Still stuck in time warp

November 10, 2020

(From JNS.org)

Some of you will probably be familiar with a charming German movie, “Goodbye, Lenin,” the story of which concerns a woman in Communist-ruled East Germany who falls into a coma and wakes up a few months later in a unified, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. To avoid another shock to her delicate nervous system, the woman’s two children carefully preserve her old living environment, so as to fool her into believing that her Socialist fatherland is still intact and that the outside world is exactly the same as when she temporarily left it.

The United Nations lives in a similar alternative universe. Since its creation in 1945, a good part of its internal life has revolved around an endless cycle of committee meetings, work plans and resolutions that take little account of how the outside world is changing. On certain occasions, its deliberations can seem so out of touch with reality that you wonder whether the directors of “Goodbye, Lenin” are lurking somewhere in the background.

Last week (a momentous, exhausting week, as we all recall) was also a busy one at the world body. The U.N. General Assembly’s Fourth Committee, an entity that remains concerned with “decolonization” in an age when territorial empires are a thing of the past, passed seven resolutions, all of which focused on Israel and the Palestinians and all of which condemned Israel in resolute terms.

The sense of a time warp is magnified by the list of member states who vote in favor of these resolutions, which is the vast majority of those present. The roster of nations that lined up last week to tar Israel as a rogue state included the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan –the three Arab Gulf states that signed normalization agreements with Israel over the last few months, marking the most profound change in the dynamics of the Middle East situation in decades. The spirit of the Abraham Accords was rudely locked out of the Fourth Committee’s deliberations.

A foreign-policy realist can counter that the Fourth Committee’s deliberations mean very little, irrespective of the size of the majorities behind its various anti-Israel resolutions. Only at the United Nations is the Palestinian question still regarded as the key to regional, if not global, peace, when that view has become an anachronism everywhere else.

It is the only international body to dedicate a vast bureaucracy to the Palestinians exclusively, notable mainly for UNRWA, the Palestinian-only refugee agency, but also the General Assembly’s own “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People,” a cauldron of anti-Zionism, and the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, which reserves a permanent spot on its agenda (“Item 7”) to lacerate Israel for its alleged violations. The United Nations is also the only global body to have officially denounced Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people as a form of racism. Old habits die hard, then – but in this case, the harder they persist, the weaker their impact is upon the wider world.

I would argue differently. The difference between a cold peace and a warm peace is whether the ideas and prejudices that informed the original conflict are sustained after an agreement is signed by governments. The warm peace between Israel and the Arab states that is beginning to emerge necessitates the wholesale abandonment of the ideology of anti-Zionism that stained Arab discourse about the Jewish state for more than a century.

Where better to demonstrate that transformation than at the very body that is stuck in a time warp: the United Nations?

Richard Schifter, a much-respected U.S. diplomat and Jewish leader who recently passed away, once observed that the anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations could only be neutralized if foreign ministries explicitly instructed their delegations to vote against them. Until that happens, Schifter argued, the ambassadors in New York would not switch their votes, regardless of their personal feelings on the subject. And indeed, that is why numerous other countries that retain diplomatic relations with Israel will nonetheless either vote for or abstain on these heinous resolutions.

If the Middle East is really to enter an era distinguished by its “good feelings,” then the rest of the world must play its part. Ending the political warfare waged against Israel from within the United Nations is a major element of that contribution, but members will not step up without a positive signal from those Arab states now at peace with Israel. The next time the Fourth Committee or any other U.N. body meets for its ritual denunciation of Israel, let us work for the unexpected outcome.

Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS. Top read more of Cohen’s columns, visit cjn.org/cohen.

Jerusalem Post

By DANIEL S. MARIASCHIN, RICHARD SCHIFTER

Women in Gaza City protest normalization of relations between the UAE and Israel, in August, 2020.

For the past several decades, the United Nations General Assembly has dutifully approved the funding of the so-called specialized “Palestinian committees,” each of which advances only one side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The UN has an opportunity to cut off this funding supply by year-end, thereby righting a decades-long wrong and in turn, ending a long-standing charade.

