Volume 1, Issue 13

The Sense of the Congress:
A Special Report

Congress toes pro-Israel line, seeks resignation of UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories

By Antarah Crawley | Last modified 11/8/2023 9:28PM

WASHINGTON, DC — Today, November 8, 2023, the Subcommittee on Global Health, Global Human Rights and International Organizations of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives (House) convened a hearing on “United Nations’ Bigotry Towards Israel: UNRWA Anti-semitism Poisons Palestinian Youth” in Rayburn House Office Building Room 2200.

Subcommittee Chairman Smith (R-NJ) presided. Antarah Crawley, Special Rapporteur on Historical and Materialist Dialectics for the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), reported to the proceedings on orders from the House Clerk’s Office of Official Reporters.

The witnesses for this hearing included Hillel Neuer, Executive Director, UN Watch; Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, Senior Vice President for Research, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; Jonathan Lincoln, Interim Director, Center for Jewish Civilization. Of these gentlemen, Mr. Lincoln had the most firsthand experience with the United Nations (UN) in the Palestinian territory, presented the most balanced testimony, and was asked the majority of the questions by the subcommittee, the other gentlemen advancing the painfully biased position that the “state” of Israel is not and has never been at fault since its “inception” on 14 May 1948. Mr. Neuer repeatedly remarked that comes from Geneva, the headquarters of the UN Human Rights Council.

The hearing was convened largely in response to statements made by Francesca Albanese United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967. The Chairman submitted a Washington Free Beacon article by Charles Hilu to that effect into the Congressional record. Ms. Albanese, who serves as the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’s Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, argued that “self-defense” has a narrow meaning under Article 51 of the U.N. charter. That definition, she said, does not give the Jewish state the right to self-defense against Hamas because the threat stems from an armed group within “occupied territory” and not “another state.” Thus, under international law, Israel’s actions in Gaza cannot qualify as self-defense, Albanese said.

Under Article 51, use of force in #SelfDefense is permissible solely to repel an armed attack by another State […] Threats from armed groups from within occ. territory give state the RIGHT TO PROTECT ITSELF, but not to wage war against the state from which the armed group emanates.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese

“The attacks are clearly indiscriminate, disproportionate and violate the principle of precaution,” she said in an interview with the Guardian published Tuesday. “One cannot bomb hospitals hosting hundreds of patients and sheltering thousands of refugees. Sorry, we need to look for another solution, and not to bomb hospitals. Absolutely not. This is criminal.”

Mr. Hilu went on to report that Ms. Albanese condemned Israel’s “militarized settler colonial occupation” and violence against “defenseless Palestinians.” The UN also reports on the remarks of the Special Rapporteur:

[D]escribing the UN [Secretary General Antonio Guterres]’s words to the Security Council last Tuesday when he noted that the brutal attacks by Hamas fighters of 7 October “did not occur in a vacuum” as “brave”, [Albanese] stressed Gazans have “already suffered five deadly wars…during the period Israel has declared an unlawful blockade over the Gaza Strip, entrapping 2.2 million people.

UN Human Rights

The UN chief’s remarks that Palestinans have been “subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation” drew criticism from members of the Israeli government late last month. Hamas is an acronym of Islamic Resistance Movement (حركة المقاومة الإسلامية Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah).

During the hearing, Mr. Bera (D-CA) remarked that “Israel has a right to prosecute a war against Hamas. They were attacked and they have a right to defend themselves, they have a right to make sure this never happens again, they have a right to dismember, dismantle, and to the best extent eliminate Hamas, but […] when you see tragic loss of innocent civilian life, you also feel that pain.”

The Chairman remarked that according to Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, “criticism of Israel is nothing less than Anti-Semitic when it passes over into demonization of Jews and Israel, delegitimizing the Jewish state, or applying a double standard, that is, one standard for Israel and one standard for every other country on the globe.”

The Chairman continued by discussing UN entities most involved in promoting Anti-Semitism, specifically the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) which “was set up in 1949 to provide aid to refugees.”

74 years later it is still going, which is absurd in itself since nearly every Arab nation will not permit the former [Palestinians] to integrate into their societies. Why don’t they welcome the Palestinians? They simply won’t.

