The UN And Anti-Semitism

Anne Bayefsky has an excellent piece in Commentary Magazine on the UN and anti-Semitism, especially in the way that the UN was founded as a reaction to the Holocaust, but now chooses to ignore anti-Semitism worldwide:

This indifference to anti-Semitism has been mirrored by the UN’s growing refusal over the decades to support the principle of self-determination for the Jewish people—that is, Zionism. The irony, of course, is that the UN General Assembly was very much present at the creation of the state of Israel, having endorsed the postwar partition plan for British-ruled Palestine. But much has changed since 1948.

In general, and in the abstract, the UN has remained committed to the ideal of self-governing nation-states. As one characteristic declaration of the General Assembly puts it, “All peoples have a right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social, and cultural development.” Indeed, over the years, the UN has developed and extended the principles of self-determination, which are now taken to entail not just the basic right of political independence but guarantees of non-interference by other nations, a realm of domestic jurisdiction and national sovereignty, and the preservation of historical, cultural, and religious particularities.

Where the UN has fallen markedly short is in the application of these principles, and in no case more strikingly than that of Israel.

Indeed there has been a chilling double standard in the treatment of Israel by the UN. One would think that Israel’s actions in self-defense were worse than the invasion and rape of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, the tyranny of Robert Mugabe, bride burning in India and Pakistan, or the horrendous conditions of the Russian prisons – all of which are vastly larger and more important human rights issues than Israel’s security fence. Only Israel’s fense is being debated in the Hague (which has no jurisdiction over the area) when the fences in Cyprus, Botswana, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Turkey and several other countries that use border fences as a security barrier are ignored entirely.

Bayefsky is right, the reasoning for this is based on the assumption that the Jews should be singled out for special treatment. There is no way to justify such a double standard without basing it on fundamentally anti-Semitic grounds. Either no one has the right of self-defense and all border fences are illegal, or only the Jews must endure suicide bombings because the Jews do not have the right to self-defense. Either Zionism is not racism, or every form of ethnic nationalism is racism.

Instead, as always, the Jews are singled out as different and operating under a different set of rules than everyone else. If that is not the essence of anti-Semitism, what is?