© Reuters / Joshua RobertsU.S. Ambassador to the United Nations NIkki Haley speaks to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference in Washington, U.S., March 27, 2017
Haley defended Israeli troops' actions and blamed Hamas and its Iranian backers for the violence on Gaza's border with Israel. "Let's remember that the Hamas terrorist organization* has been inciting violence for years, long before the United States decided to move our embassy," she said.
"Make no mistake, Hamas is pleased with the results from yesterday," the ambassador added.
Praising Israeli "restraint" in the ongoing border violence, Haley noted "no country in this chamber would act with more restraint than Israel has. In fact the records of several countries here today suggest they would be much less restrained."
According to the ambassador, the US decision to move its embassy to Jerusalem was the right thing to do, and "reflects the reality" of the city being Israel's capital.
Haley also insisted that the embassy move has no impact on the prospects for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
Comment: Uhh, Nikki, just about the entire world disagrees with you, except for the little countries the US is able to squeeze.
- Donald Trump and Jerusalem - Making Middle East peace impossible
- More than half of Americans oppose moving US Embassy to Jerusalem
- EU ministers rebuff Netanyahu's pleas to recognize Jerusalem as Israeli capital claiming it would harm peace process
- UN: Trump's Jerusalem move widely condemned
- 'This is state terror': Foes & allies criticize Israel's heavy handed force in wake of embassy move
- Jordanian warning: Trump's US Embassy move to Jerusalem, a 'gift to extremists'
- US slaps Palestine in the face by celebrating embassy move to Jerusalem on anniversary of Nakba - while Israel mass murders protesters
With Palestinian UN envoy preparing his response, Haley demonstratively walked out of the chamber. During his half-hour long speech, ambassador Riyad Mansour accused Israel of "armed aggression" against the Palestinian people, and accused the US of "trampling" international law in Monday's decision.
"No country has the right to place its embassy on occupied land," Mansour said, adding that international agreements, including those created at the UN, demand that the status of Jerusalem be defined in the course of peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine.
"This is another decision where the US administration is totally ignoring our feelings and our legitimate rights, and the feelings of Muslims, Christians, and all monotheistic religions throughout the world," Mansour said.
According to the ambassador, Trump's decision displays disregard for world opinion, including Security Council resolutions. "This is a superpower which must first and foremost defend international law, a superpower that must protect the resolutions of the Security Council as a permanent member of this body. They must adhere to international law, not wipe their feet with it," he said.
Mansour in turn walked out at the start of a speech by Israeli ambassador Danny Danon.
The war of words and gestures was part of Tuesday's emergency Security Council session dedicated to the deaths of over 60 Palestinians amid ongoing protests over Monday's ceremony to transfer the US diplomatic presence in Israel to Jerusalem. No joint statement or action was reached during Tuesday's meeting, with the US vetoing a draft statement prepared by Kuwait calling for an independent probe into the violence.
Haley's comments, particularly her defense of the Israeli military's actions at the Gaza border, saw tension reaching a boiling point on social media, with little room for neutrality.
Trump made the decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital in December 2017. That same month, a UN resolution requiring countries not to establish diplomatic missions in the contested city of Jerusalem garnered the support of 128 countries, including Russia, China and most of the US's European allies. Washington moved ahead with its decision anyway. Speaking at the embassy transfer ceremony on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu call the move "historic."
*Israel, the United States and several other countries designate Hamas as a terrorist organization. Russia does not designate the group as such.
What makes this distinct self-perpetuating leniency all the more extraordinary is that even the original designation of the Palestinians as refugees ran counter to both the standard definition of this status and the international treatment of similar, if not worse, contemporary humanitarian predicaments. In contrast, the Palestinians and the Arab states have never been penalized for their “war of extermination and momentous massacre,” to use the words of Arab League secretary-general Abdul Rahman Azzam, against the nascent state of Israel. Quite the reverse, in fact. Despite U.N. secretary-general Trygve Lie’s admonition that “the United Nations could not permit that aggression to succeed and at the same time survive as an influential force for peaceful settlement, collective security, and meaningful international law,” the Palestinians and the Arab states were generously rewarded for that very aggression. The former have become the most privileged refugee group ever; the latter have been generously remunerated for hosting the displaced persons whose dispersal they caused in the first place. This unprovoked war of aggression should have ipso facto precluded the Palestinians from refugee status, should have obliged them to compensate their Jewish and Israeli victims, and should have made their rehabilitation incumbent upon their leaders and the Arab regimes as with post-World War II Germany and collaborating parties. However, it did not. In addition, their designation as refugees also failed to satisfy the internationally accepted definition of this status in several other key respects. Apart from recognizing the Palestinians as refugees despite their failure to meet the basic criteria for this status and assigning a distinct agency to tend to their affairs, the U.N. blindly registered countless false claimants as refugees despite its keen awareness of the pervasiveness of this fraud, then let their falsely obtained status be passed on to future generations. Yet rather than seek to dispel this misguided sense of victimized entitlement and steer the refugees toward rehabilitation as stipulated by its mandate, UNRWA began edging in the opposite direction. One can only hope, therefore, that as UNRWA nears its seventieth anniversary, the agency’s main donors, first and foremost the United States and the European Union, which bankroll nearly half of its budget, will find the necessary courage and integrity to acknowledge the urgency of deep reform and condition future contributions on UNRWA’s reversion to the original mandate: that is, its gradual transfer of responsibility for the Palestinian “refugees” to the Palestinian Authority and the host Arab governments, thus ending their eternal “refugeedom” and facilitating their integration in their respective societies as equal and productive citizens. This will be seventy years later than originally conceived, but better late than never. EFRAIM KARSH
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