Israeli condemnations of the United Nations Human Rights Council after it passed five anti-Israel resolutions on Friday were accompanied by calls for Jerusalem to quit the Geneva-based organization. Israeli spokespeople have said we have no reason to be a part of an organization that is fundamentally hostile to Israel. But just as you do not abandon an army outpost, you do not abandon a political stronghold.
This is not the first time the council passed anti-Israel resolutions or shown a lack of understanding of the reality in the region. Exactly one year ago, the council, a politically biased body, went so far as to criticize Israel's world-class judicial system in its sentencing of Hebron shooter Elor Azaria.
But the real problem does not lie in the organization's decision-making process, but rather its flawed mechanism. As long as that mechanism remains in place, the farce we witnessed last week is bound to repeat itself.
When I served as a member of the council as a representative of Israel a little over a decade ago, we learned that the U.N. had decided to upgrade the body from a committee to a council. With this move, the U.N. sought to establish a fair and balanced institution with the necessary teeth with which to tackle pressing human rights issues around the world. They did a good job. The body has changed for the better.
But our enemies insist on the continuing negative characterization of Israel, and the international community, including our allies, have allowed this to happen. That is how the Human Rights Council's permanent Agenda Item 7, which focuses on the "human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories" and Israel's alleged human rights abuses came to be deliberated at every session. No other country or ethnic group has a dedicated agenda item. The same is true of the Palestinian refugees, the only group of people to have a U.N. agency dedicated solely to their plight.
As a result, the Human Rights Council has a clause that focuses on the situation of the human rights in all the countries in the world and a special clause dedicated to Israel. That is why, when it convenes, the council spends two days deliberating the human rights situation throughout the world, which of course is not nearly enough time to discuss all the world's problems, and another two days discussing Israel. This absurd reality explains the inordinate number of resolutions that are passed against Israel.
To correct the distortion, we need to change the mechanism and cancel the special clause dedicated to Israel, so that it is included among all the other nations of the world. The United States under the current administration can lead this change. Eliminating this uniquely negative treatment of Israel will serve to effectively reduce the number of resolutions against it. Better to fight the council's problematic mechanism than leave the organization altogether.
