Netanyahu demands UN chief changes institution’s ‘attitude’ to Israel
Israel has been highly critical of a number of UN institutions in recent years, including the Human Rights Council and UNESCO.
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday, demanding that the UN “change its attitude” toward Israel.
According to a statement from the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu demanded that Guterres “change the attitude of the organisation’s institutions toward the State of Israel.”
The prime minister added that it was “untenable that while major changes for the better were taking place in the entire world and in the Middle East, that the UN was unaffected and remained steadfast in its hostility to Israel.”
Netanyahu also emphasised the role of Iran in “undermining stability in the Middle East and the entire world,” and that he hopes Israel and Saudi Arabia will normalise relations soon.
“The time has come for the UN to condemn Iranian subversion and Palestinian terrorism against innocent civilians, and to refrain from its baseless criticism of Israel,” Netanyahu said, according to the statement.
Israel has been vocal in its criticism of a number of UN institutions in recent years, including the Human Rights Council and UNESCO, raging against the latter this week when it decided to list ancient ruins of Ancient Jericho/Tell es-Sultan in West Bank as “World Heritage Site in Palestine.”
In 2019, Israel left UNESCO, accusing the body of being anti-Israel. Then ambassador to UN, Danny Danon, told Times of Israel at the time that “UNESCO is a body that continually rewrites history, including by erasing the Jewish connection to Jerusalem.”
“It is corrupted and manipulated by Israel’s enemies, and continually singles out the only Jewish state for condemnation. We are not going to be a member of an organisation that deliberately acts against us.”
In 2018, Jerusalem slammed UN Human Rights Council after it passed five resolutions against Israel, calling the body an “exclusively anti Israel platform, manipulated by bloodthirsty dictatorships hiding their own massive human rights violations by attacking Israel.”
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