‘US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley says she “just started yelling at everybody” when she saw how UN members were constantly “bullying” Israel for things like its settlement push into Palestine and crackdown on Gaza protesters.
“It was abusive, how bad the international community was to Israel. It reminded me of a kid being bullied in the playground,” Haley told the Americas Society/Council of the Americas (AS/COA) annual conference, which was held on Tuesday at the State Department.
“I just wasn’t going to have it. It was just so upsetting to see, that I just started yelling at everybody,” she added. Haley told everyone at the UN that “we had the back of Israel, and if they were going to mess with Israel they had to mess with the US.”
Haley’s keynote address had mostly focused on Latin America, but she then sat down for a chat with John Negroponte, former US envoy to the UN during the George W. Bush administration and chairman emeritus of AS/COA.
It was Negroponte who brought up Israel and how often he “had to” intervene to veto resolutions against Washington’s Middle Eastern ally. “It really is a culture at the UN of constantly bashing Israel,” Haley said.
A number of UN resolutions have demanded Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, which Israel has controlled since the 1967 war with Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Israel has since officially annexed all of Jerusalem, but the Palestinians and most of the international community has refused to recognize that claim.’