From A to U: The UN exposes itself

From Sacha Wigdorovits

On February 7, the UN Special Representative for the Palestinian Territories, Francesca A(lbanese), said the following at the Al-Jazeera forum in the Qatari capital Doha, according to Amnesty International: “The fact that instead of stopping Israel, most countries in the world have armed it and give it political protection and economic and financial support. (…) And, Albanese continued: “We, who do not control large amounts of capital, algorithms and weapons, now see that we as humanity have a common enemy.”

This statement led to an international outcry. Various countries such as France, Germany, the Czech Republic and her own home country Italy demanded Albanese’s immediate resignation because she had described Israel as an “enemy of humanity”. However, she defended herself, saying that by “enemy of humanity” she did not mean Israel, but “the system”.

To what extent this justification makes the whole thing better remains to be seen. After all, it is ultimately irrelevant. What is relevant, however, is that Albanese took part in the Al Jazeera forum in Doha at all. After all, Al Jazeera’s Arabic channel is nothing other than the most important propaganda arm of the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas. This is why the two largest Swiss telecommunications companies, Swisscom and Sunrise, recently removed it from their cable networks – earning Switzerland worldwide recognition. A ban on Al Jazeera Arabic has also been discussed in the EU due to its institutional ties with Hamas.

Albanese knows this, of course. The fact that she nevertheless took part in an Al Jazeera event shows where she stands as a representative of the United Nations, which is committed to impartiality: On the side of the Palestinians and their most brutal terrorist organization.

However, this is nothing new. For many years, the Italian has repeatedly attracted attention with anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements. And she was happy to be in the front row of the marchers when pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place in her home country, calling for the destruction of the state of Israel: “from the river to the sea”.

In the USA, Albanese has therefore been declared persona non grata for some time now. It goes without saying that she is no longer welcome in Israel either. But even if leading European countries such as France, Germany and Italy, supported by the Czech Republic, now call for her resignation, this is unlikely to happen. Because with her anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel, Albanese embodies nothing other than the majority opinion in the UN and its leadership.

This is wonderfully illustrated by a second example: the U(NRWA), the UN Refugee Agency, which has been dedicated solely to the Palestinians since 1949 – while its sister organization UNHCR has to look after all other refugee groups worldwide.

The new 75-minute documentary “UNraveling UNRWA – the unmasking of UNRWA” shows what UNRWA is all about. FokusIsrael.ch presented the award-winning Israeli-German documentary for the first time in Switzerland last Monday in Zurich to an audience of 200 people, including numerous municipal and cantonal politicians. Representatives of the city parliament, which will be re-elected on March 8, were quite shocked by what they had seen at a subsequent panel discussion.

UNraveling UNRWA” uses interviews with former UNRWA officials, videos and documents to show how this UN organization is linked to the terrorist organization Hamas, how it breeds hatred of Jews and Israel in its schools through its teachers and in its textbooks, even among the very youngest children. And above all: how UNRWA tirelessly propagates the “right of return (to Israel)”. Not only among those who were displaced and fled during the Israeli War of Independence, of whom only a few tens of thousands are still alive, but also among their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

The Swiss Foreign Minister, Federal Councillor Ignazio Cassis, therefore rightly recognized as early as 2018 that “UNRWA is not the solution, but the problem.” Namely the problem that UNRWA’s behavior and its return narrative make peace between Israel and the Palestinians impossible. Because a “return” of six million Palestinians – 5.97 million of whom have never been to Israel in their lives and therefore do not deserve to be called “returnees” – would be the end of Israel as a Jewish state, in which two million Arabs already live. And sooner or later also the end of the Jews living there.

But just like the anti-Semite Francesca Albanese, UNRWA knows that it has the backing of a majority of UN states and the UN leadership with its policy aimed at the destruction of Israel. This is because both the right of return and the inheritance of refugee status are in line with official UN policy.

But only for the Palestinians. No other refugee group in the world has been granted these rights. Neither the one nor the other. Especially not the 800,000 to 900,000 Jews who had to flee Arab countries in the years following the founding of the State of Israel, or their descendants who are still alive.

In this respect, we must be grateful to Francesca Albanese and UNRWA: they expose the hostility towards Jews and Israel on the part of the United Nations, whose name is no longer even a euphemism. And they illustrate why the only hope for peace in the Middle East rests on US President Donald Trump’s new “Peace Council”, which is controversial in many (UN) countries.

Click here for the photos of the UNRWA panel at the FokusIsrael event in Zurich on February 16:

Photos: Miklos Rozsa and Stella Zeco

Sacha Wigdorovits is President of the Fokus Israel und Nahost association, which runs the website fokusisrael.ch. He studied history, German and social psychology at the University of Zurich and has worked as a US correspondent for the SonntagsZeitung, was editor-in-chief of BLICK and co-founder of the commuter newspaper 20minuten.