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!

The Israeli government’s reaction to the committee report, published at the end of last week [Jan. 29], along with its reaction to the appointment of the committee last March, reminds me of an ostrich kicking in all directions. In a similar fashion, the foreign ministry buried its head in the sand and exempted itself from dealing with the issue, contenting itself by saying that “the Human Rights Council has sadly distinguished itself by its systematically one-sided and biased approach towards Israel.”

This expected reaction was in keeping with the decision by the foreign ministry’s directorate to punish the Council for commissioning the report. It adopted the proposal by [former Foreign Minister] Avigdor Liberman to cut off all ties with the Council and its leader, Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay. The ministry prevented panel members from visiting Israel and even instructed Israel’s embassy to the U.N. organizations in Geneva “not to answer phone calls” from council officials.