In December 2014 the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution calling upon Israel to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders on the Syrian Golan. It noted that peace would not be achieved without Israel’s serious commitment to the withdrawal. What the resolution did not say was that even if Israel were sufficiently suicidal to withdraw from the Golan, this would not make any significant contribution to peace, and may well trigger even more violence.
At that time it was clear to all those voting on behalf of their country that Israel was at most a very marginal player in the murderous Syrian civil war. By that time over 200,000 Syrians had been killed by other Syrians – a figure which has since increased substantially. Furthermore 3.2 million had fled abroad. Many more millions were displaced within the country itself. The resolution also ignored the extraordinary criminality of Assad’s government, which included the use of chemical weapons. Regardless, 162 nations supported this resolution, and only Israel opposed it. Fifteen nations abstained from voting.
The General Assembly’s moral relativism becomes even clearer when one compares it with the numerical support of another resolution from December 2014. It demanded the end of human rights violations in Syria. Only 127 members voted in favor of the resolution, with 13 votes against and 48 abstentions.
It was one among many typical examples of the UN’s moral relativism. In other words: “its moral judgments depend on who is the subject of the discussion.”
The General Assembly, the main United Nations body was originally established to represent all member nations on an equal basis. It has become one of a number of consistent abusers of moral relativism at the UN in all that concerns Israel. Others include central UN agencies, publications, and representatives, such as the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, the authors of the UNHRC Gaza reports, and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.
Probably the most extreme case of moral relativism toward Israel in the General Assembly was the “Zionism is Racism” resolution of 1975. This concept had been promoted in the previous decade, after a failed attempt to expel Israel from the UN. It served to justify the refusal of the Soviet Union to condemn anti-Semitism, and was part of a move for greater Soviet influence in the Middle East aiming at turning Arab states into Soviet allies. Zionism had already been defamed in its inclusion as one of a group of extreme negative movements. For example, a 1973 General Assembly resolution mentioned “the unholy alliance between Portuguese colonialism, South African racism, Zionism and Israeli imperialism.”
Canadian legal expert Anne Bayefsky wrote already years ago that the General Assembly has gone beyond moral relativism, and is forthrightly anti-Semitic. She mentioned serial insults in various National Review articles on the topic. These included providing Holocaust-denying former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a platform to spew anti-Semitic hatred, as well as giving the terrorist-funding Islamic Development Bank observer status. There is also an UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Past ceremonies have included maps where the State of Israel has been erased, and even moments of silence in honor of suicide bombers.
Israel also faced absurd scrutiny in the General Assembly in 1997, when an emergency General Assembly session was called to examine the issue of Israeli construction on Har Homa, then a barren hill between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Dore Gold, Israel’s current Director General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was then ambassador to the United Nations. He said: “In the entire UN history, perhaps nine or ten Emergency Special Sessions have been convened. Sometimes the same session was reconvened a number of times. Almost all dealt with the Middle East and Israel. I was ambassador at the UN in 1997, when the aforementioned Emergency Special Session convened to discuss Israeli building at Har Homa.
“The emergency session recommended that the High Contracting Parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention, that is, the signatories of the 1949 Convention that deals with the protection of civilians in times of war, be convened to take measures addressing Israeli violations of it.” He added that the General Assembly did not request for the High Contracting Parties to convene during any other major conflicts, several of which had huge casualties such as when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan or Czechoslovakia, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, Turkey invaded Cyprus, India invaded Pakistani territory, or Morocco invaded the Western Sahara.
The use of moral relativism toward Israel when compared to other UN member nations with far worse human rights records has been pervasive since the founding of the United Nations in 1947. In 1952 Israel put forward a resolution for a ceasefire in the Korean War. This resolution encountered serious opposition, only to pass easily once Norway replaced Israel as sponsor. In response, Israeli ambassador Abba Eban said, “If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.”
Gold wrote “Moral-relativism was an inevitable by-product of the UN’s work; often the attacker was not treated very differently from the victim of aggression.” In other words: The General Assembly, the main UN body intended to represent all member nations on an equal basis is an extreme abuser of moral relativism in regard to Israel.