Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ New York Office, tendered his resignation in a sharp four-page letter to Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. In his letter of resignation, Mokhiber wrote:
This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm and its illusory two-state solution. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations to ensure respect for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. We must recognize that the US and other western powers are in fact not credible mediators but rather actual parties to the conflict who are complicit with Israel in the violation of Palestinian rights, and we must engage them as such.
Prior to the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack, Mokhiber was accused in March of antisemitism and strong hostility against Israel following the discovery of a slew of contentious tweets by monitoring groups. He was found unfit to hold his job because it was alleged that he had failed to uphold his duties and lacked objectivity when it came to human rights problems involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
190 anti-Semitic occurrences between October 7 and October 23 that were directly related to the conflict in Israel and Gaza are among the 388 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents that the Anti-Defamation League has documented nationwide compared to the same period last year. Without addressing the sharp rise in violent anti-Semitic occurrences since the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israeli civilians, Craig Mokhiber made the worrisome argument that anti-Zionism has no connection to anti-Semitism.
Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, such as by asserting that the establishment of a state of Israel is a racist undertaking, is included in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism.
During this time, Craig Mokhiber was a director at the United Nations Human Rights Office in New York when he chose to leave in protest of how the UN was handling the Israel-Hamas conflict. He called the attacks on Gaza "a textbook case of genocide" and opted to make public his incisive four-page resignation letter:
