UK: Voting twice in support of motions designed to demonize, delegitimize and destroy Israel

Melanie Philips writes @ The Jerusalem Post:

 When the UN Human Rights Council voted last week to back the report by Mary McGowan Davis on the 2014 Gaza war, the behavior of two council members in particular provoked protests in their home countries.  The report, which used skewed and selective reports falsely to condemn Israel for war crimes along with the true war criminal, Hamas, was a travesty. The resolution, which failed to blame Hamas for war crimes but accused Israel of such behavior not just last year but also in the 2008/2009 war, piled malice upon malice.

Only the US voted against the UNHRC resolution. Five countries abstained: Kenya, Ethiopia, Macedonia, India and Paraguay. But what caused a stir was that two countries, the UK and Germany, voted for it. [The eight sitting European Union members: France, Germany, the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal, Latvia and Estonia]

In Germany, this was denounced by the Christian Democratic Union party. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of hypocrisy. Only last April he had robustly supported Israel’s actions in Gaza, declaring there was “such a difference” between indiscriminate attacks upon Israel and its attempt to defend itself against them.

What’s more, the UK had also voted against Israel last May when, by 104 votes to 4, Israel was singled out by the World Health Organization as the only nation on earth to be condemned for violating health rights. Voting twice in support of motions designed to demonize, delegitimize and destroy Israel was behavior scarcely fitting one of its allies.

But then the story took off in a very odd direction. Stephen Pollard, the editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, had a scoop which was as strange as it was sensational.  On the morning of the UNHCR vote, he wrote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had personally called David Cameron and Angela Merkel and asked them to vote for the Israel-bashing resolution.

The reason, said Pollard’s sources, was that this resolution – which was bad enough – had been watered down from the far more savage original version. Israel feared that if the watered-down version was overturned, the original would be revived.

Cameron, who had been planning to vote with the US against the resolution, initially described this bizarre request as “pure madness” before agreeing to vote as Israel was asking.  The story made little sense.

Given that most of the UNHRC was hostile to Israel, there was surely scant chance the resolution would be overturned. More strikingly still, Netanyahu had asked India, Kenya and Ethiopia to abstain. Why would he have done that if he was desperate for this resolution to be passed as the lesser of two evils? Why was his plea to the UK and Germany diametrically different? The answer to this puzzle becomes obvious if one understands just what the Palestinian Authority was doing behind the scenes, and the nightmarish diplomatic stranglehold in which Israel is trapped.

The PA was using blackmail to get the Europeans, in particular, on side. The US, to the PA, is a lost cause on the UNHRC while India and African states are of little account. The people the PA has identified as the key to bringing Israel down through both economic isolation and diplomatic delegitimization are the Europeans.  More.