From the start, as the child and grandchild of Holocaust survivors, US Ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council Michèle Taylor had feared an antisemitic backlash from the Hamas-led invasion of Israel on October 7, despite the horrific nature of the attack that included rape and dismemberment.
“Any time that Jews are a focus of attention, I’m always afraid of what that’s going to mean in terms of antisemitism,” Taylor told The Jerusalem Post during a Zoom interview from Geneva, where she is representing the US during the Council’s 57th session, which runs from September 9-October 11.
Taylor took her seat at the Council as Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, during a time of rising antisemitism and global unrest that only grew worse with the Gaza war that followed the October 7 attack.
As the US envoy to the global human rights body, she speaks out regularly on a myriad of issues, but she has also been one of the very vocal faces of the battle against antisemitism at the Council.
“We knew that this [antisemitism] was going to be an issue going in,” Taylor said, noting that it was “no accident” that US President Joe Biden appointed “somebody with my profile” to the position.
Taylor said she was given a clear mandate “to combat antisemitism in all of its forms, especially throughout the UN system.”
For Taylor, the shadow of her history looms large, with warning bells that echo so strongly across the decades that they place the battle against antisemitism at the heart of her larger global struggle for human rights.
“I can’t separate myself from my personal experiences. It’s just not possible,” Taylor said, explaining that “most of my family was wiped out in the Holocaust.”
Taylor’s grandparents and her mother, Susi, had been living in Austria when the Germans took over the country in 1938. Susi, then three years old, was separated from her parents, hidden in a cabinet during the day and let out only at night.
At an early age, Taylor linked her family’s stories with modern-day events such as the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay politician.
“I was a little girl, and I first started seeing hatred and discrimination around me,” Taylor explained. “The biggest catalyst for me was actually in the wake of Harvey Milk being shot, There was a big backlash against the gay community in San Francisco because he had gained so much notoriety.”
“I was only 12 years old, but I understood that the kind of hate and discrimination I was seeing around me wasn’t really any different than what my family experienced,” said Taylor.
“At that stage in my life, it just sort of all came together for me, this understanding that any form of hate, any form of othering, can, and so often does, lead to what happened to my family, to atrocity, to genocide.
“I think I just knew I understood it differently, that I had a lens through which I could see these things,” and “that meant that I also had a responsibility to do something about it,” said Taylor.
She was among those who advocated for Biden to rejoin the UNHRC in 2022. The US had left the Council four years earlier to protest its anti-Israeli bias. For example, it passed more than 90 resolutions on Israel since its inception in 2006 – more than against any other single country, including Iran and Syria.
Israel under the microscope
Israel is also the only country at the UNHRC for which there is a permanent investigator and a permanent investigatory committee into alleged human rights abuses. The 47-member UNHRC is also mandated under Agenda Item 7 to discuss alleged Israeli human rights violations at each of the three annual sessions.
Biden restored the US membership to the Council in 2022, believing that it was better for his administration to make changes from within rather than absenting itself from the process altogether.
“When Biden and I first started having conversations...about rejoining the Human Rights Council,” Taylor told him that “absolutely, yes,” this was something that should happen, she recalled.
“Israel has been very, very engaged at the Human Rights Council,” Taylor stressed.
“That’s one of the issues that I have with the narrative that we should take this sort of principled position of disengagement at the Human Rights Council because of the bias against Israel. It is really a false narrative, because if the US isn’t here doing all the things that we do to call out the biased way that Israel is treated at the Human Rights Council, then Israel is sort of left here by itself.
“Israel never leaves. We’re the ones that have left,” she said.
Biden wanted it to be clear that the US wouldn’t allow antisemitism to flourish in the Human Rights Council, she said, adding, “Quite the opposite.”
Taylor clarified that no country, including Israel and the US, is above the scrutiny of the Council. She affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself, particularly against Hamas, stressing the importance of adherence to international law.
“Every country, however, should be evaluated within the same parameters and the same methodology, and that’s not true for Israel,” she said.
The US has voted no against all resolutions tabled under Agenda Item 7, and increasingly more countries have refused to participate in that session, Taylor said. She also led a joint statement against the open-ended commission of inquiry on Israel.
Taylor has also worked to help foster a better understanding of what antisemitism is and build global coalitions around them in Geneva, including helping to develop a UN strategy to combat it.
“Antisemitism falls under a couple of different buckets” at the UN, such as religious freedom and tolerance as well as racism,” she said.
“People do not always understand antisemitism when and where it shows up,” Taylor said, including with respect to October 7.
“Jews around the world, regardless of their affiliation or lack of affiliation with Israel, are experiencing hate, discrimination, and violence,” particularly since anti-Israel bias is “more socially acceptable,” Taylor said.
On Monday morning, October 9, 2023, Taylor called for a moment of silence at the Human Rights Council for the more than 1,200 victims of the Hamas attack. “I’m pretty sure I was the first US official to speak in any kind of in-person setting about October 7,” she said.
“By Wednesday or Thursday, however, we were starting to see a real shift in the amount of support that Israel received here and a shift in the narrative about what October 7 meant,” she recalled.
“There are a lot of narratives out there about October 7, but one thing we have been very clear about is that there is never any excuse or justification for terrorism full stop. Any statement to the contrary, we will push back on with full force,” she declared.
What startled her the most, however, was the reaction to Hamas’s use of sexual violence, including rape, as a weapon of war.
As someone with a background in sexual and gender-based violence, “I was expecting the same kind of public outcry” to the rapes and sexual mutilations that occurred on October 7,” Taylor said.
“The silence surprised me. And it wasn’t silence from any one place or any one organization. It was a universal silence.”
Confused, she called US Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism Deborah Lipstadt to discuss the situation.
“I’m really struggling to understand why we’re not seeing the kind of response that we normally see,” she told Lipstadt. “And the only thing that I can think of as a reason is antisemitism because there’s nothing else that differentiates this particular situation.”
Lipstadt “asked my team to put together a comprehensive layout of what normally happens [when] conflict-related, sexual and gender-based violence is very prevalent.
“Together, we wrote an article that was eventually published in The Guardian, calling out the antisemitism behind the lack of response,” Taylor said.
“Here we are, nearly eight decades after the Holocaust...and we see antisemitism alarmingly on the rise to an extent that we never could have predicted.”
She explained that in this latest wave, modern technology, particularly social media, has amplified historical tropes that have metamorphosed in new ways.
Throughout history, what begins with antisemitism never ends with antisemitism, Taylor said. "Hate always breeds more hate, and those who hate are more interconnected than ever at this time."
“I always think of hate like there’s a submarine below the surface sending up its little periscope of antisemitism” to test out the waters, she explained.
If the conclusion is that it can flourish, then “the whole submarine of hate just emerges out of the water.”