United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seems to have become the new psychologist, band leader and apologist for the Palestinian Authority.
It’s the Israelis’ fault we haven’t reached peace until now, Ban said Wednesday in a speech to the UN committee on rights for citizens of the Palestinian Authority. He fully excused the terror attacks on Israelis in his remarks.
“After nearly 50 years of occupation — after decades of waiting for the fulfilment of the Oslo promises — Palestinians are losing hope. Young people especially are losing hope. They are angered by the stifling policies of the occupation. They are frustrated by the strictures on their daily lives. They watch as Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, expand and expand.
“They are losing faith in their own leadership to deliver genuine national reconciliation and see the dream of a sovereign, contiguous and independent Palestinian state slip away.
“The people of Palestine have lived through half a century of occupation, and they have heard half a century of statements condemning it. But life hasn’t meaningfully changed. Children have become grandparents. But life hasn’t changed.
“We issue statements. We express concern. We voice solidarity. But life hasn’t changed. And some Palestinians wonder: Is this all meant to simply run out the clock? They ask: Are we meant to watch as the world endlessly debates how to divide land while it disappears before our very eyes?”
Sounds a little like an incitement speech by Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, no? Maybe a touch more elegant. A better speech writer.
But what really takes the biscuit is Ban’s outrageous defense of the violations of the internationally-recognized Oslo Accords – a document his own United Nations lauded.
“I urged Israel to take action consistent with prior agreements, particularly in Area C, to improve Palestinian lives, empower Palestinian institutions and enhance stability and security for Israelis and Palestinians.”
Particularly in Area C, the European Union – and US AID – have been funding and enthusiastically encouraging Arabs from the Palestinian Authority to build illegal structures, and infrastructures, that have nothing whatsoever to do with Israeli life. Under the Oslo Accords, signed by the PA as well as Israel, Area C is to be maintained under the sole legal administration of the State of Israel.
Oddly, Ban’s job description on the UN website says he is enjoined to “uphold the values and moral authority of the United Nations, and speak and act for peace, even at the risk, from time to time, of challenging or disagreeing with those same Member States.”
He’s sure been working real hard at that lately, when it comes to the Middle East.
“You can count on me,” he said Wednesday in his opening remarks to the 2016 Session of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
Ban vowed to “continue to speak up and speak out – to push and to prod – to do all in my power” to achieve the “long-overdue” peace between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
His “one and only path to a just and lasting solution” leading to that peace — of course — is “an end to the occupation that began in 1967, leading to a sovereign and independent State of Palestine, living side by side in peace and security with the State of Israel.”
Earlier in the week, he justified bloodthirsty terrorist attacks in a speech to the UN Security Council by explaining, “It is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”
“The UN Secretary General’s remarks give a tailwind to terrorism,” Netanyahu said Tuesday in response to Ban’s explanation. “There is no justification for terrorism.
“The Palestinian murderers do not want to build a state – they want to destroy a state and they say this openly. They want to murder Jews simply because they are Jews and they say this openly. They do not murder for peace and they do not murder for human rights. The UN lost its neutrality and moral force a long time ago and the Secretary General’s remarks do not improve the situation.”
For Israel, the presence of terrorist strongholds in Judea, Samaria and Gaza is an existential threat. The question of Jerusalem is no question whatsoever: One has only to open a Bible to know that. The United Nations understood that well before the partition plan was passed in 1947, and it was the Arabs who rejected that, not the Jews.
Israel won’t commit national suicide to win an international popularity contest. Not even the leftist factions have ever been willing to go that far.
The only goal accomplished by Ban’s latest remarks is the incitement of greater terrorist savagery against Israelis; Palestinian Authority leaders and most of its residents view such statements as validation for violence.
Ban’s declaration on behalf of the international community has now granted legitimacy to the current wave of terror – thus a license to wage a war of attrition on Israel.
But don’t imagine even for a heartbeat that Israelis living anywhere, on either side of the 1949 Armistice Line, will not defend themselves.
That went out with the gas chambers.