By Tovah Lazaroff, Jerusalem Post, June 13, 2022 GENEVA — The suffering of blacks in South Africa under its apartheid regime has become an antisemitic tool by which to delegitimize Israel, well-known Christian pro-Israel activist and resident of Johannesburg Olga Meshoe Washington said on Monday. "My people's history and experience is being used as an antisemitic tool to politically, morally and with incredible pretzel-like twisting and legal gymnastics, legally delegitimatize Israel with the hope to criminalize her," Washington said. The damning COI report
She spoke at a Geneva event hosted by the NGO UN Watch, in advance of a UN Human Rights Council debate on the first presentation of what will be an annual report, by the UN's three-member "Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem and Israel," otherwise known as the COI on Israel. The initial 18-page report explained that the COI on Israel held blamed Israel for the conflict with the Palestinians, and insisted that it had no intention of ending its oppressive systematic "occupation" of them. The COI also spoke of its intention to investigate issues of discrimination against Israeli-Arabs living within Israel's sovereign borders. The COI is headed by former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem (“Navi”) Pillay. Why Israel is nervous about the report
There was no mention in the COI about any plans to investigate Israel for the crime of apartheid, but Israeli officials and critics of the report fear that it is laying the groundwork for such a change in the future. Legal expert Ann Herzberg of the group NGO Monitor, who also addressed the UN Watch event said that accusing Israel of apartheid "is on the UNHRC agenda. It is just building up its case for it." Author and former MK Einat Wilf linked the apartheid accusation with the 1948 War of Independence. She explained that just like Arab nations sought to annihilate the fledgling Jewish state during that war, modern enemies of Israel have used the apartheid charge to claim that a Jewish state within any borders is illegitimate. Washington told the audience that the situation in Israel was incomparable to that of South Africa, so much so, that a new definite of apartheid had been created to allow for what was a decades-old "lie" first conceived by Soviet and Arab propaganda to be leveled against Israel. This dissociation is troubling, said Washington who is the executive director of the pro-Israel South African NGO DEISI International. "It trivializes the humiliation and injustices endured by black South Africans who lived through apartheid and how still, together with their descendants, bear the scars of its legacy."
"It erases the very real, very livid experience of the brutality of apartheid a reality that includes mothers who to this day do not know what happened to their children and millions of black South Africans who had to flee their country and live in exile under fear of persecution purely because of the color of their skin," Washington said. "The weaponization of apartheid by the UN and now the COI makes a mockery" of the UN, goes against its objective of upholding human rights and creates a barrier for future Israeli-Palestinian peace, Washington said. It also belies both Israel's modern role on the African continent and the west's history with it, she added. How will this affect diplomatic relations?
Some 44 of the African continent's 54 countries have full diplomatic relations with Israel that include cooperative agreements in education, defense, agriculture, high-tech, health and finance, Washington said. This reality, however, is not reflected by the African voting pattern at the UN, even though African countries have forged close ties with Western nations that "colonized use, enslaved our people and slaughtered us like animals," Washington said. "We have propped up the morally and legally corrupt notions that Israel is guilty of apartheid, colonialization and genocide. To what benefit? Africa is now the global eye of terrorism and slavery is rampant in no less than 5 African countries, some of which have had a seat on the UNHRC." Israeli-Arab human rights activist Yoseph Haddad, who is CEO of the NGO Together — Vouch for Each Other, told the audience he was "fed up" with the UN's "obsession" against Israel because it prevented resources from going to those working to bridge the gap between Israelis and Jews. "Let me clarify for this COI that I am an Arab Israeli with equal rights under the law in the state of Israel," said Haddad who served in a Golani brigade in the IDF. "This report, at its core, fundamentally misunderstood the conflict and misattributed every social ill — and I mean every social ill that impacts Palestinians, to Israel," Haddad explained. "Nowhere in this report did they address the “underlying root cause” of Palestinians refusing to recognize my country’s right to exist, or the fact that Palestinians have rejected multiple offers for peace, or the issues of incitement within Palestinian culture, or the Palestinian leadership’s corruption – no, they just blamed Israel," Haddad said. The UNHRC is funding this COI Instead of tackling issues of China's forced imprisonment of the Uyghur Muslims, the Taliban's abuse of women in Afghanistan and Iran's sponsorship of global terrorism, Haddad said. The UN has become part of the problem, he explained. To the UN, he said, that peace "will be made by Arabs and Jews on the ground. Not by your reports produced to justify your outrageous inflated budgets and lack of results to show for it." The author's trip to Geneva was funded by UN Watch. |
