The UN’s anti-Israel inquisition is falling apart – finally

Her colleagues, the Indian scholar and activist Miloon Kothari and Chris Sidoti, an Australian lawyer, also submitted resignation letters, with Kothari mysteriously citing an “understanding” that had been reached during a private meeting with the council’s president.

I hope the door doesn’t hit them on their way out. This unholy trinity has been controversial, to say the least.

In 2022, Kothari was condemned by 18 states after he claimed that Israel controls the global media, demanded it be stripped of UN membership and railed against the “Jewish lobby”.

Sidoti, meanwhile, has memorably suggested that Jews “throw around accusations” of antisemitism “like rice at a wedding”. And Pillay, who was selected as chair in 2021 after lobbying for sanctions against “apartheid Israel”, led a commission that “generally turned a blind eye to Hamas terrorism and incitement, even after the October 7 massacre,” according to the NGO UN Watch.

So what happened to these committed public servants? Surely it is something of a coincidence that all three tendered their resignations on the same day?

In cases such as these, the obvious answer is often the correct one. According to Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch and indefatigable scourge of anti-Israel bias at the institution, they were “fleeing the ship” after the UN special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, was sanctioned by the United States.

“This week, the dominoes are falling,” he said. “First, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made the historic decision to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN’s pro-Hamas rapporteur, in the wake of a massive campaign led by UN Watch.

“Now the architects of the UN’s anti-Israel inquisition are fleeing the ship. The tide is turning.”

Neuer added: “Albanese was the tip of the spear in the UN’s war on Israel. Now that she’s been sanctioned, others are looking over their shoulders. The fear of accountability is finally setting in.”

Not before time. For decades, the UN has traded upon its global reputation for authority to peddle the very worst Israelophobic propaganda.

As long ago as 1975, after nearly a decade of Arab and Soviet lobbying, the UN passed General Assembly Resolution 3379, which enshrined the central Soviet agitprop motif that “Zionism is racism”.

As the Spectator journalist Goronwy Rees lamented at the time: “The fundamental thesis… was that to be a Jew, and to be proud of it, and to be determined to preserve the right to be a Jew, is to be an enemy of the human race.”

The resolution, after which the British Students’ Unions banned Jewish societies on campuses, was not repealed until 1991.

For years, the Kremlin had been trying to convince the world that Zionism was an expression of Jewish racial superiority, a contemporary version of a supposed “chosen people” attitude.

That deplorable UN resolution of 1975 was a huge win, and the public perception of Zionism today is a depressing testament to the success of this propaganda campaign.

It hardly ends there. The UN has no fewer than seven formal bodies investigating Israel, including the Division for Palestinian Rights; the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine; the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories; and the United Nations Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The UN’s notorious 2001 anti-racism conference in Durban descended into open antisemitism. The next time it convened, in 2009, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was the only head of state allowed to speak.

In his address, he disgraced the Holocaust by referring to it as an “ambiguous and dubious question” that was used as a “pretext” for the mistreatment of Palestinians, and described Israel as “totally racist”. Which was a bit rich.

In his memoir, Danny Danon, Israel’s former ambassador to the UN, wrote: “I knew about the hostility at the UN and I was prepared for that, but nobody can prepare for the volume of attacks against Israel.”

The UNHRC is the latest inheritor of this deeply Israelophobic spirit. The fact that it can wear its double standards so brazenly, from Item Seven to the “permanent inquiry”, is a mark of how normalised Israelophobia has become at the supposedly enlightened UN.

It is good news, of course, that American sanctions are finally shining a light into the darker corners of the international institution. But it raises a sobering question.

If these people have been sent scurrying for the exits so easily, why wasn’t action taken sooner?