The UN Human Rights Council Creates a False Consciousness

In recent days, the initial conclusions of the Special Investigative Committee established by the UN Human Rights Council were published. The committee, which was formed following Operation Guardian of the Walls in Gaza, gave itself an unprecedentedly broad mandate to examine the “root causes” of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, alongside an examination of the reasons for the “systematic discrimination and the oppression on a national, ethnic, racial and religious basis in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” Even for those who are not familiar with the biased mechanisms of the UN and the clear political agenda that drives them, this reading of the aforementioned definition of the mandate should suffice to successfully “predict” the committee’s findings. Last May, on the one-year anniversary of the operation, the committee published a preliminary report, which sent shock waves around the world. The committee’s conclusions clearly indicate the apparent reason for the outbreak of violence: the Israeli occupation. The committee concluded that the Palestinians are frustrated by their inability to exercise their political rights. The name Hamas is not mentioned in the report even once, and the committee did not bother assigning any responsibility to an armed terror organization that chooses to indiscriminately fire missiles at a civilian population while using its own population as a human shield. The committee has proven since its inception that it is not focused on finding the truth, but rather on promoting a distinctly anti-Israel political agenda. The report blames Israel for all the ills of Palestinian society, from discrimination and violence against women to cultural oppression and psychological trauma. In addition, the committee performs a bypass procedure for international law when it deals with questions such as “population transfer” and pretends to answer them. This language adopted in the Rome Convention was one of the main reasons for Israel not joining the convention in the first place. It is possible to dive into a multitude of problematic examples from the report, but the main problem is the one demonstrated at the beginning of this article: that the haters of Israel received as a gift a permanent platform under the auspices of a body that still holds international legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of Western countries. The conclusions of the report, no matter how biased and distorted, will be cited by experts, journalists, and activists around the world, thereby helping promote a false consciousness regarding the existential legitimacy of the State of Israel and its actions. This mechanism must be fought with all tools and on all fronts, including exposing the illegality in the committee’s work and the appointment of its members, the unusual mechanism established to promote its activities and conclusions, as well as contradicting its conclusions, one after the other. In addition, we must continue to act in front of the member states and demand the dissolution of the committee immediately, as well as encourage public statements by leaders of friendly countries, as indeed we have done to some extent so far, condemning the committee and its conclusions. –Yifa Segal (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)