Israeli Ambassador Gilad Erdan Addressing the October 29, 2021 special session of the United Nations General Assembly. Photo: Permanent Mission of Israel to the UN

Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan lambasted the body’s Human Rights Council (HRC) on Friday, in remarks at a special session held to present an annual report that included severe criticism of Israel.

“The voices of the victims, of the terrible crimes against humanity that we have already seen in the first decades of this century, cannot be heard over the obsession of the so-called Human Rights Council with targeting Israel,” said Erdan, Israel’s Ambassador to the US and UN.

“Since the establishment of the council 15 years ago, it has decided to blame and condemn Israel, not 10 times like Iran, or 35 times like Syria. No, the Human Rights Council has attacked Israel with 95 resolutions. Compared to 142 against all other countries combined.”

HRC President Nazhat Shameen Khan delivered the report, noting that the forum had held three special sessions in the past year, on Myanmar, Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

“The Council decided to establish an ongoing independent, international commission of inquiry to investigate in the occupied Palestinian territory, and in Israel, all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law leading up to and since 13 April 2021,” Khan said.

She also recognized the group of nations elected earlier this month serve on the Human Rights Council — Argentina, Benin, Cameroon, Eritrea, Finland, Gambia, Honduras, India, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Montenegro, Paraguay, Qatar, Somalia, the United Arab Emirates and the US.

In his remarks, Erdan argued that the HRC inquiry on Israel and the Palestinian territories “completely disregarded the  hostilities of one party to the conflict – Hamas – while shifting all the blame to  the other party – Israel.”

“It was on this stage, at this very body, that the very right of the Jewish people, to have a national home, was itself declared to be racist,” Erdan concluded, recounting the 1975 General Assembly speech by Israel’s then-UN Ambassador Chaim Herzog, who physically tore up a copy of a resolution condemning Zionism that was later revoked.

“This is exactly what should be done to this antisemitic, distorted, one-sided report,” Erdan said. “For just as that 1975 resolution, equating Zionism with racism, was itself a gross form of anti-Jewish racism, which has no place in this international body — so too, the Human Rights Council’s obsessive anti-Israel bias, embodied, once again, by this report, should have no place in any body concerned with human rights, security or peace.”