Like Its Failed Predecessor, the UN Human Rights Council Is Interested Only in Slandering Israel

In 2006, the United Nations created its Human Rights Council to replace the disbanded Human Rights Commission, which was little more than a forum for the world’s cruelest despots to condemn the Jewish state. Currently in session in Geneva, the council has demonstrated that it has preserved all the faults of its precursor. Arsen Ostrovsky writes:

[I]nstead of focusing on China’s ethnic cleansing of Uighur Muslims, Iran’s merciless execution of the wrestler Navid Afkar, or Russia’s poisoning of the pro-democracy opposition leader Alexei Navalny, the council will once again focus its attention on the democratic state of Israel with a series of predictable condemnations. . . . The council reserves a spot on its agenda to condemn the Jewish state—the sole country-specific item—whereas human-rights issues in the entire rest of the world are shoved into one solitary agenda item.

In the meantime, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, in her September 14th remarks to the council at the opening of this current session, did not hesitate to condemn Israel for exercising self-defense against Hamas in Gaza.

At the same time, the council’s current membership, which includes Pakistan, Qatar, Libya, slave-trading Mauritania, and Nicolas Maduro’s Venezuela, doesn’t inspire confidence in the council’s ability to defend the oppressed and serve as an objective guardian of human rights. . . . [In] this theatre of the, absurd, terrorists, tyrants, dictators, and [their] henchmen sit in judgment of Western democracies, their places on the Human Rights Council guaranteed by sham elections and back-door deals, their impunity sealed by membership in the UN’s top human-rights body.

Read more at Newsweek

More about: Human Rights, UNHRC, United Nations

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