Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
07 June '10
Why is New Zealand’s former Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer the UN's choice to head the international investigation of Israel’s confrontation with the Jihadi flotilla militants? Because he'll make it look fair while finding Israel guilty. Not that he's highly biased personally, but the cards are stacked nonetheless.
The key reason why Palmer is up for the job is that New Zealand former Prime Minister Helen Clark, whose hatred for Israel is almost unequalled among Western politicians, is now a high-ranking UN official who pushed for him. While nominally she might do so only to have a fellow New Zealander and a fellow Labour Party person, it is hard to believe that Clark would support anyone she expected might find in Israel’s favor. Under Clark, New Zealand was then the only Western country in the world to be ruled by 1960s’ New Left radicals.
Palmer himself, however, is considered to be a fair person who has never been heard to say anything about Arab-Israeli issues. But Helen Cook knows him better than I do and it is hard to believe she would pick anyone she thought might possibly conclude that Israel was in the right.
Actually, while it may seem Palmer was a successful politician he was only briefly a transitional prime minister, picked by a Labour party too split to agree on anyone else. In office, though, Palmer was unpopular because he is aloof, dull, has a high opinion of himself, and does not suffer fools gladly.
In earlier life, Palmer was a left-wing student newspaper editor. Many of the New Zealand Labour Party leaders were New Left activists in the 1960s and 1970s. While later considered a centrist in the New Zealand Labour Party, this is arguably the most left-wing social democratic party in the world.
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