UN Human Rights Official: Israel Deserves Better Treatment

by Kalman Rushdie [➚] · Friday, March 11th, 2005

Israel should receive more balanced treatment in the UN, particularly in the area of human rights, according to Louise Arbour, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

According to the Jerusalem Post, Arbour met with Diaspora Minister Natan Sharansky this week and expressed hope that the UN’s much-discussed reforms will result in better treatment for Israel.

But the reforms are unlikely to affect how Israel will fare at the annual meeting of the Commission on Human Rights next week, Arbour said, because the 53-member body was essentially political in nature. However, Arbour told Sharansky she would use the meeting to speak out forcefully against the growing anti-Semitism.

During the meeting, Sharansky reportedly expressed concern that the commission’s treatment of Israel – the fact that Israel was the only country to have a “special report” on its human rights record – gave a false impression of Israel’s human rights record compared to countries that have complete disdain for human rights.

“How it can be that a democratic country, which has many tools to fight against these types of violations, receives a special status at the UN, as if its human rights violations exceed those of all other countries, at a time when there are UN member states that are totalitarian, and where rights for their citizens don’t exist at all?” Sharansky asked.

French Left Wing Leader Shifts Stance on Israel

by Kalman Rushdie [➚] · Tuesday, March 8th, 2005

The left wing in France is revising its long-standing opposition to Israel, according to Israeli Foreign Ministry officials. They pointed to last week’s article by noted Palestinian advocate and former French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius urging the French left to support the Jewish state.

Fabuis, writing in the traditionally pro-Palestinian weekly Le Nouvelle Observateur, entitled his article, “I am pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli.” He criticized the French left’s reflexive sympathy for the Palestinian cause “as if the suffering and despair were not evenly divided between the two sides.”

He also wrote that many French people view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the lens of their own colonial history. “Most of us came to Socialism through an anti-colonial struggle,” he wrote, adding that many socialists in France today don’t have a grasp of the pressures Israelis live under.

Israeli officials told the Jerusalem Post that shifts in Israeli policy, including the disengagement plan, are helping improve Israel’s image. They said they expect the revision in France to continue as long as Israel maintains a policy the French left supports.