Israel continues to be unfairly singled out by United Nations and world

Yonden Lhatoo rhetorically asks in his column (“Israel’s perplexing hold over America allows it to treat global opinion with contempt”, December 29), what it is about Israel that entitles it to treat the collective will of the world with contempt and defy the UN.

The answer is that Israel continues to be unfairly singled out by the world and the UN in the most biased fashion.

While the Security Council reprimands Israel, two permanent members of that council, China and Russia, are themselves occupying powers. China occupies Tibet and Russia occupies, just most recently, Crimea.

These are just two of the most brazen examples of UN members that occupy territory.

There are literally 200 disputed territories in the world, including Cyprus, which Turkey partially occupies, and Western Sahara, which Morocco occupies. Yet, the UN singularly decries Israel’s so-called occupation of “Palestinian territories”.

Are these territories in fact “occupied”? The facts are clear. Israel took these lands in a defensive war in 1967 from Jordan, not from the Palestinians. The UN offered the Palestinians a country in 1947, but the Palestinians rejected it. Palestinian land was not taken, because there was not then, nor has there ever been, a sovereign country called Palestine.