Yehuda Zvi Blum (born 1931) is an Israeli professor of law and diplomat. In 1978-1984, Blum served as Israel Ambassador to the United Nations.
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Yehuda Z. Blum was born in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in 1931 and observed his bar-mitzvah in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He immigrated to British Mandate for Palestine in 1945.[1]Blum earned his law degree from the University of London and joined the law faculty of the Hebrew University in 1965.
Blum joined the faculty of Hebrew University in 1965 and until retiring in 2001 occupied the Hersch Lauterpacht Chair in International Law there. He has served as a senior research scholar at the University of Michigan, and visiting professor in the law schools of the University of Texas, New York University, Tulane University, USC and others. In 1968 he served as a UNESCO Fellow at the University of Sydney in Australia. He has written several books and published many scholarly articles on international legal problems in law journals in English, Hebrew and German. He is currently the law editor of the Encyclopaedia Hebraica.
In 1968, Blum worked for the United Nations Office of Legal Counsel. He was a member of Israeli Delegation to 3rd UN Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1973. In 1976 he was part of the Israeli delegation to the 31st session of UN General Assembly. He served as Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, for six years between 1978-84.
He was a member of the Israeli negotiating team that drafted the peace treaty with Egypt (Camp David Accords in 1978, and Blair House, March 1979.
Member of Israeli legal team, for the Taba Arbitration (Israel-Egypt), 1986-8.[2]
As the Ambassador to the United Nations, Blum was often critical of it, saying that the U.N. "fans the flames of the middle east conflict." The New York Times quotes him as saying The essence of the middle east conflict has always been and remains the persistent enmity of Arab states towards the Jewish national renaissance, [3] As UN envoy, he made headlines for "scolding" a group of 133 American Jewish law students protesting Israel's invasion of Lebanon and protesting Jewish settlements in West Bank and Gaza. He questioned the factual, as well as the moral position, of the students' view, saying that they "have not given the slightest indication of their willingness to bear any personal consequences of their patronizing and fortuitous advice. [4]