‘How many murdered Jews does it take for you to support Israel’s right to self-defense?’
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations delivered a blistering takedown of the “false, immoral comparisons” exhibited by the global body’s top human-rights official in responding to Hamas’s massacre of civilians over the weekend.
U.N. high commissioner for human rights Volker Turk has condemned the terrorist attack, and in a statement yesterday said that he was appalled by the killings. While extensively condemning “horrifying mass killings by members of Palestinian armed groups,” he did not name Hamas directly.
He went on to criticize Israel for undertaking air strikes that he said hit U.N. targets in Gaza and said that its siege of the territory “risks seriously compounding the already dire human rights and humanitarian situation in Gaza.” Volker also “expressed deep concern at how hate speech and incitement to violence have surged since Saturday, fuelling anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the region and globally.”
Israeli ambassador Gilad Erdan slammed Volker’s statement in his own remarks at a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly’s Third Committee, which focuses on human rights, in New York this morning. He said that “Israel just suffered the gravest human-rights atrocity since the Holocaust” and posed a series of questions in response to the statement by Volker, who was also present at the meeting.
“How many dead Jews does it take to justify a proportionate response against a genocidal terror organization? Is it 1,000? Six million? Maybe it’s 10 million — the population of Israel? This is, after all, Hamas’s publicly declared goal. So I ask you, how many murdered Jews does it take for you to support Israel’s right to self-defense?”
Erdan also accused Volker of making a false equivalence between Israel and Hamas: “By making false, immoral comparisons between a vibrant, law-abiding democracy and savage Hamas terrorists that are like ISIS and al-Qaeda, you share the blame for empowering these barbaric savages and giving them a free pass.”
The U.N. has for decades disproportionately singled out Israel in its resolutions, passing over 200 such documents criticizing the Jewish state, according to data compiled by the nongovernmental organization U.N. Watch.
In addition to passing dozens of resolutions that single out Israel, the U.N.’s Human Rights Council has voted to establish several commissions of inquiry to scrutinize allegations against the country.
Erdan said the council “has lost its moral compass,” adding that it refuses to differentiate between good and evil.
“Your immoral comparisons sent a clear message to the terrorists that if they hide their rockets and weapons under schools and hospitals, and use the people of Gaza as human shields, the Human Rights Council gives them immunity for their heinous crimes,” he said, concluding with the vow that Israel “will obliterate Hamas’s terror infrastructure.”
As the attacks unfolded on Saturday, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres issued a statement specifically condemning Hamas’s actions. In a subsequent statement on Monday, he said: “While I recognize Israel’s legitimate security concerns, I also remind Israel that military operations must be conducted in strict accordance with international humanitarian law.”
U.N. Watch, in an analysis of the comments, said that while Guterres’s statement condemning Hamas was strong, it did not mention Hamas’s use of civilians as human shields.