THE TOWER
by Ben Cohen
May 2014

In 1991, The United Nations repealed the infamous resolution equating Zionism with racism. Yet unbeknownst to most of us, a whole network of anti-Israel institutions and funding streams created at the time remained firmly in place, and continue fueling anti-Israel sentiment around the world.

The April reconciliation agreement between the Palestinian Authority’s dominant Fatah faction and the Islamist Hamas movement has come as a shock to many. It shouldn’t have. In the weeks before the deal, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas had already taken steps with a profoundly negative impact on the U.S.-sponsored peace talks. Building on his modest success in winning a 2012 UN General Assembly vote to upgrade the Palestinian Authority’s status to that of a non-member state—a designation it shares only with the Vatican—Abbas returned to this unilateralist strategy of peace avoidance by signing 15 applications for membership in a variety of international agencies, conventions, and treaties.

Abbas’ goal is obvious: By embedding a virtual “State of Palestine” into the complex infrastructure of the United Nations, he hopes to massively increase international diplomatic and legal pressure on Israel, render the Jewish state vulnerable to international sanction as a rapacious colonialist occupying power, and achieve “statehood” without any compromise required by peace negotiations. This latest attempt at “diplomatic warfare” pursues many of the same aims as did decades of failed conventional wars and terrorism, yet it enables the Palestinians to do so without explicitly resorting to violence, addressing the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state, or any other necessary accommodation. Abbas knows he has a great deal of support for such a move. He can count on the votes of Arab and Muslim states in the General Assembly, as well as their allies in the developing world, to make Palestinian statehood a reality—at least on paper.

That the UN would endorse this approach, which sets out to undermine the peace process and render it irrelevant, while violating previous agreements with Israel, should not be surprising. The UN’s systemic antipathy toward the Jewish state is well-documented.

….But as long as the UN’s “propaganda apparatus” for Palestinian rejectionism survives, the world body’s essentially positive nature will be disfigured by well-founded accusations of discrimination against its only Jewish member. For the good of Israel, the Palestinians, and the UN itself, it is long past time for the world body to finally say farewell to the libel that Zionism is racism.

READ MORE