B’nai B’rith International President Seth J. Riklin and CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin have issued the following statement:

We deplore a new “report” to the United Nations General Assembly by the latest Commission of Inquiry on Israel, established by the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2021. The report—which comes months after one of the commission’s three members prompted outrage by suggesting that Jews control “social media” and that Israel should be excluded from the U.N., while another asserted that Jews dispatch complaints of anti-Semitism “like rice at a wedding”—entirely ignores previous criticism of the probe’s approach, focusing almost exclusively on vilifying Israel and recommending no U.N. action at all on grave Palestinian human rights violations.

Analysis by B’nai B’rith’s Office of United Nations Affairs, which directly provided critiques of the Commission to the UNHRC and discussed its members’ incendiary views with the Council’s president, reveals that the new report, to be formally considered by the General Assembly on Oct. 27, features some 154 references to Israeli “settlers” or “settlements,” but zero references to Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Iranian sponsorship of those terrorist groups, endemic Palestinian dehumanization of Jews or rejection of Israel’s legitimacy.

The Commission—the latest manifestation of more U.N. scrutiny of Israel than of any of the body’s 192 other member countries, though this probe is of unprecedented scope and open-ended duration—has demanded in its recommendations only that Israel, not Palestinians or others, comply with international law, and asked U.N. bodies only to hold Israel, not Palestinians, to account. The recommendations include a call for the International Court of Justice to consider what it terms Israel’s “de facto annexation” of Palestinian territory, for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to “prioritize” this subject and for the U.N. Security Council to take action against Israel alone.

If it weren’t clear enough from the unprecedented scope of the “Commission,” from the fact that it has almost entirely focused its condemnation on Israel after the Human Rights Council condemned Israel in advance, and from the appointment only of commissioners with public, preexisting views against Israel, the two first reports of this body confirm a prejudice that is as extreme as it is blatant.

The Commission members, operating within a system that condemns Israel more than all other countries combined, patently do not see a need even to pretend to conduct their “inquiry” objectively.

B’nai B’rith Director of U.N. and Intercommunal Affairs David Michaels, who previously protested to the UNHRC that the Commission’s first report expressed concern only over harm done to Palestinian, not Israeli, women and children—and that the Commission violated its own sweeping mandate by addressing the Syrian-claimed Golan Heights—found that the probe’s new report repeats the same offenses. In his analysis, Michaels uncovered that only halfway through its 28-page report did the Commission insert one line specifying that “1,024 Israelis were killed by Palestinian armed groups” over a seven-year period.

The report—whose footnotes in three instances associate the inflammatory label of “apartheid” discrimination exclusively with the Middle East’s sole pluralistic democracy, Israel—cites only non-governmental organizations stridently critical of Israel, none that focus on Palestinian abuses of Israelis’ or Palestinians’ human rights.

The report speaks of Palestinian property rights, but not Jews’ property rights; innocuously references Hamas only as “the de facto authorities in Gaza,” excoriating purported Israeli acquisition of land by force but not Hamas’s; speaks of land as “integral to the Palestinian identity,” but not Israelis’; repeatedly claims widespread Israeli “settler violence,” but not widespread Palestinian violence against Israeli Jews; references Israeli “demolition of homes” without mentioning proprietors’ ties to deadly terrorism against civilians; and reserves suggestion of possible “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” only for Israel.

The report only speaks of the “mental and physical health,” “right to… life, liberty and security,” and “anxiety, fear and humiliation” of Palestinians, not Jews, and only of legal “impunity” over attacks, including “racist and sexist language,” against Palestinians, not Jews. It refers only to Israeli, not Palestinian, actions as “collective punishment.” The document also highlights six individual Palestinians expressing grievances against Israel—but no individual Israelis impacted by Palestinian violence and incitement.

The report concludes that Israel is responsible for inhibiting a two-state solution—despite its leaders’ acceptance of that path and the intransigence of both Hamas and Fatah leaders—and imputes from the existence of Jewish “settlements” that “Israel intends the occupation to be permanent.”

The Commission report fails to note that Israel had previously completely withdrawn all civilian residents and military personnel from the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian Sinai and southern Lebanon; that Israel had previously offered Palestinians a state on nearly all the territory of the West Bank and Gaza; and that prior Jewish inhabitants had been forcibly removed from eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank beginning during the regional war of 1948.

B’nai B’rith, which has led Jewish engagement with the U.N. since the body’s founding in 1945, will continue to closely examine this and other U.N. special mechanisms focused on the Jewish state.