Current Events: Israel At War The United Nations

Current Events, Episode 167

israel at war, EXPLAINED: the united nations

december 10, 2023

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Why is the relationship between Israel and the United Nations so bad? Historical events, the makeup of the UN, and its relentless condemnations of Israel explain why Israel no longer considers the global body a neutral actor.

The events taking place in the Middle East right now seem tailor made for the United Nations. After all, isn’t the purpose of this global body to avert war or, if war is happening, to try to end it, keep the peace, minimize the damage, defend human rights on all sides, and bring the parties together? That’s a reasonable approximation of what we all think the United Nations is for — the countries of the world coming together in the service of peace and diplomacy.

That perspective has some grounding in truth, but it also understates what the United Nations is and how it works, and how it is particularly unsuited to this particular crisis. For Israel, the UN may as well be just another enemy Arab country, and that’s been true for decades. The UN’s words no longer carry much — if any — weight in Israel.

In just the last two months of this war you can get an appreciation for why Israelis think this way. After reviewing the now-infamous, intensely graphic 47-minute video that the IDF has been showing people, pulled together from Hamas’ own videos during the massacre, the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, would only admit that there were “reports” of rapes. That goes along with his assertion that Hamas’ attack “didn’t take place in a vacuum.” To Israel this looks like the Secretary General is justifying Hamas’s actions. That seems to me an exaggeration. But it is certainly noticeable how much and how vehemently he criticizes Israel compared to his reluctance to do the same for Hamas. The head of the United Nations is not a neutral actor.

The rest of the organization hasn’t fared much better. UN Women, the global body dedicated to gender equality, empowerment, and combating violence against women, refused for weeks to even acknowledge that any sexual violence took place. When pressed why, one of their directors said it was because there wasn’t enough evidence to issue a statement. Now confronted with reams of witness and survivor testimony, and video, UN Women has finally, reluctantly, admitted that it is “alarmed by reports” of violence, and condemned Hamas’ attack. It only took them 55 days to get there. They do, however, have a webpage dedicated to the effects of the war on women and girls in Gaza.

But it’s not just the UN’s willful blindness on violence against Israeli women, nor is it limited to this current war. For the last 20 years the UN Human Rights Council, which is ostensibly tasked with protecting and promoting human rights everywhere, has instead dedicated the vast bulk of its time to condemning Israel. So, too, has the General Assembly, the main body of all 193 member states of the UN. In November the GA adopted 15 resolutions condemning Israel — and only 6 on the rest of the world, one each for a different country. And then there’s the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, the UNRWA, known as “un-rah”. This is the agency responsible for Palestinian refugees, and it has a long and controversial role of perpetuating Palestinian victimhood and supporting terrorism, in addition to the actual good humanitarian work it performs.

So what’s going? There are a few explanations. There’s a long history of bad blood between Israel and the UN. There’s the makeup of the UN, which tilts towards antagonism against Israel from Muslim-majority and Arab countries. And there’s the singular focus on Palestinian refugees, which, while laudable, has also engendered bad and unfair outcomes. All this adds up to where Israelis don’t see the UN as a nonpartisan actor, or reliable mediator.

And so, once again, what looks to the casual observer like objective criticism of Israel from a global body dedicated to peace is, in many cases, not that at all. So today, parsing the role of the UN so we can understand why the relationship is so bad. I’m your host, Jason Harris, and this is Jew Oughta Know.

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We have this idea of the United Nations as an independent, objective global body where everyone is working on a united effort for peace and diplomacy. That is some of what goes on. But think of the UN more as a members club with a vast, sprawling bureaucracy that does a million things across a boggling number of departments and agencies in places all over the world. It has 193 members — individual countries — as well as numerous other entities with various status. Because it’s a members club, it has to be responsive to those members. At best, the UN is a structure and a process through which like-minded countries can team up to focus on solving a problem. But that same mechanism also allows countries to gang up. Out of 193 countries, 49 are majority-Muslim. 22 are Arab. One is Jewish. This enables countries antagonistic to Israel to join forces.

Different organizations within the United Nations have different voting systems, but all are designed to express the opinion of the international community, often through resolutions or statements. Some require a simply majority, others two-thirds, others operate by consensus. In the case of the Security Council, which considers major issues of war and peace, five countries have a veto to strike down any resolution, even when the majority approves of it: the United States, the UK, France, Russia, and China. Why them? They were the victors in World War Two, when this system was put in place.

