At the U.N., Only Israel Is an ‘Occupying Power’

EUGENE KONTOROVICH and PENNY GRUNSEID  

"What about Russia in Crimea, Armenia in parts of Azerbaijan, or what Vietnam did in Cambodia?"

For starters, Russia and Vietnam are the darlings of the left.

"The United Nations began its annual session this week, and Israel will be prominent on the agenda. Many fear the Security Council may consider a resolution setting definite territorial parameters, and a deadline, for the creation of a Palestinian state.

"President Obama has hinted that in the final months of his term, he may reverse the traditional U.S. policy of vetoing such resolutions. The General Assembly, meanwhile, is likely to act as the chorus in this drama, reciting its yearly litany of resolutions criticizing Israel.

"If Mr. Obama is seeking to leave his mark on the Israeli-Arab conflict—and outside the negotiated peace process that began in Oslo—there is no worse place to do it than the U.N. New research we have conducted shows that the U.N.’s focus on Israel not only undermines the organization’s legitimacy regarding the Jewish state. It also has apparently made the U.N. blind to the world’s many situations of occupation and settlements." . . .

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The Volokh Conspiracy:   Why the U.N.’s Israel obsession should worry even people who don’t care about Israel  "Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed by me and Penny Grunseid, “At the U.N., Only Israel is an Occupying Power.” The piece was the result of a research project in which we use content analysis software to compare the language of U.N. resolutions about Israel with the language of other resolutions. Here, we focused on comparing the legal language and general tone of U.N. resolutions dealing with Israel to the legal language and tone of resolutions dealing with the eight recent or ongoing situations of belligerent occupation that have involved substantial levels of settlement activity, which I identified in my newresearch paper, “Unsettled: A Global Study of Settlements in Occupied Territories.' ”