The Israeli ambassador, the UN and intentional deception

The outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Ron Prosor, is utilising the final days of his posting to regurgitate an abbreviated appeal of his earlier speeches. From selective statistics to contemptuous tirades against the United Nations, Prosor’s agenda throughout an interview with Ynet news is to convey the erroneous depiction of Israel as a solitary entity standing alone in the international arena.

Prosor’s twisted logic commences with a description of Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris which claimed Jewish lives earlier this year. “We need promises to protect the living,” he stated, with reference to ambassadors showing solidarity in the aftermath of the attack. Conveniently, Prosor fails to recall that Israel was founded upon the immorality of murdering and ethnically-cleansing the indigenous Palestinian population; Zionist terrorists even murdered the UN mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, in 1948. Rhetoric about protection from Israel is nothing but self-serving and dissociated from its fabricated history and reality, as Prosor’s interview portrays clearly.

Beneath the veneer of solitude attributed to Israel by the ambassador, there is an intricate complicity at international level that allows the Zionist state to plunge ahead with its colonising agenda unhindered. Away from Prosor’s articulation, which feigns limiting Israel’s presence at an international level as a mere survival tactic, the UN and its affiliated organisations have developed a system which immediately compensates Israel for any criticism that is levelled against it.

And yet Prosor claims that Israelis are “fighting for our existence” within the international body. This false premise conceals the fact that no action undertaken by the UN has yet threatened, or even questioned, Israel’s dubious existence. Despite the many resolutions condemning Israel, the UN has yet to consider departing from lauding the state’s right to exist and defend itself. Any departure from what has now become standard UN propaganda risks throwing the entire organisation into chaos and rendering its foundations fragile, since its existence thrives upon human rights violations. Israel’s illegal existence serves as a shield for the UN, which continues with its hypocritical function as guardian and violator of dignity, sovereignty and freedom.

Operation Protective Edge against the civilians of the Gaza Strip last year, and the recognition of Palestine as a state by various countries, were also discussed by Prosor, who spoke of “protecting Israel” at the UN and sounding sirens at the Security Council in order to portray the alleged trauma suffered by Jewish settlers living on colonised Palestinian land. The ambassador also accused the UN of reserving different standards for Israel, which may be the only truth gleaned from the interview, albeit with a different interpretation from that intended.

The UN has indeed differentiated between Israel and other countries, but for Israel’s benefit. The difference lies in vested interests and the level of complicity, as well as the safeguarding of colonial expansion. Israel has not been given an international platform, it has usurped the diplomatic space at an international level through claims of victimisation and even more vehement demands for compensation, which are always linked to security issues.

Throughout the interview, Prosor’s references to Palestine are few and transient. If anything is to be gleaned from this observation, it is the fact that, through both oblivion and the manipulation of reality, Israel has, at an international level, managed to embark upon a process that further absolves it of decades of murder and displacement. For Palestinians, this means combating the invalidation imposed by Israel upon their existence, a task that is hampered by the internationally-recognised corrupt entity that claims to represent them.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.