July 31, 2015: The UN is notoriously corrupt, always has been and has become more so as the decades roll by. With enough money votes in the UN General Assembly can be bought. Many of these votes are largely symbolic. For example, take the UN Human Rights Council, which is supposed to seek out, document, publicize and condemn abuses worldwide. In the nine years the UN Human Rights Council has existed it has issued 116 resolutions condemning a nation for gross violations of human rights. There are plenty of brutal governments around but because of lavish bribes by oil-rich Arab nations 52 percent of those resolutions were directed against Israel. Syria accounted for 13 percent, Burma ten percent, North Korea seven percent, Iran four percent and so on down to Honduras which was condemned once. This sort of thing is accepted as normal in the UN.

What is ironic about this is how often the political theater at the UN goes out of its way to ignore reality. Palestinian supporters (mainly other Moslem states) ignore the Palestinian worship of terrorism while declaring Israeli efforts to defend itself a war crime. That means that there is automatic support for just about anything the Palestinians want. Arab oil money has also been spent to lobby potential allies throughout the West. This has worked quite well in Europe, less well in the Americas. Money talks at the UN and there are many states willing to sell their support if the price is right. But now the Palestinians want resolutions with teeth but that may prove a scam too far. Yet there are a growing number of Israelis who fear that Arab lobbyists may end up doing more damage to Israel than Arab Islamic terrorists or soldiers ever could.

This was seen in late 2014 when the Palestinians applied to join the ICC International Criminal Court). This followed the Palestinian failure to get the UN to order Israeli troops withdrawn from the West Bank. Israel expects that similar Palestinian attempts to prosecute Israel for war crimes will backfire. That’s because far more Palestinians are killed by other Palestinians (and other Arabs) than by Israelis. For example over 3,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Syrian Civil War since 2011. Hundreds were tortured to death and more than that were executed, often in gruesome ways, for being on the wrong side or for “blasphemy”. In Gaza hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting or executed by Hamas for various offenses (like disagreeing with Hamas rule.) In the last half century more far more Palestinians have been killed by Arabs than by Israelis. This would appear to be a more significant target for ICC investigation than the much smaller number of Palestinians killed by Israelis. Arab countries block such investigations in the UN and ICC, usually with success.

Yet despite potential problems with things like the ICC the long-term Palestinian plan is working. This bothers Israelis a great deal. That plan involves continually demanding UN help to obtain recognition there as a “sort of” state and build on that to get the UN to impose economic and military sanctions on Israel for imaginary war crimes. Arab oil states have been throwing their money around for decades in the UN, to get nations to go along with meaningless resolutions condemning Israel, so this plan has a chance of success.

What the Palestinians have to fear the most is not Israel but countries that threaten Arab oil states. These days that is major Islamic terror organizations (ISIL and al Qaeda) and Iran. Because of these threats Arab oil states recently admitted the existence, for over a decade, of a secret alliance with Israel when it came to terrorists (ISIL, al Qaeda and Iran) that threaten Israel as well as Arab governments. Moreover the Arab oil states that have long subsidized the Palestinians are growing tired of that effort, especially since Palestinians have shown a preference for Arab enemies like Iran and al Qaeda. It goes back longer that as when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 most Palestinians supported Iraq and its ruler Saddam Hussein. Until recently the Palestinians supported the pro-Iran Assad dictatorship of Syria. So the oil-rich Arabs did the math and have been switching their allegiances. This will disappoint many UN members, who have grown accustomed to all those multi-million dollar bribes for symbolic, often blatantly absurd but otherwise meaningless votes against Israel.