by Our Foreign Desk

ISRAEL is pressuring the UN to sack a senior official who criticised the effectively exclusively Jewish state for racism and flouting international law.

The row started late last month when Tel Aviv’s UN ambassador Ron Prosor demanded disciplinary action against the UN’s economic and social commission for western Asia (ESCWA) executive secretary Rima Khalaf.

But on Wednesday a letter from Mr Prosor to the Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) under-secretary-general Carman Lapointe was leaked to the Associated Press, bringing the spat into the public domain.

Mr Prosor accused Jordanian Ms Khalaf of “modern-day anti-semitism,” claiming that she “has abused her position in order to promote an anti-Israel agenda, in a flagrant violation of UN obligations and principles.”

Among examples given by Mr Prosor of Ms Khalaf’s “abuses” was her response to Israel’s interception of the third Freedom Flotilla aid mission to the besieged Gaza strip in June, in which former Tunisian president Moncef Marzouki was among those detained and deported.

“What president Marzouki and his companions did is a right and a response to the injustice and suffering of 1.8 million civilians under siege in Gaza. What Israel did is aggression,” Ms Khalaf said at the time.

In February 2014 she slammed “Israel’s adamancy that it is a Jewish state, which violates the rights of both the Muslim and Christian indigenous populations and revives the concept of state ethnic and religious purity, which caused egregious human suffering during the 20th century.”

Mr Prosor claimed that this statement equated Israel with nazi Germany, which Ms Khalaf strongly denied.

Ms Khalaf said on Wednesday she stood by her statements highlighting “Israel’s documented violations of international law against the Palestinian people” and rejected “the concept of religious or ethnic purity of states.”

“I am surprised that rejecting discrimination, and reiterating the principles of equality and justice in the UN Charter, can still be contested by anyone,” she said.

• UN under-secretary-general for political affairs Jeffrey Feltman warned the security council on Wednesday that the risk of escalation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was “palpable” in the wake of attacks by Jewish settler extremists and rocket attacks from rogue militants in Gaza.