The United Nations General Assembly hall. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

A special committee of the United Nations General Assembly on Friday voted in favor of nine resolutions attacking the State of Israel — with the rest of the world left unmentioned.

The resolutions were passed in quick succession by the General Assembly’s “Fourth Committee,” which is also known as the “Special Political and Decolonization Committee.”

While the committee’s mandate covers a host of disconnected issues from peacekeeping to the uses of outer space, much of the focus of its work concerns the Palestinian question. In political terms, the committee is a significant source of support for UNRWA, the UN body dedicated solely to Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants. It also operates the “The Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories” — which created in 1968 at the instigation of the Soviet Union and its Arab allies.

Friday’s resolutions saw Israel condemned for alleged human rights abuses, its “occupation” of eastern Jerusalem, and its “occupation” of the Golan Heights captured from Syria during the 1967 Six-Day War. The ongoing civil war in Syria itself, and the continuing abuse of human rights in the devastated Arab country, made no appearance in Friday’s deliberations.

One resolution completely ignored Palestinian violence as it emphasized “the responsibility of Israel, the occupying Power, to investigate all acts of settler violence against Palestinian civilians and their properties and to ensure accountability for these acts.”

Another resolution condemned Israel for refusing to cooperate with the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, claiming as well that the continued crisis in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip — which Israel withdrew from completely in 2005 — was the consequence of “unlawful Israeli practices and measures.”

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