Unfounded
Envisioned as a beacon of hope for the world, the United Nations capitulates to antisemitic obsessions rather than live up to its ideals.
In July 2024, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) found Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror infrastructure inside the United Nations Relief Works Agency’s (UNRWA) Gaza City headquarters, including war rooms, surveillance equipment, and an extensive cache of weapons including tactical drones, rockets, machine guns, mortars, explosives, grenades, and parts for UAV assembly. This discovery is nothing new, as Einat Wilf elucidated, “UNRWA facilities and infrastructure are not “exploited” by terrorists. Rather, UNRWA is the ideological backbone of the forever Arab Palestinian war waged against Jewish sovereignty. UNRWA is the infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism.” Also in July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has employed a new legal instrument to offer the opinion that the areas of Judea and Samaria that Israel came to control in the Six Day War (1967) are unlawfully occupied. Led by known antisemite President Nawaf Salam, the ICJ has explicitly urged the UN General Assembly to “bring an end as rapidly as possible to Israel’s presence in the ‘Occupied Palestinian Territory.’” This is a sovereignty-shattering precedent that imposes a biased judge’s opinion on a nation that hasn’t agreed to subject itself to this court’s jurisdiction. Both instances show the United Nations is not just vulnerable to Arab anti-Zionism—it is the instrument that coordinates Arab anti-Zionism with Western antisemitism to alienate and disenfranchise the Jewish people. The United Nations works to disempower Jews where they have power and to displace Jews where they have roots—roots proven by millennia-old archaeological findings and ancient sacred and secular texts. Since Israel’s founding, the United Nations has made its legacy one that is antisemitic in effect, even if it occasionally tries to conceal this intent.
Despite Israel being conceived in its chambers in 1947 with General Assembly Resolution 181, the UN has deliberately turned against it. The UN’s achievement of its founding principles of human rights, equality, and peace continues to be subverted by its antisemitic politicization and prejudice. Key bodies of the United Nations, including political organs, special agencies, and bureaucratic divisions, are exploited by bad actors in coordinated efforts to delegitimize Israel and to demonize the Jewish people.
This campaign reached its first fever pitch on November 10, 1975, when General Assembly Resolution 3379 pronounced Zionism a form of racism—a declaration initiated by Arab and Islamic states in concert with the Soviet Union and other dictatorships. Despite the resolution’s repeal in 1991, the UN’s obsession with Israel continues. UN bodies systemically apply different standards to Israel than those applied to other democratic countries and target Israel with criticism disproportionate to its offenses, as compared with the criticism of other countries committing similar offenses.
One needn’t look further than the voting records of UN bodies to see the proof. Every year in the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Israel is condemned more than any other nation. In 2023, there were 14 condemnations of Israel and 7 for the rest of the world. In 2022, 15 for Israel and 13 for the rest of the world. If we look at the total resolutions of the UNGA from 2015–2022, there have been 140 against Israel and a total of 68 against other countries.
“If Algeria introduced a resolution declaring that the earth was flat and that Israel had flattened it, it would pass by a vote of 164 to 13 with 26 abstentions.”
—Abba Eban, Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister, 1970s
The Human Rights Council (UNHRC) is the highest body in the UN human rights system. Ironically, two-thirds of the 47 member states are non-democracies, and many are among the world’s greatest perpetrators of human rights violations. While its mandate prescribes “universality, impartiality, objectivity, and non-selectivity,” Israel is its only standing agenda item. Once again, the numbers show undeniable bias: From 2006–2023, the UNHRC has adopted 103 resolutions on Israel, 42 on Syria, 16 on North Korea, 14 on Iran, 12 on Eritrea, 3 on Venezuela, and 2 on Sudan. UNHRC also maintains a blacklist of companies operating in Israeli-controlled territories in Judea and Samaria which is used by BDS groups to organize boycotts. The UN does not have such a list for any other disputed territory in the world.
