Sugars, I forget that I have a Haaretz subscription at times here are excerpts from the article (not the full text). You can read some articles for free on Haaretz and the entirety of this one if you register your email:
”The decades-old image that Israel alone gets named, blamed and punished for the kinds of things all others do for free is one of the greatest historical fictions in Israel's history. It would be more accurate to say that for most of its life, Israel has gotten an incredibly free ride in its foreign relations.”
“Israel has violated UN General Assembly resolutions, including 181 (the Partition Plan) and 194 (regarding Palestinian refugees) since the earliest years. In 1967, Israel occupied territory in war (not illegal in itself), which it has essentially been annexing in slow motion ever since - and yes, the prohibition against acquiring land by force applies to any territory, not only sovereign states.
Civilian settlements - a clear violation of international law - began almost immediately and never stopped other than in Gaza. Israel openly annexed East Jerusalem and the indisputably sovereign Syrian territory of the Golan Heights, and grabbed West Bank land through the separation wall.
All this has undermined Palestinian rights to self-determination, which has been affirmed numerous times by the UN.
Then came the severe closure policy over Gaza from 2007, separation between Gaza and the West Bank, and the wars in Gaza, all bringing human rights violations, and a vast toll on civilian life and infrastructure.”
Now consider other countries involved in serious violations of international law and norms.
“Most prominently, the UN has imposed sanctions regimes on Yugoslavia and Iraq; the United States has targeted sanctions on Venezuela since 2005; and there have been sweeping multilateral sanctions on Russia over the last decade. Israel has faced nothing at all by way of official, multilateral sanctions regimes. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement has been a resounding failure on this front.”
”Regarding international associations, Israel has unconstrained access. Shortly after statehood, Israel joined the UN (although not on its first try). It participates in numerous partnerships, including with the Council of Europe and the OSCE, and in 2010, shortly after the first war in Gaza, Israel joined the OECD as one of just 38 members.”
“By contrast, Russia was kicked out of the Council of Europe due to its war in Ukraine from 2022. The G7 used to be the G8 until the 2014 invasion of Ukraine prompted Russia's eventual ouster-exit.”
“But there are worse fates: in 1974, the UN General Assembly literally suspended apartheid South Africa's participation in the Assembly for the next 20 years, until apartheid ended. Also in 1974, the UN Security Council voted on a resolution to expel South Africa from the international forum entirely. The unprecedented move was vetoed by the Americans, British and French. But many of the supporting countries also had abysmal human rights records, such as Algeria, Soviet Belarus, Cuba, Pakistan and Libya.
Kosovo can't join the UN at all, though it strains to comply with international law, and faces an ongoing de-recognition campaign fromSerbia, sometimes successful.
In the '60s, South Africa was also kicked out of the Olympics - twice. Much of the pressure to exclude it came from African countries, who presumably were not accused of being anti-African, as any Jewish person who supports a boycott of Israel would be.
In 1993, Yugoslavia was banned from the Eurovision Song Contest for the war in Bosnia, where people were starving and Sarajevo was under siege. The worst crimes - 8,000 civilians killed in Srebrenica, later designated as genocide by an international tribunal - hadn't even happened yet.
But Israel remains an enthusiastic participant in all Olympic Games as well as Eurovision.
Going back to the International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice, the accusation of singling out Israel or hypocrisy is just silly. The ICJ, the oldest postwar international court, has seen 195 cases submitted since 1947 - two of them were against Israel.
The ICC has indicted dozens of people since 2002, with more African defendants than others, while powerful Western countries face no accountability. On Tuesday, the court issued warrants to arrest more of Putin's top accomplices in the war. The current prosecutor, Karim Khan, has so far ignored the preliminary investigations of his predecessor, Fatou Bensouda, regarding the Israeli occupation.
The UN Watch NGO tracks putative endemic anti-Israelism at the international body - for example, by arguing that there have been more commissions of inquiry against Israel than other countries. Each of the two commissions related to Gaza wars (after operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge, in 2008-2009 and 2014, respectively) has been denounced in Israel as biased, predetermined and hypocritical.
But the UN Human Rights Council - admittedly a problematic body - has also established commissions for Ukraine, Syria, Burundi and Eritrea. There are also fact-finding missions, groups of independent experts, or independent investigative mechanisms for various countries - Sudan, Nicaragua, Myanmar, respectively, and other countries. I doubt Israelis have even browsed these reports; the anti-Israel bias is taken on faith.
But Israel is singled out in the UN - for special protection. According to one analysis, over half of all U.S. vetoes in the Security Council have been cast to protect Israel (45 of 89 up to late 2023). In 2002, the international relations scholar Stephen Zunes found that 91 UNSC resolutions were not being implemented at that time; the top scofflaw was Israel, which ignored one-third of them (31). I counted 18 U.S.vetos from the year 2000 to the present; 15 were about Israel and Palestine.
The U.S. role, of course, is also conspicuous regarding the lack of sanctions. Stock said: "Given how frequently the U.S. has imposed various kinds of economic sanctions or even organized other countries to coordinate on sanctions regimes ... since the 1990s, the fact that Israel has avoided anything of that nature is incredibly striking."