Now, a country that wants to be seen as a valued member of the international community — like Israel — might care that the international community is condemning them, much as I might care if all my neighbors got together to complain about my house. Of course, some countries or entities, like North Korea or Hamas, don’t care at all. While some UN votes can have actual implications, such as sending resources to a particular cause, others are just expressing — in theory — the world’s opinion.

The relationship between the United Nations and Israel started off well enough. After all, it was the UN’s 1947 vote to partition Palestine that led to the establishment of Israel in 1948. But it didn’t take too long for things to go downhill. The United Nations grew as newly-independent countries joined as members. Many of them were Muslim and Arab countries and their allies, especially the Soviet Union, which was hostile to Israel.

As I said, there is a long history of how the relationship between Israel and the United Nations turned sour. But we can point to a few events that demonstrate the evolution.

One occurred in 1967. After Israel and Egypt fought the Sinai war in 1956, the United Nations stationed a peacekeeping force in and around the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula. The goal was to ensure Israel’s security by preventing Egypt from being able to invade. But in 1967 Egypt led Israel’s neighbors in menacing the Jewish state, threatening a war of annihilation and starting to make good on that promise. Egypt ordered the United Nations peacekeeping force to leave, which they did. The UN claimed they had to, since they were only in place by the permission of the host country, which was Egypt. But in the absence of the UN force, the road was wide open for invasion. Unable to wait for the surprise attack they knew was coming, Israel launched a preemptive strike, kicking off the Six Day War. Israel took the UN’s actions as a betrayal, one that the country never forgot or forgave. It was the last time Israel would ever entrust the UN with its security.

Another huge rift occurred in 1975. That year, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” It accused Israel of having imperialist origins and of governing by a doctrine of racial superiority. It was a direct effort by the 72 nations which voted in favor of it to delegitimize Israel, casting it as a pariah state, and hoisting all the blame for the Israel-Arab conflict onto the Jewish State. Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Chaim Herzog, famously tore the resolution in half. He declared, “For us, the Jewish people, this resolution based on hatred, falsehood and arrogance, is devoid of any moral or legal value. For us, the Jewish people, this is no more than a piece of paper and we shall treat it as such.”

The resolution came a year after the arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, spoke at the UN wearing a gun. He threatened to continuing raining more violence down on Israel, which he did. Despite wielding a gun and threatening violence on a stage supposedly devoted to world peace, he received a standing ovation.

Abba Eban, perhaps Israel’s most famous diplomat in history, once joked that “"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”.

If the decades since the 1950s saw the steady erosion of the UN-Israel relationship, by the early 2000s the game was entirely up: it was clear to everyone that the UN had chosen sides, and turned irrevocably towards the demonization of Israel.

[clip: Chaim Herzog speaking at UN in response to “Zionism is Racism” resolution”]

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Although the UN officially retracted its “Zionism is racism” resolution in 1991, the pretense didn’t last long. In 2001 the UN sponsored a massive conference of non-governmental organizations in Durban, South Africa, called the “World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.” What it was really about, however, was a global, organized, and targeted hatefest against Israel. Once again Zionism was declared racist, and Israel declared founded on the principles of colonialism and ethnic cleansing. To drive home the point, NGO’s were passing out copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf and handing out signs saying “if only Hitler had won.” The most prominent human rights organizations were present, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and many others who are thought to be political neutral and objectively interested in universal human rights. The Durban conference proved that they were not, and that the UN was deeply embedded with, and enabling, extremist anti-Israel and anti-Jewish efforts.

Inside the UN building, though, things were just as bad. From 2012 through 2022, the General Assembly adopted 140 resolutions on Israel and only 68 on other countries. In 2022, the General Assembly adopted one resolution condemning North Korea, which starves and murders its own people in one of the most bleak, tyrannical regimes on earth. One on Afghanistan, where the Taliban systematically oppresses women and holds public executions for infractions of their version of Islamic law. One each on Myanmar, a military dictatorship; Syria, which murdered hundreds of thousands of people including Palestinians; and Iran, perhaps the biggest sponsor of terrorism on earth. Even one on the United States for its embargo of Cuba. None on Cuba itself, or Pakistan or Algeria or Turkey or China or Saudi Arabia or Iraq. None for countries that are horribly corrupt, oppress their own people, lock up journalists and dissidents, murder with impunity, sponsor terrorism, attack other countries, and abuse human rights. Fifteen resolutions were brought condemning Israel.