At the United Nations, Israel is judged by the severity with which it is attacked militarily rather than its response. In a broader effort to label Israel as an aggressor when it defends itself, the UNHRC has opened 9 inquiries against Israel. After Hamas instigated a war in 2014 by kidnapping and murdering three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank, the UNHRC launched an inquiry only when Israel responded. In 2021, when Hamas and Islamic Jihad fired 4,000 rockets at Israeli cities, the Council created an open-ended Commission of Inquiry on Israel to investigate imagined Israeli offenses while completely ignoring Palestinian terrorism. Inquiries like these reflect the UN’s continued commitment to whitewash Palestinian crimes and human rights violations as well as the UN’s complicity in terrorism through agencies like UNRWA.
Since the 1960s, UNRWA has become a Palestinian organization that employs Palestinians, serves Palestinians, and lends the perceived legitimacy of the UN to Palestinian goals of one day destroying Israel. UNRWA was established to provide education and social services to Arab Palestinians following the 1948 war and to resettle them in neighboring countries to conclude the conflict. Its outcomes have achieved the opposite: UNRWA grants refugee status to the descendants of Palestinian refugees in perpetuity, such that the 700,000 original refugees from 1948 have now increased in number to over 5 million. Arab nations have colluded with UNRWA to perpetuate the war by not granting citizenship to refugees, despite them residing in their countries for over 75 years (Jordan being the only exception).
UNRWA teachers and administrators expose their over 545,000 students to curricula that regularly demonize Israel, call for the murder of Jews, and glorify terrorism and martyrdom. A March 2023 report identified 133 teachers and staff who promoted hate and violence on social media, and an additional 82 teachers and staff of 30 UNRWA schools created and distributed racist content to students. At least 18 school principals of UNRWA schools in Gaza are members of Hamas’s military wing, as is Fathi al-Sharif, head of the UNRWA teachers’ union. At least 2,000 of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees in Gaza are also members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and many participated in the October 7th attack. Several UNRWA teachers have held Israeli hostages taken on October 7th in their homes.
Even before the IDF discovery in July 2024, UNRWA’s infrastructure was known to be compromised by anti-Israel terrorists. In February 2024, IDF forces discovered a Hamas data center underneath UNRWA’s Gaza City headquarters, complete with electrical rooms, industrial power banks, and living quarters. Hamas has infiltrated over 30 UNRWA buildings in Gaza, which have been found to contain tunnel shafts and other terror infrastructure, reflecting both systemic use of UN facilities for terrorist purposes and the UN’s implicit endorsement of tactics that violate Article 8 of the Rome Statute.
As if these aggressions were not enough, the UN also has three organizations that are specifically dedicated to undermining Israeli legitimacy and destabilizing its economy and security. Established on the same day as the “Zionism is Racism” resolution was adopted, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP) promotes the Palestinian narrative of victimhood and prejudice against Israel. The Division for Palestinian Rights (DPR) grants the PLO its own UN secretariat to organize boycotts against Israel to damage its economic security rather than promote paths to peace. Composed of member states Malaysia, Senegal, and Sri Lanka, the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories holds annual meetings on the Middle East and presents reports of Israel’s alleged human rights abuses to the General Assembly.
Before Israel entered Gaza in response to Hamas’s October 7th invasion and attack, members of the UN Security Council began calling for a ceasefire in a pattern reminiscent of the Six Day War (1967): When Israel is successful in battle, the Security Council demands a ceasefire to prevent Israel from achieving decisive victory. When Israel’s enemies are winning, silence. If Palestinian terrorists kill, rape, mutilate, and abduct civilian hostages, the UN is laconic at best. To the Arab states, allowing Israel to win is a level of humiliation they cannot tolerate. They coordinate with the UN to call for humanitarian pauses and ceasefires and employ baseless charges as a legal means to slow or stop Israel’s military advances.