 

Created in the aftermath of the infamous 1975 Zionism=Racism resolution, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) and the Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) are powerful, enduring vestiges of a discredited policy that has seen the world body largely aligned against Israel, not only in New York, but at UN agencies such as the Human Rights Council in Geneva, and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) in Paris.

 

 

The CEIRPP organizes conferences, photo exhibitions and other programs around the world aimed at undermining, discrediting and demonizing Israel. It does so with the active cooperation of the UN’s Department of Global Communications.

 

The DPR actually sits inside the UN Secretariat, giving the Palestinians a UN home no other people or sovereign state has. DPR sits alongside regional units such as the Asian, the African and Latin American, and the Caribbean groups of the UN system. The DPR works together with CEIRPP to organize an annual International Day of Solidarity for the Palestinian People, and maintains UN web-based information systems devoted to the Palestinian side of the conflict.

 

At the core of the work of these offices is the perpetuation of “the right of return” narrative that demands all Palestinians considered by the UN to be refugees have a right to “return” to pre-state Israel. Since 1949 the UN has, through the creation of UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency), aggressively advanced this position.

 

So why are millions of people classified as refugees? Because as “refugees” they maintain their claim to migrate to Israel in order to overwhelm the Jewish majority and thus end the existence of the State of Israel.

 

According to the UN, there are now 5.5 million such refugees, less than 1% of whom were actual refugees from the War of Independence in 1948. More than 99% are their descendants, now five generations on. The UN has endeavored to find solutions to nearly every other refugee crisis in the world over the years, largely by resettling people in the lands to which they fled.

 

Only in the case of the Palestinians has an infrastructure been established to perpetuate a crisis. Over these past seven decades UNRWA, through its schools and other services, and the UN system have held out the promise that all Palestinians will one day “return” to what is now the State of Israel.

 

In fact, 40% of these “refugees” already live on the West Bank and in Gaza among fellow Palestinians, yet they maintain a status of refugees, so they would be able to migrate to Israel under the “right of return.” Another 40% live in Jordan, where many acquired Jordanian citizenship. They, too, live among people with whom they share religion and language, but maintain their refugee status so as to qualify for a “right of return,” as do the remaining 20% who live in Syria, Lebanon and other Arab countries.

 

THE RECENTLY signed peace agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and with Bahrain, and actions and public statements by other Arab states, suggest that the Palestinian program to end Israel’s existence is losing support among some Arabs. The world – and especially the region – have moved on. Other considerations, largely based on national interest, have taken precedence: the threat of Iranian hegemony, trade and investment and even tourism, are incentives to normalization.

 

The Palestinians have overplayed their hand, pressing for a zero-sum outcome to the conflict with Israel, and especially by its leaders missing opportunity after opportunity to conclude a peace with Israel in the 27 years since the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993.

 

The Palestinian reaction to the Abraham Accords has been a vehement reassertion of their position, including the “right of return,” made possible, in large part by the automatic reinforcement they receive at the UN

 

It is the UN, created to “maintain peace and security,” that encourages the Palestinians to hold out for their one state solution: A “Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” a goal to be attained through a “right of return.”

 

The CEIRIPP and the DPR are the chief proponents of this campaign, but are aided by regional groups at the UN such as the Group of 77 (known for years as the “Non-Aligned”) and a raft of anti-Israel resolutions adopted by rote at the Human Rights Council and other UN agencies, including the World Heritage Committee, a sub-group of UNESCO.

 

The Palestinian claim of a “right of return” is simply an obstacle to peace; it has become the third rail of the conflict. No one dares touch it; no friends of the Palestinians – and there are several amongst the European countries – seem interested in persuading them that the idea is simply a non-starter. It is not going to happen. No Israeli government from anywhere on the political spectrum would sign its own national suicide warrant.

