UN Ambassador Nikki Haley this week warned the General Assembly, “Today could be a historic day at the United Nations, or it could be just another day.” As things turned out, it was both.
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For the first time ever, an overwhelming plurality voted to condemn Hamas for its ongoing war of terror against Israel.
But a last-minute maneuver set an unusually high bar, a two-thirds vote, for passage. So the US-sponsored resolution officially failed.
Then the General Assembly went on to approve another measure demanding “an end to the Israeli occupation” and a Palestinian state based on the pre-1967 borders.
Business as usual, that is, in a body that has passed over 700 resolutions condemning Israel — yet not one calling out Hamas.
Still, don’t underestimate the significance of the 87-57 vote (with 33 abstentions and 23 no-shows) citing Hamas for “repeatedly firing rockets into Israel” and calling on it and Islamic Jihad to “cease all provocative actions and violent activity, including by using airborne incendiary devices.”
Or the fact that the two-thirds requirement passed by a mere three votes.
Yet the fact remains that the UN continues to ignore terrorism directed against Israel — a maddening double standard that, as Haley declared, “is a condemnation of the United Nations itself.”
It’s also painfully self-defeating, as she also noted, since those “who have suffered the most [from] Hamas are the Palestinians themselves.”
General Assembly resolutions aren’t binding, so the vote has little practical effect. But the Trump administration had lobbied hard for passage, eventually winning the support of the entire European Union.
It would’ve been nice for Haley to finish her successful tenure at the UN with a crowning achievement — and she did come close.
Instead, this goes down as another moral failure by the feckless world body, albeit with hope that justice may triumph someday.
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