Exhibition at UN Headquarters Building Puts Into Sharp Relief World Body’s Disdain for Israel

Many at the UN dread Elise Stefanik’s arrival. An avid Israel advocate, she might attempt to slash funds for bodies like the one that organized the current exhibition.

Benny Avni
A panel in the UN exhibit on Gaza. Benny Avni

The United Nations’s one-sided obsession with Israel is reaching an apex this week, as the secretary-general and the General Assembly hone their attacks, amplified by an exhibition situated where diplomats, employees, and visitors enter the headquarters building. Will Elise Stefanik, designated to be America’s next UN ambassador, be able to change attitudes? 

The exhibition, dedicated to Gaza, is sponsored by the Palestinians at the UN, as well as the “committee on the exercise of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people,” which is one of several UN organs devoted exclusively to a single cause. 

A number of panels were hung Tuesday night on the wall where visitors enter the UN building. This prime area for exhibits is highly valued and requires approval from a UN committee, to ensure that the institution’s standards, including objectivity, are kept. 

As the first panel helpfully explains, “independent experts, jurists, scholars, and many governments and people around the world have deemed Israel’s acts of collective punishment, military attacks, forced displacement, and other violations of international law in Gaza to constitute war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide against the Palestinian people.”   

Although none of the said “experts” are identified by name, the sentiment is fairly common in the world body’s hallways. “For 77 years, you have those exhibitions, you have those debates in the General Assembly,” Israel’s ambassador at the UN, Danny Danon, told the Sun Wednesday.

The General Assembly marks an annual day of “solidarity with the Palestinian people” on November 29. That is the date that in 1947 founding Arab members of the UN and their allies objected to creating two states, Arab and Jewish, in what was then a British-mandated protectorate. The UN now expresses solidarity with those who rejected the plan it approved then. 

Following November 29, the General Assembly routinely moves on to approve nearly two-dozen resolutions condemning Israel — more than all other countries combined. Ten resolutions have already been approved this year by a sizable majority, including some that are detached from Mideast realities. 

Over the weekend the Syrian civil war reignited, with President Assad losing control of much of the state. His blood-soaked rule is now being contested by jihadist terrorists. On Tuesday the General Assembly nevertheless demanded that Israel relinquish its control over the Golan Heights — and return it to Syria.

Most of America’s European allies abstained on the Golan vote, but they voted in favor of a new Palestinian initiative that was approved by an overwhelming majority, 157 of the 193 UN members. That initiative will create yet another pro-Palestine UN bureaucracy. 

According to that new resolution, the UN will convene a “high-level conference” next June to promote a “peaceful settlement of the question of Palestine and the implementation of the two-state solution.” In a May preparatory meeting, junket-goers will demand an end to Israel’s “unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible.”

According to the exhibition at the UN entrance, those territories include Gaza. Occupied by Hamas, the Strip is where a murderous attack — unmentioned in any of the exhibition’s panels — was launched against Israel, leading to tectonic Mideast shifts. Hamas is unmentioned in the exhibit. 

“It has been 424 days since Hamas terrorists abducted innocent civilians during the barbaric October 7th attack in Israel,” Ms. Stefanik, who is President-elect Trump’s candidate to represent America at the UN, writes on X. “We MUST bring them home now.”

Many at the UN dread Ms. Stefanik’s arrival. An avid Israel advocate, she might attempt to slash funds for bodies like the one that organized the current exhibition. She might even have a word or two with Secretary-General Guterres, whose obsession with Israel has grown since the start of the war. 

“Amid the gigantic humanitarian needs in Gaza, aid is outrageously being blocked,” Mr. Guterres wrote on X Tuesday. “The nightmare is not a crisis of logistics. It’s a crisis of political will.”

The Israel Defense Force’s coordinator for the territories, known as Cogat, documents how up to 300 trucks loaded with humanitarian aid reach Gaza from Israel each day. “That trucks have crossed from Israel into Gaza at Kerem Shalom is a fact,” Mr. Guterres’s spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, said recently. Yet, “lack of safe roads, the fact that this conflict is ongoing, prevents us from accessing these goods.”

Contrary to Mr. Guterres’s X posting, aid deliveries are hampered by logistics, rather than political will. Stamens from the UN chief have angered Israeli officials for months. 

“We have 100 hostages in the hands of Hamas,” Mr. Danon notes. “I haven’t heard him speaking about it lately.” Israel is “not limiting the amount of aid coming into Gaza.” “You have gangs, you have Hamas holding the convoys. So there are many issues the secretary general forgot to mention.”


The New York Sun

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