In wake of its global campaign, UN Watch welcomed notable progress in countries' diminishing support for discriminatory annual resolutions targeting Israel at the United Nations General Assembly last week.

For the first time ever, Germany, Austria and Bulgaria changed their votes and opposed the annual resolution that renews the mandate of the 25-nation "Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People," one of the UN's most notorious anti-Israel bodies.

Likewise, Iceland and Uruguay moved from voting Yes last year to Abstain. Others who rightly opposed the resolution as they did in 2019 include Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Colombia, Honduras, Hungary, and the United States.

Similarly, Switzerland and Slovenia for the first time ever voted No to the annual resolution that renews the mandate of the UN's Division for Palestinian Rights, which employs 15 full-time staffers, at a cost to taxpayers of millions of dollars, to organize anti-Israel events worldwide. Regrettably, France did not oppose the resolution, and once again abstained.

(Click here to see full voting sheets from last week.)

Other nations who opposed the mandate of the UN's 15-member Palestinian division as they did in 2019 include Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, and the United States.

On all votes targeting Israel last week, Uruguay moved from Yes to Abstain. This followed an outcry in that country after UN Watch exposed Uruguay's support in September for an absurd resolution, at the UN's Economic and Social Council, that singled out Israel alone for violating women's rights.

As a result, Uruguayan Foreign Minister Francisco Bustillo apologized for that vote—and he fired the ministry's director-general for political affairs. Now, it seems, Uruguay is also changing its votes on many of the anti-Israel resolutions at the UN General Assembly.

Following is the Knesset testimony delivered in Jerusalem by UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer, invited as one of the world’s top 40 global advocates for Israel online, as listed by the Jewish News Syndicate. The hearing was chaired by MK Michal Cotler-Wunsh on November 24, 2020.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Our mission at UN Watch is to monitor the United Nations by the principles of its Charter, which guarantees equal treatment to all nations large and small.

Nowhere is that promise violated more frequently and more egregiously than by the UN’s one-sided, disproportionate and selective resolutions that single out Israel for discriminatory treatment.

As we meet here in the Knesset, the world parliament, the UN General Assembly, is busy targeting Israel this month with 17 one-sided resolutions. By contrast, there will be a total of 7 resolutions on the rest of the world combined.

That’s right: one on Iran, one on Syria, one on North Korea—and 17 on Israel.

Meanwhile, millions of human rights victims around the globe—in places like China, Iraq, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Cuba, Turkey, Pakistan, Algeria, Zimbabwe, and in more than 170 other countries—go completely ignored.

Some people in this country think the UN doesn’t matter — “Oom-shmoom.“ [The UN, shmoo-en.]

But the UN assault on Israel poisons the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions worldwide.

It grants the imprimatur of international legitimacy that fuels the boycott movement.

It sends a signal to Hamas and other terrorist groups that the world is with them. 

We need to demand that democracies like the UK, France and Germany respect the UN’s founding principles—which they claim to believe in—by ending their support for the UN’s obsessive scapegoating of the world’s only Jewish state, and to instead work on protecting human rights for the victims who need it most. 

Thank you, Madam Chair.