It isn’t anti-Zionism. It’s anti-Semitism. And here’s why:
Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mairead Maguire says the United Nations should suspend or revoke Israel’s membership.
Maguire, in a news conference Thursday, said that it’s time for the international community to take action against Israel. She claimed Israel should be punished for ignoring a series of United Nations resolutions over the years.
Maguire, who won the 1976 peace prize for her work with Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, is currently visiting the Palestinian territories to protest Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip.
Interestingly, Maguire never called for the UN to revoke or suspend Ireland’s membership in the United Nations. I didn’t hear her call for the suspension of Iraq’s membership during the decades when Saddam Hussein was violating binding UN Security Council resolutions. I didn’t hear her call for the suspension of Iran’s membership as they continue to violate UN resolutions as well. Nor is she calling for the expulsion of Lebanon, which recently brought Hizbullah into their government and absolutel refuses to disarm the group, as per UNSC 1701.
Funny, how the only nation she thinks should be thrown out of the UN is Israel.
By the way, Israel is not ignoring any binding UN Security Council resolutions. She is ignoring General Assembly resolutions, which are nonbinding and utterly meaningless, considering that the OIC bloc controls the voting and actually runs annual anti-Israel resolutions that get voted up every year. Check the list, which grows bigger every year.
Time for the Yourish.com mantra: Anti-Semites of the world, just die already. And that includes Nobel Laureates, too.
Have hope for the world. Not everyone hates Israel even when it seems that way.
There will always be some of us who love her.
As you point out, she ignores China’s occupation of Tibet, Iraq, Iran,Cuba, etc., and of all the countries isn the world she decides that Israel is the one that doesn’t deserve UN membership.
But she’s not anti-Semitic, oh, no. As to Israel’s response, what diplomatese for “F. off and die?”
“Nobel Laureate” is meaningless and should not be used any more to ascribe any positive notoriety to anyone. Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, Al Gore, Mohammed el-Baradei – enough said.
I’ve been racking my brain to come up with the most fitting and most Christian thing I could say to such a highly esteemed person as Mairead Maguire, and I think I’ve hit upon the perfect wording: “FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!!!”
Mairead Maguire was one of the passengers on the good ship Dignity that tried to break the blockade in that ridiculous PR stunt. In Northern Ireland they have a phrase for someone like that. That phrase is “terrorism tourist”.
Still, a critic of Israel isn’t obliged to condemn every bad-acting government in the world, even if that critic is a busybody activist like Maguire. But for the sake of argument, suppose at the press conference somone had asked her if she thought Iran, Lebanon, etc., should also be suspended from the UN, and if not, why not?
She could have replied that while most Security Council resolutions are technically non-binding, they nonetheless give a sense of the International community’s opinion and will, and that Israel’s policy towards the Occupied Territories (especially its settlement policy) had consistently flouted that will for a full four decades. The current situations with Iran and Lebanon don’t even come close. She might have gone on to compare suspending Israel from the UN to the suspension of South Africa during the apartheid regime: there were plenty of other oppressive governments, but apartheid was peculiarly odious to the values of the UN, so South Africa especially merited suspension. Similarly, Israel’s settlement policy is unique, and peculiarly odious to UN ideals and international norms.
Whether this argument is persuasive is beside the point: one doesn’t have to be an anti-Semite to advance it. It may seem strange for someone to harp on the settlement policy, but a lot of Israel’s defenders have no idea how bad the Occupation/Settlement policy makes Israel look to the rest of the world.
Lefty, no, a critic of Israel isn’t obliged to condemn every bad-acting government in the world.
But most critics of Israel condemn Israel, and only Israel, leaving their motive highly suspect.
As for Israel and the resolutions, bullshit. If they’re nonbinding, that means Israel is not obliged to obey them. As for the sense of the international community’s will, please read the resolutions.
When the Mossad kidnapped Adolf Eichmann from Argentina, the UN condemned Israel for violating Argentina’s borders—not a word about Argentina hiding Nazis for decades.
While you’re clicking on that link, take a look at the number of anti-Israel resolutions by the UN, and see if you can find a single other nation with as many resolutions about it, let alone against it. The UN’s obsession with Israel began with Israel’s founding. When the Arabs lost that little piece of land, they never stopped working to get the international community to give it back to them—in spite of the fact that Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. And the UN is working hard to do exactly that, even today, 60 years after Israel’s founding.
