Israel has once again become the target of verbal attacks leveled by Arab delegates to the annual hearings here of the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and the Protection of Minorities.
Among the most vehement critics has been the Egyptian ambassador to the United Nations here, who assailed Israeli settlements in the administered territories.
Nabil el-Arabi said Israel was trying to alter the demography of the territories by planting settlers there. He said the international community should keep pressuring Israel until it agrees to withdraw from the territories.
Arabi expressed hope that the subcommission would accord first priority to the Palestinian question and said the parties to the Geneva Conventions had a duty to pressure Israel to assure the Palestinians’ legal protection.
The 27 regular members and 24 alternate members of the subcommission are called “experts” and are technically not representatives of their respective governments. They are identified with signs bearing their names, not their nationalities. Israel does not have membership but is granted observer status.
Although the human rights panel shifted its focus this year away from sole concentration on Israel’s alleged misconduct, delegates still found time to rail against the Jewish state, including reviving the 1975 General Assembly resolution disparaging Zionism as a form of racism.
PREFERENCE TO JEWS CHARGED
Cuban expert Miguel Martinez defended the anti-Zionist resolution. He charged that in the event of a poison gas attack by Iraq, Israeli officials would distribute gas masks only to Ashkenazi Jews.
Responding to the slur, Israeli observer Rafael Walden quoted a statement by Defense Minister Moshe Arens saying he was responsible for everyone under Israeli jurisdiction, which would include Arabs as well as Jews.
Following lengthy bickering, Martinez indicated he was willing to accept assurances that everyone in Israel would be equally protected.
Hussein Raiani of the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination said that although it was comforting that apartheid was on the way to being dismantled, other forms of racism and racial discrimination were still rampant in other parts of the world.
Israel, he charged, practices the most apparent form of racism. He characterized Israel’s Law of Return and the World Zionist Organization as the embodiments of legal apartheid, since they give preference to Jewish immigrants over Arabs.
Walden, in his right of reply, spoke of the recent murder of a 17-year-old Jewish girl from Canada by a terrorist bomb on a crowded Tel Aviv beach, and of two Israeli teen-age boys who were brutally slain near their homes in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramot. He asked why the subcommission was silent on those murders.
In response, Jordanian representative Waleed Sadi requested the floor to say that he condemned the murders of innocent persons, whoever they were.
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