Five times Nikki Haley delighted the pro-Israel community

RON KAMPEAS

Haley didn’t simply defend Israel and its government, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as her predecessors had under Democratic and Republican administrations. She led a game change. On her watch, and with the blessing of US President Donald Trump, support for Israel became a “with or against us” proposition. Slam the US for defending Israel, and count on being slammed back, was the Trump-Haley credo.

A big chunk of Haley’s two years at the world body was about Israel.

“Thank you for your support, which led to a change in Israel’s status in the UN,” Danny Danon, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, said on Twitter.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered his gratitude as well in a statement.

“I would like to thank Ambassador @nikkihaley, who led the uncompromising struggle against hypocrisy at the UN, and on behalf of the truth and justice of our country,” he said.

Haley’s predecessors had also robustly backed Israel in the body, but there were hiccups. The latest came in December 2016, when Ambassador Samantha Power allowed through a Security Council resolution criticising Israel’s settlement policy in the waning days of the Obama administration, about a month before Trump was inaugurated.

It was a rare instance of a US official semi-endorsing UN criticism of Israel.

Netanyahu and the centrist to rightwing pro-Israel community sees the UN as a snake pit, and any concession is seen as a betrayal. That was the message in the American Israel Public Affair Committee’s (Aipac’s) farewell to Haley packed into a single word: “consistently”.

“We appreciate the strong leadership of @nikkihaley @USUN,” Aipac said on Twitter. “Thank you for consistently standing up for America’s interests and our democratic Israel.”

Here are five times Haley changed the game for Israel while she was UN ambassador.

Cutting funds to UNRWA

Israel and pro-Israel officials have long criticised the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which administers assistance to Palestinians and their descendants, for what they say is a too-broad definition of what denotes a Palestinian refugee, effectively allowing the status to continue indefinitely.

Haley helped spearhead the Trump administration’s decision last month to sever funding to the agency. Last year, the United States contributed $360 million (R5.3 billion), the lion’s share of the budget. This year, after forking over $60 million (R886 million), there was a freeze, and it became permanent last month.

Speaking in August at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Haley said the money could flow again if UNRWA radically reconfigured how it counted refugees, slashing the number from 5 million to 500 000.

“We will be a donor if it reforms what it does,” she said of the agency. “If they actually change the number of refugees to an accurate account, we will look back at partnering them.”

(Liberal pro-Israel groups decried the funding cuts, saying they were cruel, and noted that Israeli security officials had long argued that UNRWA assistance helped to stabilise the region.)

That wild UN party

Haley used the US veto to nix a UN Security Council resolution last year criticising Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, but its backers took the measure to the General Assembly to at least score a moral victory. (Security Council resolutions have the force of international law; General Assembly resolutions amount to little more than statements.)

Haley went to work, and managed to get an impressive 64 members to not vote or vote against the resolution in the General Assembly. Then she invited them to a party.

“It’s easy for friends to be with you in the good times, but it’s the friends who are with you during the challenging times that will never be forgotten,” the US mission said on Facebook in January. “Thank you to the 64.”

Quitting the Human Rights Council

The United States Human Rights Council makes Israel a perennial agenda item, even as it includes among its members some of the world’s worst human rights abusers like Iran, China, and Venezuela. The Obama administration repeatedly noted the anomaly, but it stuck with the council in order to nudge its members to condemn abuses in other countries.

Haley and the Trump administration stayed for 18 months before eventually concluding it wasn’t worth the insults. The body “was not worthy of its name”, Haley said at a joint appearance with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in June.

Scrub the apartheid report

The UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia published a report in March 2017 accusing Israel of apartheid. Haley, fresh to her role, made it a point to lobby UN Secretary-General António Guterres to pull the report from the web. Guterres, no doubt wary of getting off to a wrong start with the Trump administration, pulled rank on the agency and the report was soon gone.

“That such anti-Israel propaganda would come from a body whose membership nearly universally does not recognise Israel is unsurprising,” Haley said before the scrubbing.

Praying at the Western Wall

Two months after the apartheid incident, Haley told the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) that the Western Wall belonged to Israel, a sharp departure from longstanding executive branch policy of not pronouncing who claims what in Jerusalem. By the end of the year, Trump had recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

It was an early instance of Haley’s role as a smoke signal for a significant Trump administration shift in US policy. She was tapped a year ago to signal that the Trump administration would pull out of the Iran nuclear deal and, as noted above, she set the stage for cutting off UNRWA funding.

Recognising the Western Wall as Israeli seemed personal, however. Visiting Jerusalem a month after her CBN interview, she broke away from security to touch the holy site and ask worshippers how to pray.