The UN is a threat to Jewish safety.

The institution created to prevent the scourge of war has now perfected the politics of scapegoating. The State of Israel should quit this troubled entity once and for all. Enough of the circus.

The United Nations logo (photo: Davi Mendes/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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The latest outrage is a United Nations panel — laughably titled an “Independent International Commission of Inquiry,” despite being little more than a Hamas faction — declaring Israel guilty of genocide.

There is no reason Israel should put up with this. It should leave the UN to its strongmen and their stenographers. The world has always hated Jews, and now that Jews again govern themselves, the UN has made delegitimizing Israel a central ritual. Remaining in the UN is like hanging out behind the school bicycle sheds with the bullies who will never graduate.

If that feels extreme, it is only because the UN’s indecency has been normalized. The institution created to prevent the scourge of war has now perfected the politics of scapegoating. The UN includes Israel on blacklists for “grave violations against children” while swallowing and regurgitating casualty tallies from Hamas’ propaganda mills. It rouses itself to condemn hostage-rescue operations more than the abductions that necessitate them. It treats Israeli self-defense as provocation and jihadist aggression as meteorology — unfortunate weather, no one’s fault in particular.

Enough. Quitting is not a tantrum; it is hygiene.

Let us review the charge sheet, because the pattern matters more than any one outrage.

The UN Human Rights Council is as good a place to start as any. Its constant Israel-bashing is not a bug, but the council’s operating system. The council maintains a unique standing agenda item — Item 7 — that singles out Israel for automatic censure at every session.

No other country merits a permanent pillory, not even the regimes that harvest human organs, raze villages, run slave camps, or jail poets. The council has churned out more resolutions against Israel than against Iran, Syria, North Korea, China, Cuba, and Venezuela combined.

Next up is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN’s Palestinian agency, which is not a neutral aid provider but a structural incubator of the conflict. It has institutionalized a definition of “refugee” that magically multiplies generation after generation, so the problem can never be resolved and the grievance can never end. UNRWA schools have, for years, romanticized jihadist martyrdom, dehumanized Jews, and taught Palestinian children that they should aspire to kill them.

The rot is operational. UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters sat on top of, and was connected to, a Hamas data center. Dozens of UNRWA employees lauded the October 7th pogrom, dozens participated in it, and a meaningful share of staff have known ties to Hamas. That makes UNRWA a terror organization by any sane metric.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres deserves special mention for being a morally bereft slime ball. After October 7th, the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Guterres said:

“It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”

This was a lie. There had been no Israeli presence in Gaza since 2005. Hamas ruled there with absolute authority and impunity. One would have to work hard to craft a sentence that so elegantly erases Israeli victims while laundering their killers’ alibis.

When Iran later launched the largest ballistic missile barrage in history at Israel, Guterres’ first instinct was not to name and condemn the perpetrator but to sigh about “escalation.” What a thoroughly unimpressive man.

Then there is the UN’s in-house antisemitism. Jew-hatred is baked into the UN’s culture. Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the “occupied Palestinian territories” (a title that presumes the verdict in the very dispute she opines on), has trafficked in antisemitic tropes about a “Jewish lobby,” excused “Palestinian resistance” rhetoric to Islamist audiences, and relativized the October 7th atrocity. She is a slug. When watchdogs showed that she had engaged in financial improprieties and side hustles with anti-Israel bodies, the UN did what it does best — nothing.

It would be remiss not to mention the theater of the International Court of Justice. Whenever the UN wants a legal fig leaf for political warfare, it turns to the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion, which is then spun as binding international law. Yet its opinions are non-binding by design. The idea that its rulings have “moral authority” comes from the court’s own public relations department.

Asking the International Court of Justice to rule on whether Israel may ban UNRWA — after UNRWA’s collusion with Hamas was deemed a matter of fact — insults legal reason. No sovereign state requires the court’s permission to stop cooperating with an agency that aids a genocidal militia.

Perhaps nothing shows the UN’s uselessness better than its “peacekeepers,” who keep no peace. The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon was meant to enforce Security Council resolutions requiring Hezbollah to disarm and withdraw behind the Litani River. For nearly two decades, it has done neither. The Interim Force’s troops sat and played “Candy Crush” while Hezbollah built the world’s most formidable non-state army, tunneled under the border, embedded among civilians, and pointed 150,000 rockets at Israel. And, when these so-called peacekeepers get caught in the crossfire, the UN blames Israel for defending itself, not Hezbollah for using UN peacekeepers as shields.

The above is the historical throughline, not a set of cherry-picked anecdotes. It stretches back 50 years, to the UN’s 1975 resolution declaring “Zionism is racism” — later revoked under duress but never repented. It runs through the grotesque spectacle of Palestinian terrorist chieftain Yasser Arafat addressing the UN General Assembly with a gun on his hip. It winds through the election of Nazi Kurt Waldheim as UN Secretary-General — twice. It lives today in the statistical fetish of passing more anti-Israel resolutions than admonitions against any tyrant, anytime, anywhere.

If this were merely hypocrisy, we could mock it and move on. Yet the UN wields agenda-setting power, money, and, to some idiots, narrative authority. In the last year alone:

• It laundered casualty numbers from a Hamas-run “ministry of health” for months before sheepishly admitting the figures were inflated and unreliable. No apology. No institutional introspection. Just a press release in the graveyard hours.

