The United Nations wants the countries that make up its ranks to boycott companies doing business in and with so-called Jewish “settlements.”

It’s meant to be a means of pressuring Israel to uproot Jews who dare to plant themselves in the biblical heartland of Judea and Samaria.

The United States at the weekend informed the UN that it will not play along.

The UN’s anti-Israel database

The creation of the blacklist goes back to a 2016 resolution by the UN Human Rights Council demanding the creation of a “database for all businesses engaged in specific activities related to Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory.”

The database was created in 2020, and presently contains 112 companies, 94 of them Israeli, and 18 foreign, some of them large household names like Motorola and Booking.com.

Apparently, the UN wants to update the database with the names of additional companies that have defied its dictates, prompting US State Department spokesman Vedant Patel to respond:

“The US opposes the creation of this database… and continues to oppose any work to update it. We have not provided and will not provide any information to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on this database, and our position has been repeatedly made clear in public statements as well as in meetings that we’ve had directly with the Office of the High Commissioner.”

Ulterior motives

Lest one think the Biden Administration was following in the footsteps of its predecessors in the Trump White House by opposing anti-Israel actions simply because they are anti-Israel, Patel clarified that the UN’s approach poses a “genuine threat” to American businesses.

Many of the foreign companies appearing on the list are American, and a good number of the Israeli companies are likewise partially US-owned.

Patel did stress that the current administration sees the blacklist as an expression of the UN’s unfair anti-Israel bias. But just a week ago, his boss, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, agreed with the UN that Jewish “settlements” on land claimed by the Palestinians are illegitimate, and vowed to “unequivocally oppose” any expansion of the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria under the incoming right-wing Israeli government.

So it’s not the substance of the UN action that Washington opposes, but rather the particular approach to dealing with this specific “Jewish problem.”