© UPI/Debbie Hill
A Palestinian stands on his property overlooking the Israeli settlement Har Homa, West Bank, February 18, 2011.
A Palestinian stands on his property overlooking the Israeli settlement Har Homa, West Bank, February 18, 2011.
The international body had come under enormous pressure to keep the database under wraps after lobbying behind the scenes from Israel, the United States and many of the 200-plus companies that were about to be named.
UN officials have suggested they may go public with the list in a few months.
But with no progress since the UN's Human Rights Council requested the database back in early 2016, Palestinian leaders are increasingly fearful that it has been permanently shelved.
That was exactly what Israel hoped for. When efforts were first made to publish the list in 2017, Danny Danon, Israel's ambassador to the UN, warned: "We will do everything we can to ensure that this list does not see the light of day."
He added that penalising the settlements was "an expression of modern antisemitism".
Comment: Doublespeak at its best. Doubleplusgood, in fact. Because penalizing illegal, ethno-nationalist colonization is "anti-Semitic".
Both Israel and the US pulled out of the Human Rights Council last year, claiming that Israel was being singled out.
Israel has good reason to fear greater transparency. Bad publicity would most likely drive many of these firms, a few of them household names, out of the settlements under threat of a consumer backlash and a withdrawal of investments by religious organisations and pension funds.
Comment: And yet no possibility is raised that the CIA itself is working with, or controlling, this "obscure" North Korean dissident group. The mainstream sources are either idiots, or they take their readership to be idiots.
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