You really are blind to the hatred of Israel throughout the world, aren’t you? Read through the UN resolutions and you’ll start to get an idea.
No one but the Palestinians have ever beeen turned into perpetual refugees. No one but the Palestinians have an annual set of resolutions put forth by the General Assembly. And no cause but the Palestinian cause has attracted so much attention from the world—because the Arab and Muslim states make sure that it stays on the front burner.
Let me give you a comparable incident in the exact same year: Pakistan. Millions of Hindus and Muslims left their homes and villages and resettled. The UN acknowledged, indeed, pushed for, the population transfer. It’s a done deal.
Why not Israel?
Gee. Let’s think. The Hamas charter is a good place to start:
She’s an anti-Semite, Lefty. And you are dead wrong about Israel and UN resolutions.
Just one point about the “refugees.” Besides the fact that Israel took in just as many people who fled in ’48, besides the fact that palestinians are the only group in the world that have their UN agency devoted entirely to their cause, this agency (UNRWA) clearly does have even a basic understanding of what a refugee is. According to UNRWA, someone classified as a refugee could find a job, a home, etc and no longer be considered a refugee and then that person could go bankrupt due to bad luck, and RE-REGISTER AS A REFUGEE. Of course, because if they wouldn’t do that, UNRWA would cease to exist – and other than demonizing Israel, UNRWA basic goal is their own continued existence, and that wouldn’t happen if there were no more refugees, would it?
Meryl, I was addressing Mairead Maguire, not the UN as a whole (which I do think is biased against Israel), or the general Arab attitude towards Israel (which is that Israel’s a pirate state that should be crushed and ethnically cleansed of Jews). And you miss my main point: Israel’s settlement policy is unique. I’m not aware of any equivalent situation where a country treats occupied territory as if were annexed (through a settlement policy) without even going the legal fiction of annexing it. The closest analogue is maybe the partition of Cyprus, which is not recognized by any government except Turkey.
So far as I know, no binding UN resolution required South Africa to dismantle apartheid, but a logical case was made for suspending it from the UN anyway. So too a logical (if unconvincing) case can be made for suspending Israel over its settlement policy. I can’t see into Maguire’s soul — for all I know, maybe she does hate Jews — but I consider it more likely that she mistakenly assumes that the Israel/Palestine mess is just like Northern Ireland, and that she’s also fallen for Third World Chic.
You bring up some other issues. I haven’t read through all the pre-1967 UN resolutions concerning Israel, but I’ve looked through some of them, and they all seemed fairly legitimate. The early resolutions dealt with the initial establishment of Israel and the subsequent refugee crisis. Later resolutions dealt with the early wars (like the Suez crisis). It wasn’t until 1967 that the wheels completely came off. So at first blush I would argue that any anti-Israel bias in the UN was pretty mild until 1967, when it all came crashing down due to the Occupation, the decolonization of the Third World, and Soviet pandering to Arab prejudices.
Also, the UN does have more of a responsibility to deal with Israel/Palestine than India/Pakistan, because the UN helped midwife Israel in the first place by passing the partition plan and recognizing Israel. Similarly, the UN has a special responsibility for dealing with the refugees, though the camps should have been shut down decades ago.
Finally, the partitioning of India is not really comparable to the partitioning of Palestine because there was no Balfour Declaration for India. Muslims from all over the world did not emigrate to Pakistan to re-establish an Islamic state in what had long been a Hindu enclave. Israel was a unique situation, even in the context of post-WWII population movements.
#8 Lefty,
If you can, find the UN resolutions denouncing Israel, for putting in infrastructure in Gaza, building homes and taking the refugees out of UNWRA’s squalid camps, and ordering Israel to send those who had started living in the new houses with piped water and electricity back to the camps.
As for the settlements please put things into context and look at the cleansing of Jews from the massacre in Hebron in the late twenties to that which took place during the war of 48 by both Jordan and Egypt. Go and match up the locales.
And while we are at it start defining “Palestinian” and consider all those Syrian and Egyptian Arabs the British moved into the territory under their League of Nations mandate to create a homeland for the Jews and which has not been rescinded by the United Nations.
Consider the 70% of the mandated territory the British gave to Hashemite clan after the Saudi clan dispossessed them of their land in the Arabian peninsula.
In short read up on the history and maintain the context to describe the actions of the sides in this conflict.