Chairman Smith (R-NJ)

Evidently, the Chairman and the pro-Israel caucus expect for the 1948-49 crisis that resulted in the citizens of Mandatory Palestine (and their patrilineal descendants) being expelled from their country, and the subsequent declaration of that country as the birthright of a colonizing state, to be resolved through the voluntary emigration of the Palestinian people into some other Arab nation (much like their father Abram). Talk about a double standard! Later, Mr. Schanzer even went to far as to testify,

[UNRWA] was originally created to assist Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war that the Arab states waged against Israel and subsequently lost. From early on, however, it was clear that UNRWA viewed the Palestinians as clients. They refused to permanently resettle them, and then they became the rationale for additional funding year after year. Over time, UNRWA’s clients grew old and passed on, but that was bad for business, so UNRWA expanded the definition of Palestinian refugees to include the descendants of refugees. So as a result, UNRWA’s registry has ballooned from 700,000 in 1948 to 5.9 million today; mathematically impossible. Despite the fact that only few of the original refugees are alive today, UNRWA’s roster continues to grow, and all of them claim the so-called right of return to lands inside Israel. In other words, UNRWA has extended the Palestinian-Israeli conflict deliberately and indefinitely.

Dr. Jonathan Schanzer (emphasis mine)

It sounds like Dr. Schanzer is a eugenicist who cannot fathom why the Palestinians don’t just up and die already so that the Israeli colony can expand unchallenged; and is further concerned that they appear to procreate at rates that seem impossible to the white race. Dr. Schanzer also emphasized the attack on Al-Ahli hospital, noting what he called “an errant rocket by the Islamic Jihad that created the explosion there,” and remarked that the next likely targets will be the Al-Shifa Hospital, which apparently sits on top of Hamas’s multi-story command center, and the underground tunnels which Hamas allegedly uses to divert aid from the south to the north. To the ears of the instant Rapporteur, both of these targets sound like ripe opportunities for mass collateral civilian casualties, which is to say, a rationalized genocide.

The ardently pro-Israel witnesses and the Subcommittee expressed significant concerns regarding the indoctrination of “Anti-Semitism” among Palestinian youth by UNRWA. The Chairman remarked, “UNRWA provides education in hatred of Jews for the vastly expanded number of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the original refugees.” The Congress has previously voiced this concern. The Chairman claimed the UNRWA teachers and administrators “encourage children to martyrdom as suicide bombers” and cited an article reporting that “UNRWA staff celebrated Hamas’s massacre.” Mr. Neuer testified that UNWRA School administrator Hamada Ahmed posted “Welcome to the Great October” in response to the 7 October attack, that UNRWA officials posted “Allah is great […] Reality surpasses our wildest dreams” on Facebook, and that officials justified the massacre as “restoring rights and addressing grievances.”

The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education reports that “14 UNRWA staffers […] publicly celebrated the actions of October 7. One UNRWA teacher in Gaza, Sara Alderawy, posted a video clip on the same day of the massacre, showing Hamas terrorists roaming Israeli streets with rifles while shooting at Israeli cars, and of rocket attacks in Israel. The video is accompanied by a Qur’anic verse stating: we will surely come to them with soldiers that they will be powerless to encounter, and we will surely expel them in humiliation, and they will be debased.”

Ms. Wild (D-PA) sought clarity from Mr. Lincoln on the question of why there are still refugee camps in the Palestinian territory. “The idea that refugees of 1949 are continuing to be served by UNRWA, I think, is preposterous, so what we’re talking about is successive generations of people who are born into refugee status.” She continued by confirming that “70% of the population of Gaza is provided services by UNRWA.” Mr. Lincoln replied that “1.5 million beneficiaries from Gaza” are being served. The existence of these registered refugees in “camps” that look like “neighborhoods and towns” is a part of the “final political process of creating peace in the Middle East which, who knows whether that will ever come…” The words of the Member of Congress sound strikingly close to a Final Solution for “peace” in Israel.

