Jewish leaders in the United States are outraged at a recent vote by the United Nations General Assembly to fund an open-ended Commission of Inquiry (COI) into alleged war crimes perpetrated by Israel during the May 2021 conflict with Palestinian terror groups in the Gaza Strip.
In a news release on Monday, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations called the move appalling as the commission does not mention the actions of the Hamas terrorist organization, which intentionally shot over 4,000 rockets at civilians within Israel in May and has never opened an open-ended Commission of Inquiry on any other nation in its history.
“We vehemently oppose this one-sided farce of a probe, which again demonstrates the clear anti-Israel bias in the UN body. Israel is the only member state in the history of the U.N. to be singled out for taking defensive military action to ensure the security of its civilian population,” the release stated. “Indeed, throughout the history of UN actions, no other investigation received authorization to spend unlimited resources without an explicit mandate. The unprecedented UNGA vote presupposes wrongdoing, while unfairly challenging Israel’s right to self-defense in accordance with international law.”
The funding for the COI was approved on Dec. 23 by the UNGA with the support of 125 member nations, while the United States, Israel and six other nations voted against it, and 34—including some traditional allies of Israel—abstained from the vote.
“We are grateful for the support of the Biden Administration, Hungary, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and Papua New Guinea who joined with Israel to vote against this discriminatory commission,” the Conference’s statement read. “We are also disappointed that the key Western allies of Australia, Austria, Canada, Brazil and Germany chose to abstain, rather than to oppose this immoral and destructive measure.”
