"At the battalion's head, Commander Tom Thumb marches. He wears a steel helmet, and has a sharp pin in his hand," wrote lyricist Ella Amitan in the 1940 Hebrew children's song "In the Land of the Dwarfs." There could be no more suitable words to describe Foreign Minister – yes, that's his job – Israel Katz.
Katz has now gone out to confirm the killing of Israel's relations with the world. On his dartboard he has placed the head of the UN, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, and the institution he leads. That's a supreme mission, more important than the real war that has been going on for over five months in the Gaza Strip, far more glorious than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign of destruction against the U.S. president. This is Katz's jihad.
"If the victims weren't Jews, we would have seen a vigorous reaction from you," Katz accused Guterres in a letter he sent to him precisely on the eve of the UN Security Council discussion about the incisive, detailed, staggering report submitted by Pramilla Patten, the UN Special Representative of the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, about the acts of rape and the sexual abuse during the Hamas attack. It's true that the murdered and the abducted included Israeli Arabs and Thai workers, but why spoil such a convincing argument?
The United Nations isn't a pristine institution. It's tainted by political and diplomatic favoritism, inequality, corruption and mainly impotence. But the UN shares these negative features very equitably among all the member nations. It's not only the residents of Gaza that the organization is unable to save – the UN also failed to help over half a million Syrians who were slaughtered by the regime of President Bashar Assad as well as the millions of displaced persons in the civil wars in Sudan, Yemen, Libya and Congo.
And like Israel, the leaders of each of those countries also has a file stuffed with complaints against the UN. But the Israel of Katz and Netanyahu has a unique complaint, which no other country can boast. The UN is antisemitic because it's anti-Israel, and it's anti-Israel because it's antisemitic. Isn't this the organization that decided in its 1975 resolution that Zionism is a type of racism?
But 33 years after the UN revoked that resolution, the racism of Zionism has been revived – not in the corridors of the UN, but inside the State of Israel. The International Court of Justice, of which Israel is a member, had only to collect the statements of elected officials in Israel to try them for war crimes, and Israel escaped conviction by the skin of its teeth.
These are the same "leaders" who legislated the racist laws, headed by the nation-state law, which will provide everything necessary to expose the country's racism before everyone's eyes. The demand of the 2019 UN Committee on the Elimination of Racist Discrimination to discuss the nation-state law once again – so that it will meet the conditions of the convention that Israel ratified in 1979 – quickly found its way to the trash can. Because it's not the UN that will define racism for Israel, Israel will do so itself.
The UN is the arena of a tough, unfair, complex and dangerous diplomatic war. But it's also the platform where the families of the hostages and the victims of rape are now receiving recognition, understanding and protection, perhaps more than they're getting from the Knesset or from their government. But that doesn't interest Katz. It's more important to him to convey professional feedback about the functioning of the secretary general.
"Your tenure in the UN will be remembered because of the reduction of the status of the UN to an all-time nadir, which enabled it to become a center of antisemitism and anti-Israel incitement," accused the foreign minister of the country that holds a glorious record of violating UN Security Council resolutions and contempt for international law. This arena is too important to remain in the hands of whining clowns like Ambassador Gilad Erdan or his boss, Israel Katz.