Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has threatened to cut the United States’s funding to the United Nations if they push through an anti-Israel resolution.
The resolution that the U.N. has put forward would end Israel’s building of settlements, and Graham won’t have any of it:
My statement on the United Nations resolution on Israel settlements. pic.twitter.com/cWEeCGbX2T
— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 23, 2016
“If the United Nations moves forward with the ill-conceived resolution, I will work to form a bipartisan coalition to suspend or significantly reduce United States assistance to the United Nations,” Graham said in his statement. “In addition, any nation that which backs this resolution and receives assistance from the United States will put that assistance in jeopardy.”
As Graham correctly noted in his statement, the U.S. does provide 22 percent of the U.N.’s funding, and cutting such funding has been long overdue. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton argued in a 2015 Boston Globe column that due to the U.N.’s pattern of “feckless decisions,” it was time to make U.N. contributions entirely voluntary.
“Shifting to voluntary contributions means adopting two principles that, at the UN at least, would be profoundly revolutionary,” Bolton wrote. “We would pay only for what we want, and we would insist that we get what we pay for — that is, real performance. And, of course, we should vigorously encourage other UN members (especially large contributors like Japan, Germany, Britain, and France) to join us in moving to entirely voluntary contributions.”
The U.N. also has a long history of undermining Israel, as they spend vast amounts condemning Israel but devote scant time to condemning the human rights abuses occurring in North Korea, Syria, Libya and Sudan, and no time at all on Saudi Arabia, China or Russia’s human rights abuses.
“If the United Nations moves forward with the ill-conceived resolution, I will work to form a bipartisan coalition to suspend or significantly reduce United States assistance to the United Nations.”
Senator Lindsey Graham
Israel’s building of settlements should not even be a point of contention–as Ben Shapiro has noted, the building of settlements include “allowing Jews to build bathrooms in their homes in Jerusalem” and the land they’re building on is not “occupation” because “there was never any sovereign Palestine.”
President-elect Donald Trump has also condemned the U.N.’s resolution, suggesting that Israel could be an issue that unites a divided Republican Party.