Beyond the General Assembly is the vast UN apparatus that considers questions of human rights. This, too, is overwhelmingly tilted against Israel, to the point that much of the UN’s efforts seem expressly designed to condemn Israel rather than elevate human rights. One of the main vehicles for this is the Human Rights Council, established in 2006. Its mission is to promote and protect human rights around the world. It has the ability to discuss “all thematic human rights issues and situations that require its attention throughout the year.” It’s made up of a rotating group of 47 countries. Seats on the Council have been given to such human rights abusers countries as China, Sudan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Russia, and numerous other dictatorships and non-democracies. In 2023 Iran was appointed the chair of the Council’s Social Forum, which focused on “the contribution of science, technology, and innovation to promoting human rights.” You know which country has never been permitted to join the Council? Israel.

The Human Rights Council has a list of ten standing items that it considers in each session. Nine of them are general things like administrative business, technical matters, following through on mandatory reports, things like that. There is one, and only one, agenda item — Number 7 — devoted to a single country, and that is Israel. Specifically it’s the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” There are no agenda items for, say, North Korean human rights abuses, or China’s, or Iran’s, or Syria’s, or, for that matter, Palestinian terrorist groups. UN Watch, an NGO that monitors the UN, reports that from 2006 to 2023, the Human Rights Council adopted 104 resolutions against Israel. The runner-up was Syria with 43. Russia only got 7. So what you get, says UN Watch, is an annual debate in which Syria, Cuba, North Korea and others accuse Israel of human rights violations, which then get entered into the UN’s official record.

Even the World Health Organization gets in on the action. Every year, including this one, it issues a report on “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.” And every year it condemns Israel for violating the health rights of the Palestinians in the Golan Heights. It’s the only county-specific report that the WHO issues. Nothing about Syria, which kills hundreds of thousands of Arabs and bombs hospitals. Never mind Russia and it’s genocidal assault on Ukraine. Not even the Taliban and its dismantling of Afghanistan’s health care system, makes the cut. Only Israel. In fact, this year, 2023, North Korea was elected to the WHO’s Executive Board, and expressed its deep concern about the negative impacts on the living conditions of the Palestinian population.

We can go on and on, but I’m tired. You can imagine how exhausted and infuriated Israel is. Year after year Israel has to protest condemnations from some of the worst human rights abusers, along with some European countries who side with them against Israel. So you can understand why yet another UN condemnation of yet another alleged Israeli crime carries exactly no weight with Israelis, nor does the Secretary-General’s demands for a cease-fire when Israel is fighting a genocidal enemy.

But we also need to talk about UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency which looks after Palestinian refugees.

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UNRWA has a long and complex history, and it was formed for a very good purpose, which in many ways it has continued to carry out. It was established in 1949 to provide direct relief for both Jewish and Arab refugees from the 1948 war. A few years later Israel took over responsibility for both the Jews and Arabs within its own borders, but UNRWA continued looking after the Arabs who had been displaced by the war, which back then numbered around 750,000. After the 1967 Six Day War, and with the agreement of Israel, UNRWA folded the Palestinians from that conflict into its mandate, too.

Now here’s where things start to get controversial. UNRWA is separate from the main UN agency that deals with refugees, which is called the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. That agency’s goal is to eliminate a refugee’s status by integrating them into the current country where they live, resettling them somewhere else, or getting them back to their home country if safe and possible. That is, the goal is to make a refugee no longer a refugee within a few years.

UNRWA is different. It is solely focused on Palestinian refugees. Instead of trying to end their refugee status, it perpetuates it. According to UNRWA, a Palestinian refugee is someone who lived in Palestine between 1946 and 1948, and subsequently lost their home and livelihood due to the 1948 war. But, crucially, UNRWA extends that status to all the descendants of male Palestinian refugees. That means that a Palestinian born today in Gaza, whose great-grandfather was a refugee in 1948, is also officially considered a refugee from 1948. No other refugees in the world have this kind of status. If I’m a refugee from a war, move to the United States, get married and have a child, neither my spouse nor our child, and certainly not our grandchildren and great-children, are considered refugees. But that’s not the case for the Palestinians.

