The UN's All-Out War With Israel

The corrupted and maligned United Nations has become a key player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving entities and people who have no interest in seeing it resolved.

A recent UN report urges Palestinians to investigate themselves for killing Jews, when their stated goal is killing Jews. (photo: Mathias Reding/Unsplash)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

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

---

In 1952, just four years after the State of Israel was established, an initiative at the United Nations for a ceasefire in Korea put forward by Israeli representative Abba Eban encountered serious opposition, only to easily pass once Norway replaced Israel as the sponsor.

Eban went on to famously say: “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.”

In other words, the UN’s animosity toward Israel is a tale as old as the transistor radio, the color television, the credit card, power steering, the polio vaccine, the microwave oven for home use, the Barbie doll, the hula hoop, the flight data recorder, the Breathalyzer, and the first commercially available home videotape recorder (all inventions from the 1950s).

But as much as Israelis knew how unfriendly the UN has historically been to the Jewish state, never did we think that this organization, as corrupt and maligned as it has become, would directly help jihadist terrorists attack Israel. Indeed, that is exactly what’s happening.

Over the weekend, Israel was blasted by international voices for “attacking” UNIFIL (the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), which involves about 9,500 troops of some 50 nationalities tasked with monitoring the ceasefire that ended the 33-day Second Lebanon War in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.

Forty countries that contribute to the UN “peacekeeping” force in Lebanon said Saturday that they “strongly condemn recent attacks” on the “peacekeepers” — at least five of whom have been wounded in recent days as Israel takes its fight against the Hezbollah terror group into southern Lebanon.

“Such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated,” said the joint statement, posted on X by the Polish UN mission and signed by nations including leading contributors Indonesia, Italy, and India.

Turns out, such actions were investigated, and the IDF found that Hezbollah is intentionally firing at IDF soldiers from the vicinity of UNIFIL posts in southern Lebanon.

Prior to Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon to rid it of Hezbollah so that Israeli citizens could safely return to their homes near the Lebanese border, Israel requested that UNIFIL temporarily move its personnel just five kilometers (three miles) north of the border, but the request was refused.

“There was a unanimous decision to stay because it’s important for the UN flag to still fly high in this region, and to be able to report to the Security Council,” according to an interview that UNIFIL spokesperson Andrea Tenenti gave to AFP.

Translation: It is important for the UN to aid and abet Israel’s self-declared enemies, no less jihadist terrorists, in their demented antisemitic mission to destroy the Jewish state using the most sinister, barbaric methods.

It would be one thing if UNIFIL was doing its job: to enforce UN Security Council Resolution 1701, an outgrowth of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah which stipulated that only the Lebanese army and UN “peacekeepers” ought to be deployed in southern Lebanon. Israel respected this resolution, vacating southern Lebanon of its forces, while Hezbollah has entrenched itself within the area during the past 18 years, storing weapons and other military assets there.

And since October 8th, just one day after the Hamas-led massacres and kidnappings in Israel, Hezbollah joined the war unprovoked and has been firing thousands of rockets into Israel, as well as positioning its forces for a mass invasion of Israel.

Taken in perspective, the UN’s decision to in effect help Hezbollah defeat Israel is completely unsurprising. It is the predictable outcome of an organization that has long abandoned any pretense of impartiality — and its rot extends far beyond UNIFIL.

Let’s recall that UN Secretary-General António Guterres blamed Israel for bringing the October 7th pogrom upon itself; he has continued to implicitly side with Hamas and Hezbollah throughout this year-long conflict. And last week, the UN elected Qatar to its Human Rights Council — long the hub of human rights abusers. The Qataris are, in lockstep, a chief sponsor of Hamas of ISIS.

There is also the UN agency for Palestinian “refugees” (UNRWA), which commands a billion-dollar-plus annual budget that Palestinian terrorist organizations knowingly swipe to fund terrorists, explicitly promote terrorism in schools, and smuggle weapons and explosives into Gaza and the West Bank.

There have also been recent reports of:

• UNRWA filling high-level positions with senior Hamas members

• The IDF discovering a major Hamas data center directly underneath UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza

• Hamas rockets being stored in UNRWA schools

• Some of the members of the Nukhba Force (the elite Hamas unit that led the October 7th massacre) being UNRWA employees

• Hamas terror tunnels fortified with — you guessed it — UNRWA cement bags

“Hamas has their hands on UNRWA administration workers. It manages UNRWA,” as one Gaza resident recently told the Israel Defense Forces.¹

There is nothing normal about UNRWA’s existence and activities. The agency was established in 1949 after the Israeli War of Independence, in order to provide shelter, welfare, and health services for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. They refused to be absorbed into other neighboring countries, because they understood that this would mean they had lost the war against Israel, and they haven’t been willing to accept the defeat to this day.

In 1950, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees was established to handle all of the world’s refugees. However, following pressure from Arab countries, the Palestinian refugees remained the sole responsibility of UNRWA — which to this day remains the world’s only refugee agency dedicated to a specific population.

