Will Samantha Power Be the First American UN Ambassador to Abandon Israel?
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Last week mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, co-founder of Birthright Israel, which has brought 500,000 young Jews to Israel, joined with our organization, The World Values Network, in a full-page New York Times ad about Ambassador Samantha Power. In the ad Mr. Steinhardt reminded the Ambassador of her commitment at her Senate confirmation hearings, "I will stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it" at the United Nations.
At the AIPAC Annual Policy Conference in Washington, DC, in March, Samantha avowed, "It is a false choice to tell Israel that it has to choose between peace on the one hand, and security on the other. The United Nations would not ask any other country to make that choice, and it should not ask it of Israel."
Ambassador Power, of course, was correct - security is the foundation of any sustainable peace framework in the Middle East. To its credit, the United States has long stood for justice and served as an essential check against overreach, anti-Semitism, and double standards by Arab and European nations at the UN.
Yet statements in April by Ambassador Power refusing to rule out supporting UN resolutions that target Israel, added to recent claims by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, have raised serious questions about the specter of betrayal by the United States and Ambassador Power during the UN General Assembly in September. Reports have emerged that France plans to put forth a resolution before the UN Security Council that will call for immediate resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with a hard-cap of 18 months for a final deal.
Under the French proposal, if no deal is reached in 18 months, the UN would recognize the Palestinian state, effectively granting legitimacy to an organization that has consistently proven incompetent, corrupt, hostile to democratic values, and openly supportive of terrorism. While the global Jewish community has come to expect little from France, Hamdallah said France and the U.S. are "coordinating" together on the diplomatic catastrophe. There also exists the possibility that should Israel refuse to accept a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing a timetable for the unilateral creation of a Palestinian State, economic sanctions could be levied against the Jewish State.
For starters, the very notion of this process - which rewards the Palestinian Authority for failure - is patently absurd. In practice, if Israel doesn't entirely capitulate to every demand of the Palestinian negotiators, the Palestinians are granted statehood. There is zero incentive for Palestinians to even pretend to negotiate in good faith. The mortifying results of the American discussions with Iran on nuclear weapons lowered the world's estimation of the State Department's ability to negotiate, but this framework would be a historic nadir.
It's also worth questioning whether this proposal is even in the best interests of the Palestinian people. The Palestinian Authority's leadership has repeatedly proven itself incapable of adhering to basic democratic principles, transparency, and rule of law. The PA's history of graft, support of terrorism, and lack of accountability is staggering.
But at a personal level, it's not simply the concept of this proposal that is mortifying - it's the person who would be central to the decision for the United States to betray its closest ally if this proposal moved forward: Ambassador Samantha Power.
As many know, long before Samantha Power became Ambassador Power, she was a well-regarded academic studying human rights at Harvard's Kennedy School. It was there she wrote the Pulitzer-winning book that launched her career into orbit, A Problem from Hell, the stirring and essential indictment of the inability of the United States to act against genocide over the past 100 years.
But as her star rose in the Obama Administration, many began paying attention to other early statements and writing, including specific ones that raised great concern about her feelings towards Israel and understanding of the conflict. These might have gone unnoticed for any ordinary academic speaking loosely early in her career, but Samantha Power was no ordinary academic.
Due to those earlier statements, Ambassador Power wasn't implicitly trusted by members of the Jewish community when she took her role in the National Security Council. After writing an op-ed where I encouraged her to clarify her statements, she did just that.
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