Last summer I was invited to testify before an independent fact-finding mission commissioned by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council. According to the invitation that landed in my mail box, the committee was supposed to investigate “the implications of Israeli construction in the settlements on the rights of the Palestinians in the occupied territories.” After a brief hesitation, I decided to reject the invitation. Everything I know about the settlements and their implication for both peoples has been published in dozens of articles I have written on the subject for more than 30 years and in the book Lords of the Land which I wrote with historian Idith Zertal.
The job of journalists and writers is to share their knowledge with the broad public. They have a right not to cooperate with investigative committees. Governments, on the other hand, and especially governments which proudly bear the adjectives “democratic”, “enlightened”, “moral” and more, are best served by cooperating with every internationally recognized organization. This is true, too, of the U.N. Human Rights Council, whose degree of objectivity on all that concerns Israel is doubtful (until a few years ago it was headed by a Libyan representative). Nonetheless, Israel cannot afford to boycott a central, international organization of the U.N. But often, against their own interests, recent Israeli governments have adopted the habit of boycotting bodies they do not like. It seems Israel is trying to delegitimize the whole world. Israel is isolated? No way. The world is isolated!