The UN Human Rights Council Reaches a New Height of Absurdity

Long a forum for despotic and ruthless regimes to criticize the Jewish state, the UN Human Rights Council has now commissioned an investigation into corporations doing business in Jewish areas of the West Bank and is set to release a list of such companies. The editors of the New York Post comment:

The Human Rights Council (HRC) believes companies doing business in the settlements are somehow [committing] a human-rights violation. Never mind that many of these firms provide jobs for Palestinians in the area and that the blacklist could cost many of them meaningful work. Or that the companies provide needed goods and services to anyone, no matter their background or where they live.

Ignore, too, the fact that the panel . . . has never voiced any human-rights concerns about firms in “occupied territory” elsewhere in the world, even where ethnic cleansing has taken place. And that numerous legal opinions and rulings [permit] such practices, with some citing language in the Fourth Geneva Convention.

The World Bank itself has lent billions to companies in occupied territories around the world. Heck, even the United Nations’ own legal adviser, in a 2002 memo on Western Sahara, concluded that such a practice raised no human-rights concerns.

But then, the move by the HRC isn’t really about fighting human-rights abuses (or, for that matter, making rational and consistent policy of any kind). It’s about trying to hurt Israel in any way possible and gin up opposition toward it. . . . Meanwhile, the council and [its director’s] office get hundreds of millions of dollars every year, much of it from the United States. Surely there are better uses for that money.

Read more at New York Post

More about: BDS, Israel & Zionism, UNHRC, United Nations, West Bank

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF