senior Israeli jurists are making clear that they prefer to maintain their good reputations in places like London over defending the actual legal rights of their country.

On Monday, former Supreme Court president Aharon Barak announced that in his view, Israel should accept the jurisdiction of the inherently anti-Israel International Criminal Court. In his words, “Israel is part of the international community, and it must conduct itself in accordance with the interpretation that is common ininternational law.”

The fact that this “common interpretation” is common only when convenient and is actually antithetical to international law and to the rights of nations is of no interest to Barak. Also of no interest to Israel’s international legal superstar is the fact that the institution set to do the judging is politically stacked against Israel, and that the Islamic bloc-dominated “international community” redefinedinternational law for the purposes of the ICC to make all Israeli communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines criminal.

Concerned not only about the anti-Israel likes of Richard Goldstone but also about the likes of “international community” obsessed Barak, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi this week ordered army commanders to integrate legal advisers in decision-making not only during the planning of battles, but also during battles themselves.

In an effort to offset some of the crushing pressure the UN-led international community is placing on Israel to stop defending itself, senior IDF officers have been dispatched to lobby US and UN officials. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how the IDF’s efforts to convince the UN or the US that it upholdsinternational law will make any difference. The UN is a lost cause and under US President Barack Obama, America has been moving swiftly in the direction of Europe in accepting the authority of the UN as the linchpin of a morally-relativist, post-nationalist, philo-Islamic international system.

In his speech at the UN General Assembly in September, Obama renounced the US’s right to lead the international community when he proclaimed, “No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.”

Obama’s decisions to try terrorists as criminal defendants; to close the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay; to join the UN Human Rights Council; and to open criminal investigations against US intelligence operatives all demonstrate that the US supports the expansion of the power of the UN-led international system against actualinternational law that views independent nation-states rather than the UN as the foundation of the international legal system.

America’s behavior towards the UN today should serve as a reminder to Israel that we mustn’t put all our diplomatic eggs in America’s basket. If we wish to neutralize the threat the UN-based international community poses to our national interests, we must expand our international alliances.

IN OUR efforts we have a potential ally in China. One of Beijing’s abiding positions is that it opposes UN sanctions on individual states. In the Chinese view, such sanctions diminish national rights to sovereignty. It is on the basis of this claim that China has justified opposing sanctions against rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

Israel should make the case to the Chinese that China should back Israel in international institutions, by among other things vetoing UNSecurity Council resolutions against Israel. If in defense of the principle of sovereignty China is willing to block sanctions against Iran and North Korea, then surely Beijing should be willing to take the far more benign step of supporting Israel.

China’s willingness to buck the US and Europe in refusing to support sanctions against international rogue states has expanded China’s international influence by making it a country that cannot be taken for granted. Likewise, were China to block international sanctions against Israel, it would become an influential player in the big power game in the Middle East. And whereas its support for Iran and North Korea potentially endangers China by empowering destabilizing actors, support for Israel would serve China’s interest of enhancing regional stability since a strong Israel deters regional aggressors from stirring up trouble.

Israel should back up its approach to China with a prolonged public diplomacy campaign to educate the Chinese about the Jewish state. A groundbreaking effort in this field is being initiated this week by StandWithUs, the US-based Israel-advocacy organization. This week, StandWithUs members from Israel will travel to Harbin, China, to present a photography exhibit called “Inside Israel.” Their goal is to educate the Chinese about Judaism, Israel’s history and life in Israel.

It is true that China does not share Israel’s democratic values. Owing to this, it may be difficult for Israel to sustain a bilateral alliance with China over time. However, China and Israel share the distinction of being the two oldest, continuous civilizations. This shared direct line to antiquity can form the basis of a strong bilateral relationship. It is already a source of Chinese attraction to the Jewish state.

Over the past 15 years or so, Israel’s expanding trade ties with China have been a source of friction with the US. As the US turned a blind eye to Chinese theft of US military technologies at places like Los Alamos, New Mexico, American officials were quick to attack Israel for selling military technologies to Beijing. To placate Washington, Israel effectively ended its military sales toChina in recent years. It is probably reasonable to continue this practice if only because there is a strong likelihood that China will sell Israel’s military technologies to the likes of Iran and Syria.