 

The vote count supporting funding of the Palestinian committees is dropping; the number of “no” votes to fund these committees is rising – slightly – with a large number of abstentions and those voting “absent.”

 

A new wind is blowing in the region. “Normalization” is in, and obstructionism is on its way out. Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and perhaps others to come are demonstrating that where there is good will to resolve more than seven decades of animosity, economic warfare and the absence of real human interaction, reconciliation can follow.

 

Spending millions of dollars on conferences that perpetuate the “right of return” mantra and the constant efforts to delegitimize Israel is both a waste of time and a sure prescription for the UN to become increasingly irrelevant when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

 

The responsible member states of the UN need to look out the window and see the dramatic, positive changes that are taking place across the region, despite attempts by Iran and its proxies and terrorist surrogates to perpetuate chaos and instability.

 

Depoliticizing “peacemaking” at the UN by eliminating the CEIRIPP and the DPR would send a clear message to the Palestinians and their friends that the free ride is over. That will tell us whether or not they are really interested in emulating their neighbors who have reached historic accords with Israel.

 

Until the UN ends its support of the “right of return,” we cannot expect meaningful progress toward a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

 

Ambassador Richard Schifter, who died on October 3, was most recently the Chairman of AJIRI and former US ambassador to the UN in Geneva. Daniel S. Mariaschin is the CEO of B’nai B’rith International.

(WorldNet Daily) October 16, 2020

By Lt. Col. James Zumwalt

We are experiencing a time when words, long having an understood meaning, are being replaced by words more politically correct (PC). But one word PC activists seek to keep while expanding its meaning is “hero.” It is a title participants in today’s rioting in various American cities are, undeservedly, seeking to be grouped. We can never becloud the true meaning of hero with that of non-hero for it denigrates those whose selfless acts have done so much to enrich life for their fellow man.

On Oct. 3, we lost one of those true heroes. Ambassador Richard Schifter, 97, had devoted his lifetime to leaving us with a better world than the one he inherited – one bringing him tremendous tragedy in his early years.

Born in Austria before Europe would be torn apart by World War II, Schifter was fortunate to have parents, able to foresee the anti-Semitic tsunami coming, who took action to send their son, then 15, to America alone in 1938. Schifter would never see his parents again. He would be the only member of his family to escape the Holocaust – the only evidence remaining of their existence in the ashes of a concentration camp’s crematorium.

by Algemeiner Staff

Ambassador Richard Schifter, who died on Oct. 4, 2020, seen addressing the United Nations. Photo: UN Watch.

Richard Schifter, one of the the US Jewish community’s foremost diplomats and advocates, passed away on Sunday at the age of 97, drawing a flood of tributes for a lifetime of achievement in Jewish and international affairs.

A former assistant secretary of state during the Reagan administration who fled Nazi-annexed Austria as a teenager, Schifter would be remembered as an “American patriot and a proud son of the Jewish people,” Gil Kapen — a board member of the American Jewish International Relations Institute (AJIRI), a think tank founded by Schifter — told The Algemeiner on Monday.

Born in Vienna to Polish-Jewish emigres in 1923, Schifter was the only member of his family to receive a visa to enter the US following the “Anschluss” — Adolf Hitler’s annexation of Austria into the German Reich in March 1938.

Five years after arriving in America, he returned to Europe with the US Army as one of the “Ritchie Boys” — German-speaking military intelligence officers, many of them Jews, who were trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland in psychological warfare operations.

While serving in Europe, Schifter learned that most of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust.

After returning to the US and graduating from Yale Law School in 1951, Schifter began a distinguished career in the private sector, becoming one of the main attorneys for the Oglala Sioux tribe of South Dakota in its repeated battles with the US government. He moved into diplomacy in the 1980s, representing the US at the UN Commission on Human Rights and at the UN Security Council, achieving the rank of ambassador.

In 1985, then-President Ronald Reagan appointed Schifter as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, a position he held until 1992. During President Bill Clinton’s administration, Schifter served as a special assistant in the US National Security Council for nearly a decade.