Mirjana Spoljaric Egger, the current president of the International Red Cross, previously served as a senior adviser for UNRWA, which might explain why her organization has effectively refused to visit the Israeli hostages and ensure their well-being in more than a year of captivity.

If the mission of any refugee agency is to resettle people and end their refugee status, UNRWA has failed miserably. Over the years, there were changes and simplifications for the terms to receive refugee status and the eligibility of descendants to receive “services” from the agency.

At first, only those Palestinians who had lost their home and livelihood as a result of the 1948 war were considered refugees (with the definition later broadened to include their children). But beginning in 1982, the right to be defined as a “Palestinian refugee” was expanded to include every generation of descendants — a definition afforded to no other refugee group on this planet.

Now, even the great-grandchild of a refugee is considered a refugee — meaning the number of UNRWA beneficiaries has grown from 700,000 refugees, to almost six million by 2022. This includes 1.6 million people in Gaza, a fourth generation of refugees, which is largely perpetuated by the UNRWA eligibility requirements.

“UNRWA operations in Gaza are a mask for Hamas,” according to journalist David Collier. “They all know that if Hamas loses control, the whole world will learn many dirty secrets. It is why — along with several NGOs — they are all so desperate for a ceasefire.”²

With the increase in the number of refugees, UNRWA has become a vast organization and huge part of the Palestinian education, health, and welfare systems. About 60 percent of its budget is allocated to Palestinian schools, which play a pronounced role in the Palestinians’ desire for a “right of return” and the destruction of Israel as the Jews’ indigenous homeland.

“It’s the school system that wields the greatest influence on the awareness and ethos of a society. And what they teach the children in the Palestinian school system — where most of them study at UNRWA schools — is that Israel is an amorphous thing, not even a state, a Zionist entity, and that it must be destroyed,” according to Sharona Shir Zablodovsky, a public policy expert.³

One of UNRWA’s key fundraisers is UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has been operating an international network entitled the “Global Network on Question of Palestine” aimed at harming Israel, according to a UN Watch report published in June. Via the Global Network on Question of Palestine, the report stated that Albanese has been coordinating legal campaigns against Israel, justifying Hamas’ actions, and advocating for the funding of UNRWA.

To encourage UNRWA funding, people in Albanese’s network were told to utilize “overtly racist messaging” to raise the subjects of “illegal immigration” in Europe, specifically when speaking with Right-wing and anti-immigration governmental officials. According to the report, this would fuel the fear that failing to fund UNRWA would signify that “millions of Palestinians are forced to flee the Middle East.”

This is the same UNRWA that was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize last week. If that sounds like a joke, it is not. I wish I could take credit for writing something so unbelievably ridiculous that it makes us laugh in disbelief.

UN Women also joined the UN’s antisemitic bloodbath against Israel, waiting nearly two months before issuing a both-sides statement on the Palestinians’ use of sexual violence as a tool of war. Its executive director used the 100-day mark of this conflict to finally say anything about anything, opting for overly ambiguous language — “for all those affected” — before, two sentences later, calling out the “unparalleled destruction rained on the people of Gaza.”⁴

Then the UN Satellite Center published a report that said 55 percent of buildings in Gaza have either been destroyed or damaged. UNRWA doubled down on this report earlier this month, claiming that more than 50 percent of buildings had been completely destroyed, citing the aforementioned report, even though it made no such claim.

This prompted the IDF to look into these figures, and they were nowhere close to what the Israeli data found. Destruction caused to Gaza’s infrastructure by the ongoing war points to 16 percent, or some 36,000 of Gaza’s permanent structures, being damaged beyond repair in the war, according to a report released this week by the reputable Israeli news site Ynet.

Last week, the UN released another nefarious report — the second “inquiry” into the October 7th attacks. The first one, released in June, claimed that “concerning rape” it “has not been able to independently verify such allegations.” In other words: UN “experts” could not verify the atrocities that Palestinian terrorists themselves had no shame in deliberately videotaping and sharing online with the world.

The newest report, released last week, was conducted by the UN Human Rights Council, headed by Navi Pillay, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. Pillay is also a judge on the UN’s International Court of Justice, which erroneously tried to “convict” Israel of “apartheid.” Another member of this report is Miloon Kothari, who told an interviewer that the Jewish lobby controls social media.⁵

Their report, in short, urges Palestinians to investigate themselves for killing Jews, when their stated goal is killing Jews.

“The de facto authority in Gaza (Hamas) has the responsibility of investigating possible violations of international law and holding the perpetrators accountable,” according to the report’s authors — inventing a moral compass where none exists.

But these are merely points of a much greater problem: The UN has become a key player in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, serving entities and people who have no interest in seeing it resolved.

---

1. Israel Defense Forces on X

2. David Collier on X

3. “How UNRWA Became the Second-most Influential Organization in Gaza After Hamas.” Haaretz.

4. “Statement on Gaza by UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous.” UN Women.

5. “The UN is investigating the root causes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians.” Mondoweiss.