At any rate, it is not anti-American for Israel to cultivate closer ties to China. As America’s alliances with Israel and Saudi Arabia and its courtship of Iran and Syria show, international affairs are not and should not be monogamous. This has never been more apparent than now. The Obama administration’s moves to subordinate US foreign policy to the UN-based international community make it less clear that Israel can rely on the White House to veto anti-Israel resolutions in the Security Council.

It is fortuitous that this time, when Israel’s need to diversify its international affairs has become acute, that the foreign minister is not a Shimon Peres-type who believes that Israel’s ability to achieve its national interest is a function of the number of European cocktail parties he attends. Whatever Avigdor Lieberman’s drawbacks may be, they clearly don’t include excessive worship of the international community’s taste for opulent statecraft or a desperate desire to be loved by Europe.

From his first moments on the job, as the Obama administration subordinated the US’s joint interests with Israel to the president’s dream of establishing a Palestinian state by 2011, Lieberman moved quickly to diversify Israel’s international ties. Noting that his predecessors harmed Israel by behaving as though our international relations began and ended with negotiations with the Palestinians, Lieberman turned his attention to the great world they ignored.

In September, Lieberman travelled to Africa. There he bolstered Israel’s strategic ties with potential allies in Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria. In July, he went to South America with the declared goal of blunting Iran’s influence in the continent. In at least one of the countries he visited – Colombia – great potential exists for a strategic alliance.

On Tuesday, Lieberman reached out to the Balkans. During a meeting with visiting Macedonian Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, he noted that the forces of global jihad are making a concerted effort to penetrate the Balkans through the Albanian and Bosnian Muslim communities. This encroaching threat should induce states like Macedonia to enhance their relations with Israel.

Lieberman should seek a diplomatic opening to China just as he has reached out to states in Africa, South America and the Balkans, as well as to Russia. With its Security Council veto,China would be a major asset to Israel in its bid to neutralize the UN-centered international community’s campaign to delegitimize its right to exist.

By supporting Israel, Beijing stands to lose nothing and gain a great deal. Just as China’s support for Iran has not harmed its trade ties – and its burgeoning military ties – with the likes of Saudi Arabia, so its support for Israel will likely have no impact on its ties in the Arab world. More important for China, its support for Israel would enhance its ability to challenge the UN-besotted Obama White House in the great power game.

Ironically, to the extent that by supporting Israel China secures the rights of nation-states threatened by the rapidly expanding UN colossus, China will become a pivotal defender of embattled democracies on the world stage.

Bernard Glick, published in the Oregon Stump on Dec. 28, 2009

Over the past 60 years, the political architecture and political mathematics of the United Nations have changed drastically. Not only has the number of non-permanent members in the Security Council been increased from six to 10, but the pivotal position in the General Assembly once held by Latin America is now held by Third World countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. They have hijacked the U.N. and transformed it into one of the most anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic organizations on the planet.

They are also determined to make the U.N. the substitute for sovereignty and the surrogate for a state’s decision-making institutions. Except when their own interests are at stake, they preach that the Security Council is the government of the Earth and the General Assembly the parliament of mankind.

The United States can keep the Security Council at bay because it has a veto there. But in the veto-free General Assembly, America, which pays 20 percent of the United Nations’ regular budget and about a third of its peacekeeping budget, has only four options: Either it abstains on a resolution, or it supports one it doesn’t like, or it introduces one it does like, or it waters it down to utter ineffectiveness in order to get the two-thirds vote required to pass a resolution in a General Assembly that is unrecognizably different from the one the U.N.’s founders envisaged in San Francisco in 1945. The situation is now so bad that it forced John Bolton, when he was the United States ambassador to the United Nations, to remark: “Many people want me to be the U.N.’s ambassador to the U.S. That is not my job. I am the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., and my primary duty is to advance U.S. foreign policy.”

