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Israel's Priorities at the 61st UN General Assembly

[Israel Foreign Ministry] The Northern Border - Israel will spare no diplomatic effort to see the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1701 in full, and will highlight Israel's struggle with terrorist elements that have dominated the politics in our region and dragged the region into war. Palestinian Organs in the UN - Israel believes that the time is right to deal with the mandates of the Palestinian organs in the UN, by abolishing them or merging them with other mandates or organs in the Secretariat. Over the years, the General Assembly (GA) and the Councils established 120 mandates and procedures relating to the Palestinian issue. Israel views the maintaining of these mandates and organs as superfluous and one-sided and as a distorted and wasteful use of the resources of member states against a fellow member state, whose narrative is neglected. Annual Resolutions Relating to the Conflict - The General Assembly votes on about 70 resolutions every year, of which about 20 deal with the Israeli-Arab conflict. The need to limit the number of annual pro-Palestinian resolutions, or to consolidate them, dovetails with the proposals of the Secretary General to streamline the work of the GA and to make it more effective. UNRWA - The UN agency for relief and work has become, after 60 years, the second biggest employer of Palestinians operating in the PA. (UNRWA operates also in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.) UNRWA perpetuates the Palestinian problem, rather than resolving the refugee status of the people or rehabilitating them. It devotes all its resources to three functions that are usually run by a state or governing authority: elementary education, public health, and food security. We believe it is possible, in the long term, to transfer the daily tasks, together with existing budgets, of the agency to governmental bodies in the PA, as should be done in Jordan and elsewhere. The Human Rights Council - The UN upgraded the Commission for Human Rights to the status of a council. Israel voted against its establishment, together with the U.S., due to the worry that the new council would not be an improvement over the commission it replaced. Indeed, since its first meeting, it has discriminated against Israel. The council has convened an emergency session twice in its short history - once regarding Gaza and once regarding Lebanon, and in both cases decided on action against Israel. The international community should know that the council is failing to deal with real humanitarian crises and cases of serious violations of human rights in other parts of the world because it is dealing nearly exclusively with the Middle East and particularly with Israel.
2006-09-20 01:00:00
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