Four Perspectives on the U.N. Security Council Vote

On Friday, the U.N. Security Council voted 14-0 on a resolution condemning Israel for its settlement policies. While such votes in the historically anti-Israel body are not unusual, the abstention by the United States that allowed the resolution to pass represents a significant rift between two close strategic allies.

Below are four interesting and important perspectives.

The U.N.’s Lost Legitimacy, by Aviva Klompas, senior director, CJP Strategic Israel Engagement

“With every passing year, the UN’s anti-Israel bias becomes more overt.  It’s an injustice to Israel to be sure, but it’s also an injustice to the millions of victims of tyranny and terror worldwide. Every session spent censuring Israel, every debate spent denigrating the Jewish state, and every fact-finding mission or special commission that is created to investigate the Middle East’s only democracy, is time and resources not spent addressing the world’s real victims.”

Misguided Inaction Makes Peacemaking Even Harder, by Jeremy Burton, executive director, Jewish Community Relations of Greater Boston

“As a matter of policy, it is true that the Obama administration’s opposition to Israel’s expansion of settlements is broadly consistent with US policy across administrations of both parties going back four decades. But this administration has pressed that opposition with a particular fervor that has been ill-placed.”

Netanyahu Goes to War with the World, by David Horovitz, founding editor, The Times of
Israel

“Israel has a solitary vote in the United Nations General Assembly, and no vote at all at the United Nations Security Council. Israel was annihilated in the Security Council vote on Friday that demanded an end to all settlement activity and that designated all the land that Israel captured from Jordan in the 1967 war, which includes the Temple Mount and the Western Wall, as “occupied Palestinian territory.” The prime minister’s hope is that he can stave off further, and still more devastating, potential diplomatic defeat at the hands of the outgoing Obama administration via a mixture of pleas, threats and boycotts. On the horizon, he sees the incoming administration of Donald J. Trump. For Netanyahu, it cannot arrive soon enough.”

The Only Thing He Didn't Say Was 'Apartheid' 

"It’s been a difficult road, these past eight years. And in these final days, the depths of frustration and anger between Washington and Jerusalem have been laid bare. Last Friday’s vote at the UN represented the most glaring instance in eight years of the president putting “daylight” between the United States and Israel, as he reportedly warned that he would back in 2009. Kerry’s speech on Wednesday pulled back the curtains all the way." 

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