UNRWA argues that solving the conflict to create a Palestinian state in which to settle the refugees is not its mission, which is true. But there are other reasons. The Arab states refused to integrate the Palestinians, wanting to keep them stateless and miserable to make Israel look bad. And the Palestinians themselves often resisted integration into their host countries, since that would mean giving up their status as refugees — and thus their claim to having the right to return to what was now Israel. And so as long as Palestinians are technically stateless, UNRWA classifies them as refugees. It’s how UNRWA went from 750,000 Palestinian refugees in 1949 to 5.6 million today. Around 1.6 million of them live in Gaza today. In other words, instead of shrinking the Palestinian refugee population, the UN has grown them into millions.

The other thing that happened is that UNRWA’s role expanded. Originally it was supposed to supply direct humanitarian relief, and jobs. But in the decades since it took on additional responsibilities, where it now provides education, health care, and a variety of social services to these millions of Palestinian refugees: everything from small business loans to medical care and school textbooks. They operate in several dozen refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. On the one hand, this is a good thing: someone, after all, needs to take care of these people. But this is also why, for example, Hamas says that it’s not their responsibility to look after their own people; it’s the UN’s, says Hamas. They know that UNRWA will provide the necessary resources, which allows Hamas to instead use its vast wealth for war against Israel, rather than for the Palestinians. It’s a similar story in other Arab countries with large Palestinian refugee populations.

There’s no doubt that UNRWA does deep and important humanitarian work. But it has also been dogged by controversies to which it never seems to provide much resolution. Most of what UNRWA does is fund and operate schools for Palestinian children. Yet these schools have often been found to teach hatred towards Jews, that Israel will be wiped out, the glorification of martyrdom and jihad — indoctrinating generations of children into extremism and violence, many of whom then grow up to join terrorist groups. You can bet that most of the 3,000 terrorists who attacked Israel on October 7 were raised in UNRWA schools.

The degree to which UNRWA has been enmeshed with Hamas’ activities in Gaza is on the one hand not surprising, given the close quarters in which the two groups operate; but on the other hand, this is supposed to be the neutral, objective United Nations. Yet UNRWA employees have been found to be Hamas members and supporters, praising the October 7 massacre on social media, expressing support for genocide against the Jews, and more. There is an accusation that an UNRWA doctor was holding an Israeli hostage in his house on behalf of Hamas, where the hostage was beaten, malnourished, and left without medical care. We know that rockets are routinely fired from UNRWA schools, but weapons have also been found in other UNRWA facilities, including the private homes of employees. Given how Hamas operates, it may be that UNRWA had no choice in some of these instances. But then why wasn’t the UN screaming bloody murder about it? To Israel and other observers around the world, it looks like UNRWA and many of its employees — especially teachers — support Hamas not out of necessity but out of conviction.

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So you add all this up. Decades of one-sided condemnations against Israel. Obsessive focus on supposed Israeli crimes while actual war criminals get a free pass. Years of looking in the other direction as Hamas and Hezbollah and other terrorist groups built up their arsenals, and then refusing to condemn terrorism. Zionism is racism. Disregarding the horrific abuse against Israeli women on October 7. Little concern for Israeli children held as hostages. This is why Israel sees the UN as an adversary.

For the first time in 34 years, the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, invoked a clause in the UN Charter that allows him to bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which he believes threatens international peace and security. The Secretary-General used this rule to continue his calls for a cease-fire. Israel has refused a cease-fire without a simultaneous release of hostages and a parallel cease-fire from Hamas, which the terrorist group won’t do. A cease-fire, says Israel, only helps Hamas stay in power. Israel continues to lambast the Secretary-General, demanding his resignation, and insisting that the UN has become morally corrupt.

Per the Secretary-General’s request, on December 8 the Security Council did vote on demanding a cease-fire. 13 of the 15 countries on the Council voted in favor. The UK abstained and the United States vetoed it, ensuring that it wouldn’t pass. The resolution condemned Israel for creating the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. No condemnation was offered against Hamas or its atrocities against innocent people.

The purpose of this episode wasn’t to just bash the United Nations, but to explain why the UN-Israel relationship is so bad. As always, much more to say, but we’ll leave things here. You can find me at jewoughtaknow.com and my email is jewoughtaknowpodcast@gmail.com. If your community or institution is looking for a speaker or a teach-in about what’s going on, hit me up. Thanks for listening everyone, Am Yisrael Chai — the Jewish People live.