There aren't many serious words that can be said about the fabricated report released on Wednesday by the UN, which accuses Israel of genocide, sexual violence, and harming the reproductive capacity of Palestinians in Gaza.
After all, it has been centuries since the blood libels of the Middle Ages. The Age of Enlightenment transformed the world, and yet, in one small corner of New York City, the same old fantasies about the Jewish people are carefully preserved like artifacts in a museum. Should we really be surprised? This is nothing more than pure, distilled antisemitism. The same people who believed 500 years ago that Jews slaughtered Christian babies and used their blood to bake matzah now, in the age of artificial intelligence and high-tech, have no problem believing that Jews deliberately bomb fertility clinics in Gaza.
We won't give a pass to the so-called experts who signed off on this prestigious report because their field of expertise clearly belongs in the realm of fantasy. Here are just some of their "findings": Israel exterminating Palestinians by impairing their fertility, deliberately targeting sexual health and fertility clinics, using starvation to impact reproduction, systematically employing sexual violence and gender-based violence, engaging in sexual harassment and public shaming of Palestinian women, recording and filming sexual violence against men and boys during arrests, and committing sexual violence during ground operations, including at checkpoints and evacuations. And the list goes on and on, as if pulled from the depths of an overactive imagination.
One section of the report even seriously discusses how IDF soldiers "shamed" Palestinian women and their sexuality simply by taking photos of themselves in underwear, what the report essentially labels "genocide" in the style of Victoria's Secret. Another section claims Israel intentionally bombed fertility clinics in Gaza. Perhaps this would have been taken more seriously if we hadn't already encountered a similar claim during Operation Guardian of the Walls. Palestinian testimonies, by the way, are accepted at face value throughout the report, with no rigorous verification, no cross-examination with Israeli accounts or investigations. But don't hold your breath - the entire process was meticulous when it came to collecting every possible accusation, with fact-checking tossed aside as an inconvenient afterthought.
How tragic is this farce, particularly for the Jewish people? The very international institutions that were established after the Holocaust to ensure "never again" are the ones now compiling every possible accusation against Israel with one hand while keeping their eyes firmly shut to the atrocities committed against Israelis. They ignore the harrowing testimonies of rape, sexual violence, the burning of infants, child abuse, the kidnapping of babies into captivity, and the desecration of bodies. None of these horrors warrant a UN report, a sharp condemnation, a special session, or dozens of pages of detailed documentation. The same rules from the Middle Ages and 1933 still apply today: when it comes to Jews, facts be damned.
We are participating in this spectacle by choice. Israel remains a UN member because the alternative - being cast out from the family of nations - is exactly what our enemies would love to see. The path we have chosen, and continue to choose, is to stay engaged while speaking out against the repeated injustices. The only thing left for us to do is stop acting surprised every time.
In the 1950s, David Ben-Gurion summed up the Jewish state's attitude toward the institution: "Um-Shmum" (a dismissive play on the Hebrew acronym for the UN). Golda Meir later added the immortal words: "It doesn't matter what the nations say, what matters is what the Jews do." And in 1997, when the UN condemned Israel for building the Har Homa neighborhood in East Jerusalem - the very place from which I am writing these words - Prime Minister (then and now) Benjamin Netanyahu responded: "If this is what the UN is doing, then it really is just shmum." Even today - let them be a thousand times shmum.