Schifter founded AJIRI after leaving government in 2001. Much of the institute’s work focused on countering the demonization of Israel at the United Nations, such as the labeling of Zionism as a form of racism as well as the comparisons drawn between the Jewish state and the former apartheid regime in South Africa.

In a 2014 interview with The Tower magazine, Schifter argued that negative voting behavior at the UN with regard to Israel would only change once delegates were explicitly instructed to reject anti-Israel resolutions by their heads of government.

“A significant number of ambassadors in New York vote against Israel without instructions from their governments,” he  explained. “So the answer to the problem is that you reach out to heads of government. You get them to give instructions to the ambassadors on how to vote.”

Kapen praised Schifter as “a towering figure who made a huge positive impact on the world.”

“As a soldier, diplomat and fighter for freedom and human rights, he lived a legendary life,” Kapen said. “His tireless efforts on behalf of democracy and against the unfair treatment of Israel at the UN continued until the last days of his life.”

Schifter’s “wisdom and his many accomplishments were matched only by his kindness and humility,” Kapen recalled.  “He won the undying admiration and affection of all who knew him.”

Other warm tributes to Schifter came from Alfred Moses, also a former American diplomat, as well as US Jewish organizations.

“Dick Schifter dedicated his life to helping others,” Moses — chair of the Geneva-based advocacy organization UN Watch — said in a statement. “Having lost his parents and much of his family in the Holocaust, he gave of himself, professionally and personally to advance human rights and protect the dignity of people around the world.”

A statement from the Washington, DC-based B’nai B’rith International organization lauded Schifter as “an inspirational leader, accomplished diplomat, public servant, staunch advocate for human rights, a resolute defender of Israel, a strong proponent of trans-Atlantic relations and of America’s place in the world.”

The group said that it had reached an agreement with AJIRI in September to merge, in order to “continue to advance the groundbreaking work both organizations have undertaken separately in the realm of fair treatment for Israel on the world stage.”

Paying tribute from the Israeli government, Israeli Foreign Ministry Director-General Alon Ushpiz called Schifter  “a symbol of perseverance and strength who achieved much in his lifetime and worked endlessly on improving Israel’s position in the UN,” in a Twitter post on Sunday.

 

(Times of Israel)

Hailed as a defender of Israel, the Austrian-born adviser to three American presidents was the only member of his family to escape the Holocaust

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/united-nations-not-thrilled-about-middle-eastern-nations-uniting

(Washington Examiner, August 24, 2020)

The United Arab Emirates and Israel took the historic step of normalizing diplomatic relations this month. But you would never know how positive this development is for regional peace based on the United Nations’ tepid response, which focused on the Palestinians. The U.N’s continued perseveration about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict underscores how the international organization, whose mission is to promote “international peace and security,” has become an overt champion of one side of a conflict and a detractor of another side. To uphold its mission fairly and justly, this must change.

This was not the first time the U.N. promoted the Palestinian agenda to the detriment of regional peace initiatives. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat shocked the Arab world in September 1978 when he became the first Middle Eastern leader to sign a peace agreement with Israel. Three months later, in resolution 33/28A, the U.N. General Assembly condemned Egypt for bypassing the U.N. and for not resolving the Palestinian issue. The General Assembly followed up in December 1979 with resolution 34/65, which again argued that regional security, somehow subordinate to the Israeli-Palestinian issue, would deteriorate with an Egyptian-Israeli deal. Both resolutions drew heavily from reports produced by the U.N. Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

That committee is part of an infrastructure of pro-Palestinian institutions within the U.N. system. To be sure, Palestinians deserve international support. Even while their situation today in part results from decades of rejectionism by failed leaders who have openly engaged in terrorism against Israel and others, Palestinians need humanitarian assistance. However, the U.N’s unconditional acceptance of the one-sided Palestinian narrative has served to unfairly malign Israel and harm prospects for peace.