At the end of 2023, South Africa submitted a baseless case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, the principal judicial organ of the UN. South Africa alleged that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people in direct violation of the Genocide Convention. In their case, South Africa attempted to apply the moral gravity of the term to refer to what are clearly war-related deaths. This ill-founded accusation is blood libel by another name. As John Spencer, Chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point asserted, “Israel has implemented more precautions to prevent civilian harm than any other army in history—above and beyond what international law requires, and more than the U.S. did in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
This accusation of genocide is deliberately antisemitic: The term genocide was coined by Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to describe the atrocities the Nazis were committing in Europe. Since the adoption of the Geneva Convention in 1948, Israel has been accused of genocide despite facts on the ground contradicting this accusation, not least of which is an exponential increase in Palestinian population. Israel’s detractors deliberately draw moral equivalence between Israeli Jews and Nazi Germany because it is the most obscene insult they can muster. By allowing this case, the United Nations and the International Court of Justice willingly instrumentalize themselves in Holocaust inversion.
ICJ President Nawaf Salam has consistently shown himself to be neither a fair nor an impartial arbiter of justice. Article 17 of the ICJ charter states that no judge “may participate in the decision of any case in which he has previously taken part” as “advocate” or in “any other capacity.” Salam’s presidency is in clear violation of the charter: Before the ICJ, he spent 11 years as the Lebanese Ambassador to the UN, during which time he voted to condemn Israel 210 times and frequently made inflammatory and antisemitic remarks. Lebanon is an official supporter of the fraudulent case of genocide at the ICJ and is also engaged in armed conflict with Israel—rockets have been fired regularly at Northern Israel from Lebanon since the October 7th attack. Beirut’s Al Akbhar newspaper has suggested that Salam has received support from Hezbollah as a possible candidate for Prime Minister of Lebanon. Now he and his 14-colleague panel seek to reward Hamas’s October 7th attack with statehood through a unilateral motion. How can the ICJ effectively fulfill its mission when its figurehead does not recuse himself in cases where he has a well-documented history of bias?
The UN are aware of their many shortcomings. While Secretary General António Guterres and Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief Ahmed Shaheed pay lip service to a coordinated response to antisemitism, many other officials, member states, and NGOs aligned with those governments are opposed to taking basic steps to address the issue, including the adoption of the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism. Included in the IHRA definition are examples of antisemitism, including “denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination; e.g. by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor” and “applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.” Opposition to the working definition is not surprising: Without a framework to define and identify antisemitism—especially antisemitism shrouded in euphemisms about justice and ensconced in bureaucratic proceedings—business (and anti-Zionism and anti) at the UN can go on as usual.
UN officials who oppose the IHRA Working Definition demonstrate their biases willingly. In 2014, Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories for UNHRC (and former UNRWA employee) Francesca Albanese opined on Facebook that America and Europe have been “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” She has also compared Israelis to Nazis, called Israel an “apartheid regime by default,” and declared Israel to be a racist project. Craig Mokhiber, Albanese’s colleague at the UN High Commission on Refugees, called Israel “a European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project” and frequently gaslights accusations of antisemitism as a “tired old trick” that obscures “the real struggle against antisemitism.”
The UN cannot live up to its espoused founding principles when its membership, leadership, and officials have been so infected with hate. Despite the endorsement by 36 countries, including the United States and the European Union, the UN refuses to adopt the IHRA Working Definition because it would require its organs, bodies, committees, and member states to be held responsible for their words and actions. The UN’s failure to meet its potential coupled with its moral collapse has eviscerated its credibility.
The UN needs a reset. The UN should adopt the IHRA Working Definition, remove any official who issues statements that are antisemitic, eliminate standing agenda items that only focus on criticizing Israel, block the worst violators of human rights from the UN Human Rights Council, and recognize Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations.
The UN’s historical and continuing treatment of Israel as a unique global evil is the bureaucratization of age-old antisemitic tropes wielded against the greatest modern manifestation of collective Jewish existence. For decades, the United Nations has demonstrated that the world’s oldest hatred is fully intact, confirmed by member vote. In its marriage of Arab anti-Zionism and Western antisemitism, the United Nations favors terrorists over sovereign nations, if the sovereign nation at stake is the Jewish one. The UN and its bodies lack the legitimacy to pass any resolution or to make any demand of Israel, or any other country for that matter.