Europe’s Rosh Hashanah Betrayal: Universal HRs for All Except Israelis?
When European governments declare “Palestine” with “East Jerusalem” as its capital, they are not advancing human rights — they are trampling the very declaration written in Jewish blood from the Shoah.
The Universal Human Rights Declaration Turned on Its Head
In recent days and weeks, European leaders have rushed to recognize a “State of Palestine” and, more dangerously still, to declare East Jerusalem its capital. They have done so while 48 Israeli hostages remain in captivity, while rockets still fall, and while Palestinian leaders openly pay salaries to terrorists.
Here is the bitter irony:
These moves are cloaked in the language of “human rights.” Yet the very Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), drafted in 1948 in the shadow of the Holocaust, is now being twisted to deny the Jewish people the rights it was designed to protect. And since the October 7 massacre — with its mass killings, kidnappings, torture, and sexual violence — Israel has lived the starkest proof that these “universal rights” are not guaranteed to Jews unless we defend them ourselves.
1967: A War of Survival and a Legal Casus Belli
The Six-Day War of 1967 was not a war of conquest; it was a war of survival. Egypt had expelled UN peacekeepers, massed over 100,000 troops in Sinai, and illegally blockaded the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s only southern lifeline. That blockade was a textbook casus belli, recognized in international law as an act of war.
On June 5, Israel struck Egypt’s airfields in response. Crucially, Israel sent a message to King Hussein of Jordan: stay out of the war and we will not engage you. Hussein chose the opposite path. Jordanian artillery opened fire on Jerusalem, shelling civilian neighborhoods and advancing on Israeli positions.
By every standard of international law, Israel was acting in self-defense. And, as former ICJ President Stephen Schwebelexplained in 1970:
“Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title.”
Jordan’s hold on East Jerusalem had been unlawful since 1948. When it attacked again in 1967, it forfeited its claims entirely. Israel, fighting in self-defense, gained the stronger title — and with it, the right to reunify its capital. It’s also important to note that Jordan had ethnically cleansed the Jewish populations of Judea, Samaria and the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in previous wars.
Jerusalem: Never Anyone’s Capital But Israel’s
For more than three thousand years, Jerusalem has been the capital of the Jewish people even when we did not control it.. It has never served as the capital of an Arab or Muslim sovereign state. Under the Ottomans, it was a provincial town; under the British Mandate, a colonial administrative hub. Only with the rebirth of Israel was Jerusalem restored to its true role as a sovereign capital.
East Jerusalem is not some bargaining chip nor a city you can cut in half. It contains the Western Wall (Kotel), the holiest site where Jews can pray. From 1948–1967, Jews were barred entirely from the Old City, their holiest shrines desecrated.
• The Six-Day War / Jerusalem history site states that “Fifty-eight synagogues … were destroyed, their contents looted and desecrated.
• The Mount of Olives cemetery was vandalized; tombstones used to pave roads and latrines.
• The Kotel itself was used as a dump site and latrine — left in ruin and neglect.
That was not coexistence. It was erasure.
And here lies another legal point often overlooked: every sovereign nation has the right to designate its own capital. Israel did so in 1949 and reaffirmed it in its Basic Law of 1980. To deny this right uniquely to Israel — while accepting it for every other nation — is not international law. It is discrimination.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights — If You’re Israeli
The UDHR enshrines rights meant to apply to all peoples equally. Yet when it comes to Israelis, Europe’s selective reading turns universals into exceptions:
• Article 3 — Right to Life & Security: Israelis live under rocket fire and abductions. Yet pressure falls on Israel, not the perpetrators.
• Article 13 — Freedom of Movement: Jews are told they may not live in parts of Jerusalem where their ancestors dwelled for centuries. People might argue Palestinians don’t have that — that is solely because of security reasons and they are not citizens of the a state of Israel.
• Article 18 — Freedom of Religion: Jews were barred from the Kotel under Jordan and are still restricted on the Temple Mount, while Palestinian leaders demand exclusive control.
• Article 17 — Right to Property: Jewish homes in East Jerusalem are contested while Palestinians are granted hereditary “refugee” claims.
• Article 21 — Self-Determination: Israel is a sovereign democracy. Yet the world rushes to recognize a “Palestine” that fails every test of the Montevideo Convention — no defined territory, no unified government, no monopoly on force.
If rights are universal, they cannot be denied to Jews simply because we are sovereign in our ancestral land and the world doesn’t seem to like that.
Europe’s Hypocrisy
These same governments fiercely defend Ukraine’s sovereignty, insisting rightly that Russia withdraw from every square kilometer. Yet when it comes to Israel, they demand withdrawal from Jerusalem itself, without so much as the release of hostages in return.
Former Canadian Justice Minister Irwin Cotler and international law scholar Orde Kittrie put it bluntly:
“Recognition now would reward terrorism and contradict international law.”
Never Again Is Now
The UDHR was written in the wake of Auschwitz. It was meant to ensure that Jews, and all persecuted peoples, would never again be denied the most basic of human rights.
Yet today, in the wake of October 7, the world has already forgotten. The very atrocities the UDHR was meant to prevent — slaughter of civilians, abductions, systematic terror — were committed in plain sight. And yet instead of standing with Israel against such crimes, European leaders reward the perpetrators with recognition and capitals they never had.
That is not human rights. It is politics dressed up as morality.
If human rights are not applied universally, they are not rights at all. They are weapons and they are being wielded against Israel today.
The world must be reminded:
Jerusalem has never been the capital of any nation but Israel. The Western Wall will never again be off-limits to Jews. And the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, born of Jewish suffering, must not become the instrument used to erase Jewish sovereignty.
