The Statistically & Structurally Anti-Israel UN

Martial arts experts from formalistic styles like karate to raw brawling approaches like MMA teach that a fight turns into a lynch when the victim-to-be starts to cower and withdraw. The aggressors, for whatever reason, are emboldened by the victim's stance of helplessness and so the lynch begins.

With regard to Israel, this is exactly what has happened at the UN under the guise of civil, diplomatic and, of all things, democratic discourse. In fact, the UN's attitude and behavior towards Israel has been, at best, none of these things and, more likely, an embodiment of the antitheses of these lofty mores.

For this reason, someone's citing of UN resolutions or statements against Israel doesn't legitimize anti-Israel claims but, actually, does the opposite.

A common answer to this charge of extreme bias at the UN is a statement of the organization's name: “But, it's the UN,” as if a world body is a priori objective in its global affairs.

The UN, however, has shown itself to be statistically anti-Israel. This does not mean that the UN has criticized Israel and, therefore, it is anti-Israel. Criticism is a fine and necessary thing, especially when it comes to the world of governance and the potential infringing upon precious liberties and rights.

The reason that the UN shows itself to be statistically anti-Israel is that while it mints resolution after resolution condemning Israel for various things-- to the point that the anti-Israel resolutions number in the triple digits-- the world body saves its outrage when it comes to other conflicts around the world.

Doing the math provides easy proof of this. There have been close to 100 UN condemnatory resolutions against Israel. Many of these resolutions go so far as to condemn Israel for “killing” a specific amount of people at a specific time in Arab places.

Turning attention to one of the world's major human rights abuser (if not the world's human rights abuser), China, we see a different story at the UN. There have been less than 10 resolutions against China concerning its occupation and annexation of Tibet. Some of these resolutions don't even name China but simply “urge respect” for the people of Tibet.

Even setting aside the visceral tone of the anti-Israel resolutions and the politeness of those about China, the comparison of the numbers is baffling.

Are we to conclude that in passing 10 times more resolutions against Israel than China, the UN values Palestinian rights 10 times more than Tibetans' rights? Any UN official and most sane observers would say of course not.

The alternative and much more likely conclusion is that the UN pursues Israel 10 times more often, or 10 times more voraciously, than it pursues China. There's good reason for this.

It is critical to keep in mind that the UN is not an objective body that exists separate from its member states; it is, in fact, only its member states, and sometimes even less than that. In the case of China, the dictatorial People's Republic of China took over the seat from the Republic of China after Mao's bloody revolution.

Since the Republic of China was a founding member of the UN, it had a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, making it one of the most powerful agents in the organization. The current regime simply slipped in there without anyone else making a substantive objection to the commandeering.

Israel, on the far other hand, is the only member in the UN that is not part of a regional bloc or “group.” This is because the Muslim controlled Asian Group, Israel's “natural” regional group, refused to let the Jewish State into the group. Among other things, this means that Israel cannot have a temporary, rotating seat on the Security Council.

Additionally, Muslim states have their own delegation to the UN, something called the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The OIC has the ability to form additional committees in the UN. It, by its own admission, has as its goal the strengthening of Muslim countries and an ongoing mission to support “...the struggle of the Palestinian people and assist them in recovering their rights and liberating their occupied territories.”

It should be noted that there is no other such religiously based group in the UN.

There is more, of course, as the UN also enjoys the presence of an Arab Group. Your guess about that group's predisposition regarding Israel is probably correct.

Finally, we note that the UN awarded Palestinian refugees their own, personal refugee organization, UNRWA, while all of the world's other refugees deal with a separate organization. The UN, under UNRWA, gives Palestinians almost twice as much money (per refugee) as it does any other refugee group in the world. Why is this so?

The problem is no longer with the UN; it's with Israel. While it's true that Israel has placed one or two bold personalities as ambassadors to the UN (Chaim Herzog or Dan Gillerman for instance), the country as a whole takes a cowering stance in the diplomatic arena. It fears the now hollow anti-Israel resolutions as a dog fears a rolled up newspaper.

The first important step is to understand that the UN is structurally and statistically anti-Israel. The next important step is to begin doing something about this so that a cowering, frozen, and weak stance no longer provokes the geopolitical lynch that it's trying to prevent.