UN chief hails ‘beautiful’ Israel

THE United Nations Secretary-General has decried people who call for Israel’s destruction saying that they are engaged in “a form of modern anti-Semitism”.

Antonio Guterres was making his first trip to Israel since becoming leader of the UN in January. He sought to allay Israeli concerns about antagonism from within the UN, enthused about Israel, and expressed sympathy for Israeli security concerns.

After Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin urged him to “end the discrimination against Israel in some branches of your organisation”, Guterres said he should be “fully confident” that he is committed to “the very important value of the [UN] Charter, impartiality”.

At another point during his trip Guterres said that when the UN is referred to as an honest broker this “means that all countries must be treated equally”. he said: “This is for me very clear and you can be sure that these values will be upheld.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told him during a meeting that there is “no question” that Israel and the UN have a “troubled relationship”, saying that the UN has “an absurd obsession with Israel”.

The UN has “failed” its mandate to promote peace and security when it comes to Israel, its cultural agency UNESCO “makes a mockery” of world heritage by passing resolutions airbrushing Jewish history from Jerusalem, some UN institutions allow Palestinian hate speech to “flourish”, and Israel is targeted on human rights issues by countries with bad human rights records.

But Netanyahu had some optimism, saying that Guterres has “demonstrated the desire since you have taken office to turn a new page in the relations between Israel and the UN”.

Guterres called Israel “beautiful”, and lauded the country as “the world’s most successful knowledge-based economy”.

He said that this success stems from the “enormous contribution of the Jewish people” to culture, science, philosophy and civilisation.

At Yad Vashem, he raised concerns that echoes of Nazism are being heard again today.

“The Holocaust was not a crazy initiative of a group of paranoid Nazis but it was the combination of millennia, of persecution and discrimination of the Jewish people of what we today call anti-Semitism,” he said.

Guterres had been “shocked” to hear a Nazi chant used in a developed country – an apparent reference to Charlottesville – and he said: “That is a dramatic demonstration that it is our duty to do everything possible and, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, I fully assume that commitment to do everything possible to fight anti-Semitism in all its expressions.”

Guterres listened to concerns about Israeli security.

“Iran is busy turning Syria into a base of military entrenchment and it wants to use Syria and Lebanon as warfronts against its declared goal to eradicate Israel,” Netanyahu told him, adding a detailed complaint against Iran.

Tehran, he said, “is building sites to produce precision-guided missiles towards that end in both Syria and in Lebanon. This is something Israel cannot accept. This is something the UN should not accept.”

In meetings with Palestinian leaders in Ramallah, Guterres said that there is no alternative to the two-state solution, spoke out against settlement activity calling it “illegal under international law” and an “obstacle to peace”, and criticised Netanyahu’s new promise not to leave settlements.

It is “clear that there is a disagreement on that matter”, he said of Netanyahu’s comments. He strongly rejected alternatives to the two-state solution, saying that the two-state formula, calling it the “only way to guarantee that peace is established”.