The UN envoy blasts world body for focusing on Israel instead of on Palestinian terrorists and their Iranian backer – or the Ukrainian crisis.
By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News
Ambassador Gilad Erdan slammed Palestinian claims about Israeli “apartheid” at a United Nations Security Council meeting Wednesday, wondering aloud how the international body could ignore real human rights violations, including the current Ukrainian crisis.
In a special debate devoted to the Middle East conflict, the Palestinian representative accused Israel of apartheid several times and even wore a mask with the words “Stop Apartheid.”
Erdan responded sharply, saying, “Can anyone honestly look me in the eye and tell me that Israel, a country that protects the social and political equality of all of its citizens, is guilty of systematic injustice? A country in which Arab doctors, Arab members of parliament and Arab ministers serve alongside their Jewish counterparts?”
“While these organizations, in addition to UN bodies, spend countless hours and resources demonizing Israel, to find true discrimination and human rights violations they do not have to look far,” he added. “All they have to do is look at how the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas treat political dissidents, minorities, women, and the LGBTQ community.
“Where are the reports condemning the Palestinian law threatening life imprisonment for selling land to someone only because they were born a Jew? Where are the humanitarian organizations decrying the PA’s pay-for-slay policy?”
The PA pays terrorists jailed in Israel for attempting attacks or actually injuring and murdering Israelis on a sliding scale, depending on how “successful” the attacks were. It also provides a stipend to families of terrorists killed during the assaults.
“Iran, the world’s number one state-sponsor of terror, spreads chaos and death across the region. It funds an army of six terrorist proxies dedicated to establishing a Shiite hegemony throughout the region,” Erdan said, adding, “If this is how Iran acts now, it is frightening to imagine what the region will look like when Iran becomes a nuclear threshold state.”
“This council repeatedly refuses to address” the threat, he stated.
Erdan said that there were also far more serious issues for the Council to deal with right now than what he called the Palestinians’ “false allegations.”
“The clouds of unrest, violence, and war cast long shadows across the world,” he said, broadly hinting to the start of Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine. “One might wonder what the urgency was to turn a closed monthly debate into an open one while such critical matters to global security are being discussed in the General Assembly as we speak.”