States, like individuals, can be inert. They tend to cling to policies and processes long after they have ceased serving intended purposes. One example is America’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Only God knows why the United States still belongs to NATO. It is a Cold War anachronism whose only purpose was to deter Soviet aggression in Western Europe. The Soviet Union is gone, but Europeans still want America to help them whenever they get into trouble. However, they have neither the means nor the will to help America when it gets into trouble.

Another example of how inertia triumphs over intelligence is America’s membership in the United Nations. Although the United States was one of the organization’s founding members, it should separate itself from that body. And while it is doing that, it ought to encourage the United Nations to move its headquarters from New York City to a place more congenial to its orientation.

Whatever usefulness the U.N. had in its early years has been dissipated by its indecency and irresponsibility in later years. A case in point is its incessant denunciations of Israel, to which it gave birth and legitimacy when it adopted the Palestine partition resolution in November 1947. Palestine and Israel aside, really important events, such as America’s recognition of Communist China, the ending of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the defusing of the Cuban missile crisis, were settled not by the United Nations but by diplomats operating outside the world organization.

To those who would say that America’s jettisoning the United Nations would mean its return to pre-Second World War isolationism, one should answer that in the age of the computer, the Internet, and the high-speed airplane, the United States can defend its interests and still be part of the world in old-fashioned ways: ambassadorial diplomacy, summit meetings, trade talks, cultural and scientific exchanges, and bilateral and multilateral treaties.

When a more realistic administration comes to Washington, one of its first moves should be starting the legal and administrative process of extracting the United States from the United Nations, and the United Nations from the United States. Surely, America can find better domestic uses for the U.N. dues it pays and for the money it loses from the expensive untaxed property along New York’s East River.

Edward Bernard Glick of Northwest Portland is a professor emeritus of political science at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Transcription from IMRA, 24/09/2009

Mr. President,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Nearly 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years-old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland.

I stand here today as the Prime Minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday the President of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

Last month, I went to a villa in a suburb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on January 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler’s deputy, Heinrich Himmler himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie? And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife’s grandparents, her father’s two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You’re wrong. History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

This Iranian regime is fueled by an extreme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries.

In the past thirty years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus, and many others. Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times. Wherever they can, they impose a backward regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.

The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization. It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death. The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day.

Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope. The pace of progress is growing exponentially. It took us centuries to get from the printing press to the telephone, decades to get from the telephone to the personal computer, and only a few years to get from the personal computer to the internet.

What seemed impossible a few years ago is already outdated, and we can scarcely fathom the changes that are yet to come.

We will crack the genetic code. We will cure the incurable. We will lengthen our lives. We will find a cheap alternative to fossil fuels and clean up the planet.

I am proud that my country Israel is at the forefront of these advances – by leading innovations in science and technology, medicine and biology, agriculture and water, energy and the environment. These innovations the world over offer humanity a sunlit future of unimagined promise.

But if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after a horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind.

That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction, and the most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood?

Will the international community thwart the world’s most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen,
The jury is still out on the United Nations, and recent signs are not encouraging.

Rather than condemning the terrorists and their Iranian patrons, some here have condemned their victims. That is exactly what a recent UN report on Gaza did, falsely equating the terrorists with those they targeted.

For eight long years, Hamas fired from Gaza thousands of missiles, mortars and rockets on nearby Israeli cities. Year after year, as these missiles were deliberately hurled at our civilians, not a single UN resolution was passed condemning those criminal attacks.

We heard nothing – absolutely nothing – from the UN Human Rights Council, a
misnamed institution if there ever was one.

In 2005, hoping to advance peace, Israel unilaterally withdrew from every inch of Gaza. It dismantled 21 settlements and uprooted over 8,000 Israelis.

We didn’t get peace. Instead we got an Iranian backed terror base fifty miles from Tel Aviv. Life in Israeli towns and cities next to Gaza became a nightmare.

You see, the Hamas rocket attacks not only continued, they increased tenfold. Again, the UN was silent.

Finally, after eight years of this unremitting assault, Israel was finally forced to respond. But how should we have responded?

