UN Security Council Resolution 2334 will undermine peace prospects
Last week’s United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSC) 2334 was shameful and totally counterproductive…says the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.
The National Chairman Mark Leibler and executive director Dr Colin Rubenstein said: “It will undermine, rather than advance, prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and its sponsors and supporters are on the wrong side of morality and the wrong side of history.
At a time when the world is witnessing the horrors of Aleppo, and as chaos and savagery spreads through the Middle East and terrorism afflicts the globe, the UNSC has chosen to punish Israel. It has done so on the basis of the flawed assumption that Israelis living outside the 1949 Armistice Line -established after Israel survived the efforts of Arab nations to destroy it at its birth – including but not restricted to those living in disputed settlements, are the major problem preventing Israeli/ Palestinian peace.
This one-sided, biased resolution contradicts UN Resolution 242 and the Oslo Accords, both of which called for negotiations to end the conflict. It rewards the Palestinian Authority (PA) despite its ongoing intransigence, incitement and glorification of terrorists. It is anathema to the goal of encouraging the Palestinians to engage in good faith, direct, bilateral negotiations with the Israelis, who repeatedly express their willingness to do so, which is the only workable pathway towards achieving a viable two-state outcome. PA President Mahmoud Abbas now has no reason to come to the negotiating table. The UN has demonstrated that he can continue to be recalcitrant and advance his unilateral agenda without any negotiations or recognition of Israel ‘s existence, much less as a Jewish state, in any part of the land west of the Jordan River, the true core obstacle to peace. Furthermore, this resolution will boost the international campaign to delegitimise, demonise and isolate Israel, particularly the anti-Israel boycott movement in promoting its hateful, anti-peace agenda.
The UNSC has, additionally, denied Jewish legitimacy in historic Jerusalem. Jews who now go to pray at the Western Wall, the last remaining remnant of Judaism’s Holy Temple, may be acting in contradiction to UN policy. Building in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City could now be considered to be without legal validity, while the extensive changes in the Holy Basin area as a result of non-Israeli activity are ignored.
President Barack Obama’s calculated decision to reverse decades of principled US behaviour, during the lame duck period, contributes to a deplorable legacy of abandoning America’s traditional allies, ignoring his own red lines on Syria, bending over backwards to accommodate the extremist Iranian regime in nuclear negotiations and now, in not vetoing this crude anti – Israel resolution, leaving the Middle East a far more volatile, tragic and dangerous place.
New Zealand’s enthusiastic, misguided sponsorship of this ill-conceived resolution and the support given to it by other democratic allies of Australia and alleged friends of Israel like the United Kingdom are also most disappointing.
While history will judge this infamous episode for what it is, we can only hope that the damage it causes can be contained, mitigated and eventually reversed.”
