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In a video interview posted yesterday by the Wall Street Journal, Anne Bayefsky was asked what further steps the UN might take against Israel in the aftermath of upcoming talks in Paris Middle East Peace conference that starts in five days, on 15 January.

Bayefsky is Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust. She is also a regular analyst on major media networks in the US and Canada.

According to Bayefsky, the Paris talks are all about Barack Obama who, behind the scenes, has engineered the confab. "The situation," she says, "is that the President of the United States has gone rogue."

What she means is that, "essentially, he is upending the transition of power" to US President-elect Donald J. Trump.

The Paris conference is a case in point and may be the pièces de résistance of his anti-Israel "rogue" endeavors before leaving office on 20 January.

Bayefsky says the 70 nations gathering in Paris are an "international mob ...that will attempt to impose some kind of deal" between Israel and the Palestinians. It is a deal, she says that will create a terror state.

Her claim has merit. Israel's left-wing paper Ha'aretz reported yesterday that it has draft of the conference's summary statement.

According to that statement, "participating countries will not recognize unilateral changes to 1967 borders, including Jerusalem."

If this happens, especially in addition to recent passage of anti-Israel UN Security Council Resolution 2334, Bayefsky says it will be a "catastrophe."

Her justification for the descriptor is that Paris declaration added to Resolution 2334 will further "license terror, because it takes away the possibility of negotiations. The Palestinians will never negotiate again as long as they [get] what they want out of the United Nations Security Council or some ...international gang in Paris."

Bayefsky's advice to President-elect Trump and the US Congress is that they must immediately "weigh in," and do so "in a far greater way than they have so far."

Instead of ...legislation or bills that have no teeth, they have the power of the person in respect to the United Nations, and they have to use it."

How? For one thing, Trump can refuse assistance requested by European leaders.

"How dare [UK Prime Minister] Theresa May come cap in hand, and the rest of the EU, expecting favors" when, at the same time, "they are going to Paris!"

Can Trump undo actions Obama has taken against Israel - and might still take? In short, probably not.

UNSC Resolution 2334, Bayefsky says, cannot be easily rescinded. And while it stays on the books, it provides a kind of license for anti-Israel terrorists as well as for international Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) efforts. It also lays the groundwork for legal efforts, using national courts - or the International Court - "to stymie Israel in all kinds of other ways."

"The French initiative," she says, "promises to do it again. They are looking to go either to the Security Council for a resolution or what they call a Presidential statement. That will tie the hands of the next President.

"That’s why the President-elect has to do something, some signal to those international players that it is not going to be cost free."

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Brian Schrauger is the Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Journal. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. This report is based on a Wall Street Journal video interview with Anne Bayesky posted on 9 January 2016 at http://m.wsj.net/video/20170109/010917opinionun/010917opinionun_v2_ec664k.mp4