Well, there is only one example in history of thousands of rockets being fired on a country’s civilian population. It happened when the Nazis rocketed British cities during World War II.

During that war, the allies leveled German cities, causing hundreds of thousands of casualties. Israel chose to respond differently. Faced with an enemy committing a double war crime of firing on civilians while hiding behind civilians – Israel sought to conduct surgical strikes against the rocket launchers.

That was no easy task because the terrorists were firing missiles from homes and schools, using mosques as weapons depots and ferreting explosives in ambulances.

Israel, by contrast, tried to minimize casualties by urging Palestinian civilians to vacate the targeted areas. We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave.

Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way. Yet faced with such a clear case of aggressor and victim, who did the UN Human Rights Council decide to condemn?
Israel.

A democracy legitimately defending itself against terror is morally hanged, drawn and quartered, and given an unfair trial to boot.

By these twisted standards, the UN Human Rights Council would have dragged Roosevelt and Churchill to the dock as war criminals. What a perversion of truth! What a perversion of justice!

Delegates of the United Nations,
Will you accept this farce? Because if you do, the United Nations would revert to its darkest days, when the worst violators of human rights sat in judgment against the law-abiding democracies, when Zionism was equated with racism and when an automatic majority could declare that the earth is flat.

If this body does not reject this report, it would send a message to terrorists everywhere: Terror pays; if you launch your attacks from densely populated areas, you will win immunity.

And in condemning Israel, this body would also deal a mortal blow to peace. Here’s why. When Israel left Gaza, many hoped that the missile attacks would stop. Others believed that at the very least, Israel would have international legitimacy to exercise its right of self-defense.

What legitimacy? What self-defense?

The same UN that cheered Israel as it left Gaza and promised to back our
right of self-defense now accuses us -my people, my country – of war crimes?
And for what? For acting responsibly in self-defense. What a travesty!

Israel justly defended itself against terror. This biased and unjust report is a clear-cut test for all governments. Will you stand with Israel or will you stand with the terrorists?

We must know the answer to that question now. Now and not later. Because if Israel is again asked to take more risks for peace, we must know today that you will stand with us tomorrow.

Only if we have the confidence that we can defend ourselves can we take further risks for peace.

Ladies and Gentlemen,
All of Israel wants peace. Any time an Arab leader genuinely wanted peace with us, we made peace. We made peace with Egypt led by Anwar Sadat. We made peace with Jordan led by King Hussein.

And if the Palestinians truly want peace, I and my government, and the people of Israel, will make peace. But we want a genuine peace, a defensible peace, a permanent peace.

In 1947, this body voted to establish two states for two peoples – a Jewish state and an Arab state. The Jews accepted that resolution. The Arabs rejected it. We ask the Palestinians to finally do what they have refused to do for 62 years: Say yes to a Jewish state.

Just as we are asked to recognize a nation-state for the Palestinian people, the Palestinians must be asked to recognize the nation state of the Jewish people. The Jewish people are not foreign conquerors in the Land of Israel. This is the land of our forefathers.

Inscribed on the walls outside this building is the great Biblical vision of peace: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. They shall learn war no more.” These words were spoken by the Jewish prophet Isaiah 2,800 years ago as he walked in my country, in my city – in the hills of Judea and in
the streets of Jerusalem. We are not strangers to this land. It is our homeland.

As deeply connected as we are to this land, we recognize that the Palestinians also live there and want a home of their own. We want to live side by side with them, two free peoples living in peace, prosperity and dignity.

But we must have security. The Palestinians should have all the powers to govern themselves except those handful of powers that could endanger Israel.

That is why a Palestinian state must be effectively demilitarized. We don’t want another Gaza, another Iranian backed terror base abutting Jerusalem and perched on the hills a few kilometers from Tel Aviv.

We want peace.

I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order.

The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them.

Over seventy years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the “confirmed unteachability of mankind,” the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them.

Churchill bemoaned what he called the “want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong.”

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill’s assessment of the “unteachability of mankind” is for once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history — that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.