HOW ironic that the report by former South African judge Richard Goldstone and others, accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza, was presented to the UN at the same session that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad again denied the Holocaust while proclaiming that Israel should be wiped off the face of the map.
While Iran is building a nuclear bomb to use against Israel, the UN does nothing, thus guaranteeing Israel must act to ensure its survival. When it does the world will rush to condemn.
It is more than 60 years since Israel's founding and we are no closer to peace in the Middle East.
Take the recent Gaza conflict. Israel, it was said, would never surrender Gaza while Ariel Sharon was prime minister. When he did, he was attacked for doing it unilaterally. Hamas's response was to slaughter its fellow Arabs in Fatah and pour thousands of rockets into Israel. There was a strange silence from the Western media.
After 10,000 rockets, Israel decided enough was enough. In the resulting war, about 1300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died. The media's response: the rockets weren't accurate, they didn't kill many Israelis and Israel's response was disproportionate.
When asked by an interviewer whether that was the case, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied, "Would you prefer more Israelis had died?" None raised the proportionality of the Allies during the London Blitz, when 76,000 British civilians died.
Arthur "Bomber" Harris, commander-in -chief of bomber command , "proportionately" flattened German cities, killing more than 600,000 Germans. In the Pacific War, 1700 US civilians were killed, mostly at Pearl Harbor, while Australia lost 700 in Darwin. The response was to "proportionately" bomb Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 580,000 Japanese perished.
The approach of Israel in the Gaza conflict was highlighted in a speech to the UN on October 16. "Mr President, based on my knowledge and experience I can say this: during Operation Cast Lead the Israeli forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare. Israel did so while facing an army that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population. The IDF took extraordinary measures to give Gaza civilians notice of targeted areas, dropping over two million leaflets and making over 100,000 phone calls. War is chaos and full of mistakes. But mistakes are not war crimes."
The speaker? The Israeli ambassador? An Israeli general? An Israeli politician or a rabid Zionist? No, it was Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan. What a different picture from that which appeared in the international media. Many Western journalists covering the Gaza conflict should hang their heads in shame.
The greatest myth about the Arab-Israeli conflict is that Israel is the root cause of all the problems in the Middle East. An examination of the numbers killed in other conflicts in the region since Israel was founded in 1948 shows a different picture. They include Algeria: war of independence 600,000; civil war, 100,000. Sudan: first civil war (1955-72), 500,000; second civil war (1983-), 1.9 million; Darfur, 600,000. Iraq: Iraq-Iran war, 1.5 million; Saddam Hussein purges, one million. Lebanon: civil war (1975-90), 130,000. Afghanistan: Soviet invasion (1979-90), 1.5 million; civil war, 100,000. Somalia: civil war (1977-), 500,000. Jordan: 25,000. Chad: 30,000. Syria: 20,000. Turkey: 20,000. Yemen: 130,000. Total: 8.525 million. This compares with the Arab-Israeli conflict since 1948: about 85,000.
Individual anti-Semitism is one thing but the anti-Semitism of international organisations such as the UN is quite another. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which once had a reputation for integrity, have lost credibility due to anti-Israel bias.
The founder of Human Rights Watch and its chairman from 1978-98 has just resigned because he can no longer tolerate its bias against Israel.
One organisation, Freedom House, has maintained its reputation for objectivity. Formed in 1941 with the support of the Roosevelts to fight Nazism, it has maintained its integrity, monitoring political rights and civil liberties throughout the world.
Since 1973 its annual assessment of freedom has ranked every country according to whether it has free and fair elections, cultural and religious freedom, freedom from corruption, freedom of association and the press, the rule of law and all the freedoms enjoyed in modern democracies.
Among the 89 countries ranked by Freedom House as free are Australia, Britain, theUS, New Zealand, France, Germany and Israel. Not one Arab country is in the free category.
Has there been any campaign to have any Arab countries boycotted or delegitimised?
The worst of them are thuggish nations that massacre and oppress millions of their own people and are never called to account.
Why? Because they are a large voting bloc in international forums and they have resources the West badly needs.
Too often the democracies either abstain or vote with African, Asian and Middle Eastern blocs that constitute almost half the numbers in the UN because of trade or reciprocity. It's easy to vote with the bullies because Israel has only one vote.
What can be done?
First, Israel and its supporters must stop defending Israel for Israel has nothing to apologise for.
It is the criminal countries that should be on trial. Those where apostasy is a crime punishable by death and where slavery, female circumcision, honour killing, stoning to death of women for adultery and other abuses are common.
They are the ones that should be called to account.
The democracies should demand that those in the media, academic circles and trade unions now calling for boycotts of Israel be asked what they are doing about human rights abuses in such totalitarian regimes.
Israel is starting to fight back, verbally.
After a rant by Ahmadinejad at the UN on September 24, Israel's Netanyahu responded: "Yesterday the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium.
"To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honour to your countries. But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?
"A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace. What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations."
The UN is a disgrace and is only tolerated because there is no alternative. The Inter-Parliamentary Union and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association established to promote parliamentary democracy are useless. Few know they exist and fewer care.
In recent years attempts have been made to set up an international organisation for genuine democracies.
To belong to an organisation of this nature would be a badge of honour because it would exclude all those countries that are one-party states, military and theocratic dictatorships or feudal monarchies.
Eligibility for membership should be restricted to those members of the UN that are genuinely free. Using Freedom House's rankings of the 193 UN members, only 89 would qualify.
The time has come for the world's democracies to demand that every country has the same high standards of human rights they demand of Israel.
Only then will there be a genuine chance of peace in the Middle East.
This is an edited version of a speech to the Jewish National Fund in Adelaide on November 5. Barry Cohen was a minister in the Hawke Labor government.
