A special session was held on Friday in the United Nations General Assembly in which the President of the Human Rights Council presented its annual report to all UN member states.
As expected, extensive sections of the report condemned and criticized Israel, including the establishment of a biased Commission of Inquiry against Israel following Operation Guardian of the Walls in May, which completely ignored Hamas and its attacks on Israeli citizens.
Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, responded to the report in a speech in which he tore a copy of the report to pieces on the UN General Assembly stage.
"The voices of the victims, of the terrible crimes against humanity that we have already seen in the first decades of this century, cannot be heard over the obsession of the so-called Human Rights Council with targeting Israel," he said.
"Since the establishment of the council 15 years ago, it has decided to blame and condemn Israel, not 10 times like Iran, or 35 times like Syria. No, the Human Rights Council has attacked Israel with 95 resolutions. Compared to 142 against all other countries combined," added Erdan.
"The Human rights Council suddenly became the Harry Potter Council, able to make all of Hamas’ war crimes and atrocities, namely the 4,300 Hamas rockets fired at Israeli civilians, magically disappear," he stated.
"By whitewashing Hamas’ terror attacks and focusing so much time and energy on Israel, the suffering of the victims of humanity’s greatest crimes goes unnoticed. Shame on you, shame on you, shame on you!"
Ambassador Erdan concluded his speech by saying, "It was on this stage, at this very body, that the very right of the Jewish people, to have a national home, was itself declared to be racist. A decision that was justly over-turned. A decision that Israel’s Ambassador at the time, Chaim Herzog, tore up, before the United Nations. And this is exactly what should be done to this anti-Semitic, distorted, one-sided report. For just as that 1975 resolution, equating Zionism with racism, was itself a gross form of anti-Jewish racism, which has no place in this international body, so to, the Human Rights Council’s obsessive anti-Israel bias, embodied, once again, by this report, should have no place in any body concerned with human rights, security or peace.”
“Its only place is in the dustbin of antisemitism, and that is exactly how we shall treat it.”
The UNHRC continues to pass resolutions condemning Israel and, more recently, announced the formation of a commission chaired by Navi Pillay to investigate what was described as “systematic” abuses allegedly committed in Israel and Palestinian Authority territories during violence between Hamas and Israel in May.
Former US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from the UNHRC in 2018, citing its longstanding anti-Israel bias.
The Biden Administration returned to the organization recently even though it acknowledged its “disproportionate focus” on Israel. WATCH