• It amplified ceasefire resolutions crafted to preserve Hamas’ power in Gaza while constraining Israel’s ability to rescue its citizens and dismantle jihadist infrastructure.

• It was reticent to condemn Hezbollah’s serial violations of UN resolutions 1559 and 1701, even as the militia rained rockets on Israel’s north, internally displacing 100,000-plus Israelis.

• It mounted a clownish “Action Plan to Enhance Monitoring and Response to Antisemitism” that reads like DEI boilerplate. The UN cannot credibly teach people how to recognize antisemitism while giving senior platforms to ideologues who spout it.

Meanwhile, when Argentinian President Javier Milei stood before the UN to state the obvious — that the UN seats “bloody dictatorships,” that it targets the Middle East’s only liberal democracy while coddling misogynists and theocrats — his moral clarity was treated as a curiosity.

Why should Israel continue legitimizing this circus? Membership is not free. Israel spends money, real diplomatic bandwidth, and — because the UN’s rhetoric feeds real violence — real blood.

Every time a UN official equivocates after a massacre, an arsonist somewhere hears permission. Every time UNRWA prints a map without Israel, a classroom somewhere erodes a child’s empathy. Every time the UN Human Rights Council holds Item 7, a journalist somewhere writes the sentence “Israel again under fire for human rights abuses,” cementing the world’s laziest lie.

There is also a subtler opportunity cost. Remaining in the UN encourages the complacent hope that “engagement” will eventually reform it. This is nonsense. The UN’s structure rewards bloc politics, and bloc politics rewards numbers over norms. No amount of eloquent Israeli speeches can out-argue arithmetic.

Even the alleged costs to Israel of quitting the UN do not withstand scrutiny.

The idea it that would impose a reputational hit on Israel is meaningless, because it is already priced in. The countries that matter — those with shared strategic interests and compatible values — will understand why Israel refuses to participate in such a big-top circus.

It is also a lazy analogy to say Israel leaving would make it look like the European fascist states that quit the League of Nations in the 1930s. The League hemorrhaged members as aggressor states sought freedom to conquer. Israel is not seeking freedom to aggress, but freedom from institutionalized calumny and sabotage.

The commonality between the League and the UN is not the virtue of membership; it is in their gross ineptitude and in the futility of expecting moribund multilateral bodies to restrain tyrants. Israel’s exit would be a warning flare of the UN’s inevitable collapse upon its own excesses.

Useful diplomatic activities — bilateral intelligence cooperation, joint technology projects, disaster response, regional groupings — occur outside the UN or despite it.

Israel has fought to reform the UN from within for 75 years, yet the body is worse today than ever, and thus unreformable.

Jerusalem should ban UN operations, personnel, and funding channels in all Israeli-controlled territory. Concurrently, it should publish a white paper laying out the evidentiary record — physical infrastructure, employee conduct, curricular content — so allies can make informed decisions about their own funding.

Israel should then establish a transparent, reviewable process distinguishing between good-faith humanitarian actors and political warfare in humanitarian clothing. It should notify governments that Israel will work directly with them and with vetted non-governmental organizations, but not through UN intermediaries.

Amid much fanfare, Israel should reallocate UN membership dues and costs to hostage families and those of fallen Israeli soldiers. Israel should also publish a Security Doctrine of Sovereignty that asserts the primacy of self-defense and defines the limits of multilateralism.

It is impossible to critique the UN without commenting on its recent “Action Plan” to fight antisemitism. It was pure self-parody. The plan is heavy on “monitoring and evaluation,” “victim-centric approaches,” “engaging stakeholders,” and “leveraging digital platforms.” It reads like bad advertising copy filtered through a DEI committee. It does not address the one thing that would give the UN a sliver of moral standing on the topic: cleaning its own house. To be fair, no broom is that big.

Beneath this institutional analysis lies the truth that the UN and its apologists cannot bear: The Jews have their country back and no longer need to beg others for safety. Israel does not need the approval of sick regimes that stone people, subjugate women, hang gays, murder dissidents, and bankroll terrorists. Nor does it need the approval of Western states that support these regimes.

History shows us that antisemitism surges when Jews are prominent and perceived as weak. Jews will always be visible, but as they have shown over the past two years, they are anything but weak. Only a weak nation with no self-respect would want to be in a body that despises it. Leaving would be an act of strength and self-respect.

On the day Israel left, headlines would scream, foreign chancelleries would profess shock, and then the world would move on. Nothing terrible would happen. We would still live in a heliocentric solar system.

Meanwhile, some positive things could flow from it. Bilateral agreements and trade would continue and grow, because growth always beats grievance over time. Humanitarian work would become more effective because there would be no UN gravy train for freeloading bureaucrats. Lawfare efforts against Israel would sputter because they could not feed on the UN’s imprimatur. The International Court of Justice would still issue opinions, and they would continue to mean nothing.

Upon Israel leaving the UN, there would be diplomatic noise, editorials, and dire predictions. So what? Israel already faces these things. Quitting would make clear that Israel’s security and legitimacy are not contingent on a mob of corrupt bad-faith actors. It would also send a message to the next generation of Israeli diplomats and soldiers that their nation measures itself by the lives it saves, the freedoms it guards, and the civilization it extends, not by the UN resolutions it absorbs.

There comes a time when honest actors must walk away from a rigged game. For Israel, that time is now.

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