UN: United against Israel with the support of Switzerland
Assertion
With 193 members, the United Nations (UN) is the most important body in the global community of states. On paper, it is committed to impartiality.
Facts
The reality is different: For decades, the UN has been characterized by a massively anti-Israeli stance. No other state in the world is denounced more frequently by the UN for human rights violations than Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. And Switzerland has tolerated and supported this questionable practice for decades. In the past, however, the UN has shown little interest in the behavior of its staff working for the Palestinian refugees. This is despite the fact that investigations have shown that both the UN’s own Palestinian refugee relief agency UNRWA and private NGOs working for the Palestinians are often infiltrated by members of Palestinian terrorist organizations and controlled by them behind the scenes.
At the end of October 2023, just a few days after the Hamas terror attack, the largest pogrom against Jews since the Second World War, the UN General Assembly calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, calling into question Israel’s right to self-defense. The Hamas attack and the atrocities that triggered the war in the first place remain unmentioned. Only 14 countries voted against the resolution – including the USA, Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Croatia. Switzerland supports the resolution.
Switzerland has also regularly supported the one-sided, anti-Israeli voting behavior of the UN General Assembly in the past. In 2023 (as at 10.11.), 14 resolutions were aimed against Israel and only seven against states in the rest of the world. What did Switzerland do? It voted in favor of all anti-Israeli resolutions or abstained from voting.
The figures for 2022 paint a similar picture: 15 resolutions against Israel, only one against Afghanistan, North Korea, Iran and Syria and not a single one against Russia, China, Qatar or Saudi Arabia – states that continually violate human rights in the most serious way. Here too, Switzerland nods off the resolutions or abstains from voting.
According to UN Watch, 140 resolutions were aimed at Israel between 2015 and 2022, while 68 were aimed at the rest of the world. The only democracy in the Middle East is said to have violated human rights twice as often as all other states combined.
In a 2020 interpellation, Marianne Binder-Keller, National Councillor Die Mitte, demanded answers as to what consequences Switzerland was drawing from the UN’s one-sided condemnation practice towards Israel, especially since the FDFA confirmed in 20.5417 that these condemnations were “strikingly high in relation to other countries”, as she wrote. The interpellation was written off in November 2022 “because it was not conclusively dealt with by the Council within two years.”
However, the UN General Assembly is by no means the only body that has been demonizing Israel for years. Since its founding in 2006, the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council has passed more resolutions on Israel (104) than on any other country in the world, and more than on Iran, Syria and North Korea combined.
The Human Rights Council currently includes human rights despisers such as China, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Somalia and Sudan. Iran, on the other hand, has been elected to chair a social forum of the Council on November 1, 2023 – a regime that tramples on human rights, especially those of women and girls, and is the mastermind behind the terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.
The demonization of Israel is also part of the UN Human Rights Council’s agenda. Just one year after the Council was founded, a fixed agenda was introduced, whereby the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories” must be discussed every time under agenda item 7. No other area of conflict has a comparable agenda item. Accordingly, Israel is frequently condemned. Switzerland does not oppose this practice.
In 2017, the then FDP National Councillor Hans-Ulrich Bigler demanded in a motion that Switzerland work to abolish this unequal treatment. The Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) supported the demand. The National Council rejected the motion by 106 votes to 77, mainly thanks to the left wing of the Council, which voted almost unanimously against it.
In the wake of the atrocities committed by the Palestinian terrorist organization against Israeli civilians on 7 October 2023, the National Council initially decided in December 2023, at the request of its member David Zuberbühler (SVP), to cancel Switzerland’s contribution of CHF 20 million to the UN Palestinian Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). The reason: UNRWA has been accused of anti-Semitism and close ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations on several occasions in the past. This also included massive anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda in school textbooks that were financed with the help of UNRWA funds, including Swiss taxpayers’ money. This is due to the fact that many of the UNRWA employees are Palestinians themselves (at the UN sister organization UNHCR, which is responsible for all other refugee groups supported by the United Nations, such personnel overlaps are not the order of the day). However, the Council of States opposed the cut, so that it was reversed in the conference of the two chambers. Now, following David Zuberbühler’s initiative, the removal of support for UNRWA is once again under discussion. It has become public knowledge that at least twelve UNRWA employees were involved in the massacre of Israeli civilians carried out by Hamas on October 7, 2023. A number of other countries have therefore already suspended their UNRWA contribution: USA, Germany, UK, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, Finland, Australia and Canada.