The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People was created in 1975, in the same session as the infamous “Zionism is Racism” resolution, which vilified the movement for Jewish autonomy. When the resolution passed, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Daniel Patrick Moynihan proclaimed, “A great evil has been loosed upon the world.” To this day, the committee produces a steady stream of anti-Israel resolutions that the General Assembly rubber-stamps.

The U.N. created additional bodies to assist in the committee’s work. The Division for Palestinian Rights, with an annual budget of nearly $3 million under the Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs, serves as the committee’s secretariat. The U.N. Information System on the Question of Palestine operates under the Division for Palestinian Rights as a pro-Palestinian propaganda arm. Tellingly, the U.N. has no other similar network of bodies devoted to promoting one people’s narrative, or to refuting that of another.

But the U.N’s pervasive anti-Israel bias does not end there. In December 1968, the U.N. created the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People, whose mandate is to investigate alleged Israeli abuses.

That U.N. committee is reminiscent of the U.N. Human Rights Council’s commissions of inquiry following Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. These commissions presumed Israeli guilt and were directed to focus only on Israeli actions. Indeed, the U.N. Human Rights Council has a rapporteur whose mandate exclusively calls for exposing Israeli crimes and not Palestinian ones. Systematic bias is hard to deny, as this flawed forum has produced about as many resolutions criticizing Israel as resolutions criticizing every other country in the world combined.

The U.N. also operates the U.N. Relief and Works Agency, a refugee agency devoted exclusively to the Palestinians. The agency maintains a broader definition for refugees than that of the U.N’s actual refugee agency, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, allowing an initial refugee population in the hundreds of thousands to balloon to well over 5 million by allowing descendants of refugees to claim this status. The Relief and Works Agency also indulges a fictional Palestinian “right of return” to Israel, which has emerged as one of the primary obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace, particularly as it has encouraged Palestinian obstinacy at the negotiating table. Remarkably, the Relief and Works Agency has three times as many employees as the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, and spends considerably more per refugee.

In recent years, the United States has begun to push back against these biased U.N. bodies. The U.S. cut funding to the Relief and Works Agency and left the Human Rights Council. The U.S. can do more, however. It should reduce its contributions to the U.N. by an amount proportional to America’s share of the budgets for the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the Division for Palestinian Rights, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, and any other Palestinian-specific body. For example, the U.S. should withhold some $600,000, its share of the Division for Palestinian Rights’ budget.

Other countries are beginning to express concern about the U.N’s Palestinian bias, too. In recent years, the United Kingdom has opposed all Human Rights Council resolutions presented under an agenda item dedicated to castigating Israel. And, recognizing the discriminatory nature of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, Ukraine departed the committee in early 2020. To build on this, the U.S. should encourage committee members with close ties to Israel, such as India and Cyprus, to follow suit.

New possibilities are emerging in the Middle East. The UAE has broken the taboo of normalization with Israel, while other countries, such as Bahrain, Oman, and Morocco, may soon follow. The U.N. should encourage this instead of promoting the false notion that Palestinian grievances should supersede support for peace and security efforts. When the U.N. encourages maximalist Palestinian demands, it makes regional peace less likely. Systemwide changes are needed.

Ambassador Schifter was interviewed recently by Leon Goldenberg for the popular “Community Matters” radio program, heard weekly in the New York area on WSNR, AM 620.

Palestinian Arabs cannot sign an agreement that ends all claims and recognizes the right of a Jewish state to exist and live unmolested on land that was ever Muslim.

According to the usual international peace negotiators, everyone knows the end game to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, exactly what each party must concede for a final treaty. They say all that is needed is for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines with minor adjustments, with east Jerusalem as the capital of the new Palestinian state. If only Israel offered that, peace would reign.

If the Palestinians’ goal was truly two states for two peoples, and they truly wanted an independent Palestinian state living side by side a Jewish state, as UNGA Resolution 181 called for, why has this conflict not been resolved?