Ms. Manning (D-NC) remarked upon a Hamas leader’s statement that “it was the responsibility of Hamas to fight against Israel and to protect its fighters with their underground tunnels. […] And […] that they do not have a responsibility to allow the Palestinian people to get shelter from attacks in those tunnels; that the responsibility of the Palestinian people was solely held by the United Nations.” The Member asked Mr. Lincoln to expound upon how the perspective the Hamas leader is wrong; that it is the responsibility of the elected government (presumably Hamas since the 2006 legislative election) to take care of the Palestinian people who live in Gaza. Mr. Lincoln replied that that is correct, but also that in a context like Gaza, “the work of UN agencies is often conflated with the work of governments.”

Mr. Schneider (D-IL) delivered these remarks:

In synagogues around the world this week, two things are going to be universal. On the one hand there are going to be armed guards outside every one of those synagogues for fear of Anti-Semitism and violence. […] But inside those synagogues […] they’re going to be reading from the Torah, and the Torah portion that they’ll be reading from is called Chayei Sarah … [which] means “The Life of Sarah,” but it starts with the death of Sarah. […U]pon Sarah, the wife of Abraham dying, Abraham buys […] a place to bury his wife […in the Meʿarat ha-Makhpelah in Hebron]. There was a deed; my point I want to make is that the Jews have connection to this land. Hebron […] is a city in the West Bank. Jews lived in that city from the time of Abraham until 1929 […when] Arabs massacred the Jews of Hebron; those that weren’t killed left. […] Jews have lived in the land of Israel for 3,000 years, and I think that’s an important thing to note. These are not colonialists who came from Europe. In fact, today, many of the Jews […] can trace their roots, not to Europe, but to countries like Libya and Iraq, Yemen, other places, but they have a connection that goes back 3,000 years.”

Mr. Schneider (D-IL)

Mr. Schneider concluded by remarking upon the Abraham Accords, which “recognize that both Jews and Arabs belong to the same land […and] that by embracing each other, by recognizing the humanity and the connection that both have to the same place, both can elevate the place and their peoples.”

At the conclusion of the hearing, in reference to the Washington Free Beacon article on Francesca Albanese, the Chairman asked each witness whether the Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories ought to be fired for her remarks, and they all replied in the affirmative. Ms. Albanese is known to have said in 2014 that she believes that the United States is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”

After the hearing adjourned, the instant Rapporteur asked Mr. Lincoln whether the aftermath of World War III would see the UN establishment of a Palestinian reparations state in the legitimized state of Israel. Mr. Lincoln replied that my question is a misinterpretation of history, since the UN suggestion for a two-state state solution in Israel and Palestine (Resolution 181) was accepted by Israel and rejected by Palestine, therefore rendering it null and void. What subsequently occurred was the new Israeli population (which had been protected by the British until this time) declared a state of Israel which was only then recognized by the Soviet Union, the United States, and other UN member states. Ergo, the Palestinian people and its allies have never recognized the legitimacy of the state of Israel.

As to the land currently called Israel and Palestinian territory, Wikipedia relates:

Israel is located in the Southern Levant, a region known historically as Canaan, the Land of Israel, Palestine and the Holy Land. In antiquity, it was home to several Israelite and Jewish kingdoms, including Israel and Judah and Hasmonean Judea. Over the ages, the region was ruled by imperial powers such as the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans. During Roman rule, Jews became a minority in Palestine. The region later came under Byzantine and Arab rule. In the medieval period, it was part of the Islamic caliphates, the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the Ottoman Empire. The late 19th century saw the rise of Zionism, a movement advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland, during which the Jewish people began purchasing land in Palestine. Under the British Mandate by the League of Nations after World War I, Jewish immigration to the region increased considerably, leading to tensions between Jews and the Arab majority population. The UN-approved 1947 partition plan triggered a civil war between these two peoples. The British terminated the Mandate on 14 May 1948, and Israel declared independence on the same day.

The majority of biblical archeologists translate a set of hieroglyphs from the Merneptah Stele (Egypt, 13th century BCE) as “Israel”, the first instance of the name in the record, Wikipedia says.

Sources

Agassi, Arik (COO). White Paper, 2 pgs. The Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education (IMPACT-se). 8 November 2023.

Hilu, Charles. UN Official Says Israel Has No Right to Self-Defense. Washington Free Beacon. 7 November 2023.

TimesOfIndia.com. Hamas’s top 3 leaders are worth staggering $11 billion. The Times of India. 8 November 2023.

Additional References

Abraham Accords from State Department website.

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