The UN’s Obsession With Israel
The UN seems to be blaming Israel for its own failures, a classic antisemitic ploy.
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In 1952, an Israeli initiative at the United Nations for a ceasefire in Korea, put forward by 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.”
Last week, the sentiments felt eerily similar: The UN Security Council spent five whole days bickering and then deciding on the obvious: humanitarian pauses between Israel and Hamas, increased aid to Gaza, and the creation of conditions that will allow for a sustainable end to fighting.
In other words, hard-earned taxpayer money is being used to produce no-good nothingness and utter irrelevance, while continuing the UN’s specialization in disproportionately chastising the Jewish state.
Ironically, one American woman recently wrote me that her justification for opposing Israel’s response to Hamas’ massacre on October 7th is that she’s “paying for it” — you know, with her tax money. Meanwhile, the U.S. sends approximately $12 billion a year to the UN, even as it displays one-sided and pro-terrorist behaviors during the Israel-Hamas war.
The depth of the United Nations’ recent bias against Israel can be explained in one story: Canada offered an amendment to “unequivocally reject and condemn the terrorist attacks by Hamas that took place in Israel starting on October 7th, 2023 and the taking of hostages,” but it failed to get the two-thirds majority needed to be adopted.
An institution that can’t clearly condemn terrorist attacks and vicious brutality is a morally bankrupt, deeply corrupted institution. But it’s all kosher as long as the UN keeps up its constant and unabated effort to defame the Jewish state, erode its moral standing among the community of nations, and delegitimize its very existence — going back to the notorious “Zionism is racism” resolution in the 1970s.
Eight years ago, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry gave words to what Israelis had been feeling for decades, as he criticized the UN for its “obsession with Israel.” True to form, the organization has issued 14 condemnations of the Jewish state this year — double the rest of the world, combined.
But why the UN’s obsession with Israel?
Actually, it’s pretty simple: The UN is the one place where countries, particularly Arab and Muslim ones, can take swings at Israel without any real repercussions. Whereas Jewish state has won all its many wars since 1948, becoming a regional superpower and forcing Arab regimes to bow in humiliation, the UN has become the only arena where Israel can be embarrassed.
For more than 70 years, the fixation for singling out Israel has largely been accepted across the world, enabling the Palestinians to hijack the world body and turn it into its lavish welfare system, with unlimited impunity for their decades’ worth of miscalculations, deceit, and fraudulence.
Let’s not forget: The Arabs refused to collaborate with the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine in 1947, then attacked Israel just after it declared its independence in 1948.
Following Israel’s victory against five Arab states, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) was established in order to provide shelter, welfare, and health services for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, who refused to be absorbed into the new countries, because they understood that this would mean they had lost the war against Israel.
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.
At first, only those 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 refugee was expanded to include every generation of descendants. In other words, even the great-grandchild of a refugee is also considered a refugee.
As a result, in its 74-year existence, the number of UNRWA beneficiaries has grown from 700,000 refugees, to almost six million by 2022 — with an annual operating budget that exceeds $1 billion.
The UNRWA is just one example of the UN’s rampant rot and double standards. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UN put out a statement saying that “corruption is criminal, immoral, and the ultimate betrayal of public trust.” Sadly, the ubiquitous nature of the UN’s administration is itself the subject of accusations of corruption and various integrity violations.
The most prominent of these was the 1996 Oil-for-Food Program scandal ensuing when, under UN auspices, more than $65 billion worth of Iraqi oil was sold on the world market in violation of the provisions that it was to be sold in quantities necessary only to exchange for food, medicine, and other humanitarian needs.
According to a study by Ilyana Kuziemko and Eric Werker, there is a strong connection between the distribution of foreign aid payments and rotating membership of the UN Security Council.
“There are few organizations in the Western world that could survive with the allegations of mismanagement, scandal, and corruption that permeate the United Nations. For many delegates, officials, and employees, particularly those from developing nations, the UN is little more than an enormous watering hole,” industrial psychologist Paul Babiak and criminal psychologist Robert D. Hare wrote in their book, “Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work.”
Because of this, the UN has become an impotent body, lacking in legitimacy and financial security, thus doomed to go down the same path as its predecessor, the League of Nations. This is why it goes after Israel so much — because the Jews are an easy target to bring down with you. At least the UN is consistent with history, taking a page out of Nazi Germany, Catholic monarchs in the Spanish Inquisition, and the Russian Empire, to name a few case studies.
But the UN is not living by a thread in 2023. It is operating sometime in the past, as evidenced by the statement released as part of the Security Council’s resolution on Friday, which stressed that “the Gaza Strip constitutes an integral part of the territory occupied in 1967.” To be sure, Israel hasn’t “occupied” Gaza since the 1990s.
The Security Council is just a microcosm of a more dire and pressing problem across the UN: Its lack of membership criteria renders it open to participation and manipulation by the world’s worst human rights abusers.
Tyrannical regimes such as Burma, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and Zimbabwe all voted in favor of establishing the council, and the North Korean dictatorship also gave the council its ringing endorsement. When council elections were held in May, leading human rights abusers Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia were all elected.
As one political analyst aptly noted: “The UN today is best described as a sickly patient awaiting a blood transfusion.”1
On Friday, the Security Council’s resolution expressed “deep concern at the dire and rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and its grave impact on the civilian population, underlining the urgent need for full, rapid, safe, and unhindered humanitarian access into and throughout the entire Gaza Strip.”
But could the world body actually be the reason for the minimal amount of aid entering Gaza?
“Unfortunately, due to the utter failure of the UN in its work with other partners in the region, they have been unable to bring in more than 125 trucks of aid a day,” Israeli President Isaac Herzog said last Thursday. “Today it is possible to provide three times the amount of humanitarian aid to Gaza if the UN — instead of complaining all day — would do its job.”
“The U.N. is riddled with massive corruption.” Sri Lankan Guardian.
You MUST check out this Ig post from Quillette where a former UN employee lays out where Antonio Gutierres’ Israel hate comes from. It’s very interesting: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1Gdx4YyAKr/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
How about this for a narrative that speaks truth. The UN, dominated Muslim nations vs Israel and other antisemitic forces, bet heavily that Israel would be defeated by the Arab League and Palestinian terrorism. They promised the Palestinian war refugees a separate nation, which they did not want. They declared that Israel could not keep the land it won in defensive wars of survival - because that would help the Arab League eventually destroy Israel because it is essentially indefensible without those buffer territories, especially regarding missiles and terrorism.
So, because the Arab League essentially gave up on waging war against Israel, the U.N. was used to sacrifice Palestinians as a helpless pawn in order to keep the dream of destroying Israel alive. This is what became the UNWRA mission, to keep armed struggle paramount by trapping Palestinian refugees in hopeless dependency and poverty. Terrorism and martyrdom is the result of U.N. empowerment, supported by the Soviet bloc, of radical Islamist dreams of destroying Israel. This was never for the benefit of Palestinian women and children or their society. It was ALL about a chess game in which Palestinian refugees and others were sacrificed as pawns inbthe broader effort to destroy Israel and force the US and Europe out of the Middle East. At least that's how this all makes sense to me.