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Did the U.N. Call on Israel to Share Iron Dome With Hamas?

No, what it actually said was even more outrageous

by
Liel Leibovitz
August 04, 2014
A missile is launched by an 'Iron Dome' battery, a missile defence system designed to intercept and destroy incoming short-range rockets and artillery shells, in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod on July 18, 2014. (DAVID BUIMOVITCH/AFP/Getty Images)
A missile is launched by an 'Iron Dome' battery, a missile defence system designed to intercept and destroy incoming short-range rockets and artillery shells, in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod on July 18, 2014. (DAVID BUIMOVITCH/AFP/Getty Images)

Over the weekend, a custom-tailored-for-Facebook story started making the rounds, claiming that Navi Pillay, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, was blasting Israel for refusing to share the Iron Dome missile defense system with Hamas. It was just the kind of hilariously delicious absurdity that could be expected of the same organization that will soon welcome Chad—where slavery is still a rollicking tradition—into its Security Council, but the ever zealous guardians of Israel’s minor infractions and little else soon declared that Pillay was being slandered: she never called on Israel to share its defensive bounties, but rather criticized the United States for helping to fund the advanced system and noted that “no such protection has been provided to Gazans against the shelling.”

Which, in a way, is an even more deplorable statement to make. It refrains—as the recent U.N. Human Rights Council, presided over by Pillay, has—from ever mentioning Hamas, or the fact that it is a terrorist organization engaged in a campaign of indiscriminate attacks against a civilian population, a war crime by any measure.

Even more disingenuously, while it portrays Israel and its American backers as fat cats who pad themselves with cash, it neglects to say that Hamas’s annual operating expenses are estimated at $1 billion, or that then-Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, no pauper, visited Hamas in Gaza in the fall of 2012 and pledged $400 million to aid the terrorists in their fight against Israel.

That, by the way, is nearly double what Congress has just pledged to refurbish Iron Dome.

Any way you look at it, then, Pillay’s statement makes a mockery of the principles her organization purports to protect.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.