Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Gilad Erdan Crows After His Uncontested “Election’’
Women protest the appointment of Gilad Erdan, Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, as one of the 21 Vice Presidents of the 77th session of the U.N. General Assembly, outside the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees center in the Rafah refugee camp on June 9, 2022. (SAID KHATIB/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, August/September 2022, pp. 10-11
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
OVER THE YEARS, Israel has sent a tag team of obnoxious racist right-wing ambassadors to the U.N. who shared a publicly expressed disdain for the organization, its Charter and its decisions. Last year, current incumbent Gilad Erdan lived down to his predecessors’ standards by tearing up the U.N. Human Rights report while on the podium from which he will now occasionally preside over the Assembly. Of course, he shared with them a brazen disdain for the Palestinians along with an obsessional need to be recognized and loved by the organization that, after all, had anomalously legitimized their settler state.
Notoriously, a diplomat is someone sent abroad to lie for their country and just like his predecessors, Erdan ostentatiously and consistently lives down to the job description. And like them, he does not blink at disparaging the U.N. while calling down its wrath on others, notably Iran. And oddly, along with the State of Israel, he crows at every tiny positional gain his renegade state makes in the organization.
Other countries think “so what,” but for Israel it is a diplomatic game of Go, where each piece positioned is an incremental gain in the long run. Despite Erdan’s manifest disdain for the Charter, U.N. delegates “allowed” this Goebbels-emulator to become one of 21 Vice Presidents of the General Assembly. Although the press reported that Israel was “elected,” this is stretching it, since the scofflaw state could only take the seat because of the fix in the “West European and Others Group” (WEOG), which meant no other country from that group dared run against it for fear of being penalized when its “turn” came round.
But as has been said in other contexts, not least the much-invoked Holocaust, for evil to triumph all it needs is inaction from bystanders. This means that most members of the U.N., and in particular the West European group, just had to acquiesce in Erdan’s “election,” implicitly condoning the countless crimes of the occupiers. Typically insouciant of reality, Erdan crowed that “this triumph sends a clear message to our enemies that they will not prevent us from participating in leading roles at the U.N. and in the international arena.”
The appointment was announced against the background of the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s conclusion that Shireen Abu Akleh was killed by the IDF. The same week The New York Times belatedly reached the same conclusion after almost every other news agency, including Al Jazeera, whose staff were actual witnesses, as well as the Washington Post, CNN, AP and many others, about the shooting. Along with Bellingcat, oft acclaimed for its work in ferreting out disinformation, the media concluded that it was the Israeli security forces who killed her, the same gang of “the most moral army in the world,” who then trashed her funeral as the world watched.
Indeed, their attempt to hijack the coffin could be seen as a calculated diversion for the settler mob that seized a Palestinian home in Hebron. In any case, shortly afterwards the IDF and police backed up a mob of hard Zionist pogromists ravaging the Old City, so it was indeed an incremental gain for the occupiers, who escaped with little or no public condemnation for their manifestly illegal barbarities.
If the VP vote had gone as a contested election to the whole General Assembly, then almost any other candidate would have won. Indeed, although the bumptious Erdan represented it as a pioneering triumph, in 2005, backed by brutal U.S. pressure, his predecessor Dan Gillerman had taken the seat when Israel was first admitted to the WEOG ranks. Nevertheless, Erdan’s cynical crowing was supported with hasbara from the state, amplifying his shameless self-promotion through a sycophantic and stenographic media.
The U.N. members know the real situation since they overwhelmingly endorsed the results of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) into Israeli practices in the Territories. With typical perversity, the pro-Israeli press headlined their vote as “21 countries lash U.N. report.” The headline writers’ inversion of the subject is indicative. When the numbers were inverted for the General Assembly resolution on the invasion of Ukraine, the headlines talked about the world’s condemnation of Putin, not about the flogging of the U.N. by Zelensky! A small harbinger of conscience was Australia’s new Labour government breaking the Anglo-Israeli axis whip when they refused to join this “lashing!”
Typically, the U.S. ambassador claimed that “the nature of the COI established last May is further demonstration of long-standing, disproportionate attention given to Israel in the Council and must stop…We continue to believe that this long-standing disproportionate scrutiny should end, and that the Council should address all human rights concerns, regardless of country, in an even-handed manner,” she said. “Regrettably, we are concerned that the Commission of Inquiry will further contribute to the polarization of a situation about which so many of us are concerned,” she shamelessly blathered.
Citizens of Canada, the Netherlands, the UK and other countries that supported the resolution are culpable. Imagine the outcry if their delegations to the U.N. had exonerated Putin!
Taking their cue from Washington, the assorted group of 21 client atolls and toadies who voted against the report did not contradict the facts in it, but rather squirmed to suggest that there were too many such reports about Israel.
None of them seriously contested the findings about Palestinian suffering, nor about Israeli crimes, which suggests their protestations of bias had all the ethical substance of Al Capone whining about anti-Italian bias in the FBI.
Perhaps those who look for “bias” should look at Secretary of State Antony Blinken unabashedly not conducting any inquiry into the murder of a U.S. citizen because he is waiting for the results of an inquiry by the murderers, who have made it plain that they had no intention of investigating. First they could nothing without the murder bullet, and then when they got it, their soothsayers concluded from a few battered crumbs of lead that there was no reason to infer murderous intent.
And, speaking of bias, these recidivist whitewashers have repeatedly found themselves innocent of every such charge. The good news is that many Democratic lawmakers have called for an inquiry despite being warned off by AIPAC, which claimed that “the circumstances of Ms. Abu Akleh’s death remain unclear despite the hasty conclusions of various media outlets.” For a reductio ad absurdum this is a bit like refusing to start the Nuremberg trials until we have the full names of all the victims. It is an insulting prevarication and should be denounced as such by the congresspeople to whom it was addressed.
Shireen Abu Akleh can draw some posthumous comfort from the timing, some 55 years after the murder of 34 other U.S. citizens, the sailors on the USS Liberty that Israel tried to sink in 1967, a crime which could have led to charges of a biased inquiry from Washington.
But the Israelis know what they are doing. Like Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, they know that pre-emptive complaints about alleged bias, delivered in a bubble wrap of “what about-ery,” go a long way to head off criticism and make liberal and fair-minded critics ignore the substance of the accusation to simply count up the complaints and shout “bias.”
Blinken can at least exonerate himself of anti-Arab bias since he is now shaking the hands of the Crown Prince who ordered Jamal Khashoggi put through a meat grinder—and is refusing to support moves to isolate Putin. It is almost reassuring that there is more than one lobby mesmerizing the administration in Washington. But not really! The overarching message is not “bias” but that it is open season on American journalists across the world!
U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).
