BICOM

 The US Ambassador to the United Nations is set to arrive in Israel today in her first visit to the country.

 The itinerary for Ambassador Nikki Haley’s visit includes meetings with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, and she is expected to meet senior officials from the Palestinian Authority. Haley will also take a helicopter tour of Israel’s northern and southern borders.

Similar to President Trump, she will visit the Old City of Jerusalem and the Western Wall. However, this trip is described as “private and religious,” and she will not be accompanied by Israeli officials.

Her UN counterpart Israeli Ambassador Danny Danon will formally host her for the duration of her three-day visit, and will accompany her to Yad Vashem where she will lay a wreath.

 To coincide with her arrival, Ambassador Danon has written an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post where he states: “Ambassador Haley’s visit is significant. By bringing moral clarity and a clear sense of justice to the UN, Ambassador Haley is serving as a model to leaders around the world, proving what can be accomplished when the simple truth serves as our guiding star.”

Danon is referencing Nikki Haley’s efforts to highlight and combat the UN’s anti-Israel bias, and he continued by highlighting the “discouraging aspect of diplomacy” he has encountered at the UN, where countries often “vote blindly against Israeli interests, and oftentimes their own, as they pander to the worst elements of the international community”.

He added:  “For years, we have warned our colleagues that the insistence by UN bodies to focus disproportionately on Israel is not only wrong, but it also diverts the international community’s limited time and resources from real crises around the globe.”

Meanwhile at the UN yesterday, Secretary General António Guterres marked the 50^th anniversary of the Six-Day War in a statement that said Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories was the cause of the “displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Syrians” and “fuelled recurring cycles of violence and retribution”.

Ambassador Danon responded that attacks on Israel by its neighbours did not begin in 1967, and that it was “preposterous to blame terror and violence in the Middle East on the one true democracy in the region”. On the prospects for peace, He added: “The moment the Palestinian leadership abandons terror, ceases to incite against our people and finally returns to direct negotiations, then real progress can be made towards peace.”