Israel's UN Envoy Tears Up Human Rights Council Report at General Assembly

The Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan tore to pieces the human rights council's yearly report on the podium of the General Assembly, mimicking the gesture of former ambassador Chaim Herzog who did the same in 1975 when the UN declared Zionism a form of racism.

On Friday, a special hearing was held at the General Assembly in which the president of the human rights council presented its annual report to all member states. In the report are the results of an investigative committee that was founded after the May conflict with Hamas. Large parts of the report condemn and criticize Israel, but disregards Hamas' attacks on Israeli civilians.

"Since its establishment 15 years ago, the Human rights council has condemned Israel 95 times compared to the 142 against all other countries in the world combined," Erdan said addressing the assembly.

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"For just as that 1975 resolution, equating Zionism with racism, was itself a gross form of anti-Jewish racism, which has no place in this international body, So too, the Human Rights Council’s obsessive anti-Israel bias, embodied, once again, by this report, should have no place in any body concerned with human rights, security or peace," Erdan said.

Erdan, who is also the outgoing ambassador to Washington, also recently accused U.S. lawmakers who voted against funding for the Iron Dome anti-missile system of being "either ignorant or antisemitic" as he spoke to Jewish community leaders in September.

Gilad Erdan referred to the 11 lawmakers who either voted against the funding or abstained as "the extended 'Squad,'" a group of progressive Democratic lawmakers.

"Do they really not understand that the Iron Dome saves both Israeli and Palestinian lives?" Erdan asked at the event organized by the Jewish Federations of North America. "If Israel didn’t have the Iron Dome to protect our citizens from the thousands of rockets that Hamas fired, we may have needed to respond with a ground operation that would have inevitably resulted in many more lives lost."