2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People

By Anne Bayefsky for the Jerusalem Post

The UN propaganda campaign against the legitimacy of Israel has now reached epidemic proportions.

Palestinians, and their undemocratic UN cohorts, are off to a roaring start for 2014, the UN Year of Solidarity with the Palestinian People.

Last week UNESCO tore down an exhibit on the Jewish people’s ties to the land of Israel, just before it opened to the public, because it offended Arab states. Unfortunately, the move was only the tip of the UN iceberg.

All visitors to UN Headquarters in New York, including school children from across America, walk off the elevator straight into the “Palestine” exhibit.

The UN tour’s first stop communicates malignant historical revisionism. According to the display, Palestinians are the new Jews, having suffered an “exodus” in 1948. Total Arab rejection of a Jewish state (contrary to the 1947 UN partition resolution), and repeated efforts to annihilate Israel, are not mentioned. Instead, in 1948 “the first Arab-Israeli war breaks out.” Nor is there any apparent reason for the “two wars” of 1967 and 1973.

The only “contravention of international law” is by Israel. The year 1987 began not a murderous campaign against Israeli civilians, but a justifiable “Palestinian uprising.” There are triumphant photos of Yasser Arafat, maps pre-dating modern Israel, and lots of photos of miserable-looking Arab children. Not a Jewish victim in sight. And the exhibit announces, there are now 11 million Palestinians worldwide.

The UN propaganda campaign against the legitimacy of Israel has now reached epidemic proportions.

On January 20, 2014 the UN organized its first Solidarity Year event for “civil society.” In one of the UN’s main galleries, it conducted a public screening of the film “Where should the birds fly?” and sponsored a subsequent discussion with Palestinian filmmaker Fida Qishta and journalist Laila El-Haddad. Here is just some of what the film included:

Mona Samouni (age 11 or 12): “The Israeli soldiers were shooting at the people, as if they were not human, as if they were chickens or mice. For the Israeli army this is something without meaning. But the victims were very precious to us, even though they didn’t consider them human.”

Fida Qishta: “Even the presence of international observers does not prevent daily random Israeli gunfire. The Israelis seem to be playing a deadly game with Palestinians who are just trying to work and live, taunting them and intimidating them, sometimes killing them.”

Fida Qishta: “Israel justified its war on Gaza as retaliation for rockets fired into southern Israel. Hamas said Israel provoked the rockets by breaking the ceasefire agreement. But you can get trapped in all this. Who did what to whom first?...It doesn’t matter if they are the relatively simple and ineffective rockets from Gaza into southern Israel or Israel’s sophisticated US-made missiles launched from F-16’s and Apache helicopters. The real question is the imprisonment of the people of Gaza.”

At the end of the film, the child Mona asks that “the Goldstone report” be “reactivated.” In fact, the film is marketed by the distributor as the “visual documentation of the Goldstone Report.” Indeed, the film mirrored the infamous UN report’s slanderous claim – which Goldstone subsequently recanted – that Israelis “indiscriminately kill and injure” Palestinian civilians. Or as El-Haddad told the UN audience when the film ended, Israel engages in the “systematic targeting of the Palestinian civilian sector.”

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