Israel Loses Its Staunchest Ally At The UN With Nikki Haley's Departure

With Nikki Haley's departure, Israel loses its staunchest ally at the UN

With Nikki Haley’s surprise resignation Tuesday as US ambassador to the United Nations, Israel will be losing its most outspoken champion at the world body, a figure dubbed “Hurricane Haley” by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for her muscular defense of the Jewish state in front of an often hostile crowd.

Sitting in the Oval Office Tuesday morning, not even an hour after news broke of her departure, Haley listed what she considered her achievements in the diplomatic posting. Chief among them was standing up to the UN’s “anti-Israel bias” and defending the Trump administration moving the US embassy to Jerusalem.

It’s not clear who will take Haley’s place — US President Donald Trump said he would name a successor in a few weeks — but it’s safe to say they will be somebody who also sees eye to eye with Trump on America’s place vis-a-vis the UN as well as defending Israel in the world body.

It’s harder to say whether whoever does get the nod —  will be able to match Haley’s zeal in being Israel’s champion in Turtle Bay. Haley’s predecessor Samantha Power, for instance, also spoke out loudly against anti-Israel bias at the UN, but it was a smaller part of her role as envoy and she never earned the kind of cheers Haley did from the pro-Israel community. Power, moreover, represented the Obama administration when it allowed an anti-settlement resolution to pass in the Security Council by withholding the US veto in December 2016.

Haley’s tenure in New York was widely noted — and, in some corners, criticized — for its defiance in the face of international diplomats who challenged US President Donald Trump’s approach to the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Her departure was unanticipated and took the pro-Israel community by surprise,” Matt Brooks, the Republican Jewish Coalition CEO, said on Twitter. “Stunned and shocked by the surprise resignation of @nikkihaley as UN Amb. She was a consequential and impactful force at the UN.”

Beyond rhetorically supporting the embassy move, she was a major proponent of the United States exiting the UN Human Rights Council, citing its reflexively critical posture toward Israel, cutting aid to UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and blocking a resolutioncondemning Israel as responsible for the deaths at Gaza border clashes this spring.

For those moves, she was treated as a rockstar when she spoke before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference the last two years.

Most notably, she has questioned the Palestinians’ claim to a “right of return,” in which all Arabs who were displaced between 1947 and 1949, including millions of their descendants, would “return” to modern Israel.

UNRWA claims there are more than five million registered Palestinian refugees, when there were roughly 750,000 after the 1948 war, of whom it is estimated tens of thousands are still alive. Unlike every other refugee population, which shrinks every year, the Palestinian one exponentially increases.

The Palestinians claim that five million people — tens of thousands of original refugees from what is today’s Israel, and their millions of descendants — have a “right of return.” Israel’s population is almost nine million, some three-quarters of whom are Jewish. An influx of millions of Palestinians would mean Israel could no longer be a Jewish-majority state. Israel claims a “right of return” is a non-starter in negotiations, as it would abrogate Israel’s Jewish majority and character as a Jewish state.

In August, Haley publicly sided with Israel, saying the Palestinian “right of return” should be taken “off the table. “I absolutely think we have to look at right of return,” she said during an appearance at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a DC-based think tank closely aligned with Israel.

Asked whether the issue should be “off the table,” Haley replied: “I do agree with that, and I think we have to look at this in terms of what’s happening [with refugees] in Syria, what’s happening in Venezuela.”

Longtime Israel watchers in the United States said that Haley focused on Israel more than past US ambassadors. “She speaks about Israel a lot, more than Susan Rice and Samantha Power did,” Elliott Abrams, a hawkish diplomat who served as deputy national security adviser to President George W. Bush, told McClatchy last month.