The story goes that the Israeli ambassador was about to give a speech at the United Nations. “I’d like to tell a biblical story to start,” he began. “King David once saw a beautiful stream by Jerusalem and went to bathe in it. When he was done bathing, he saw a Palestinian stealing his clothes and running away.” The Palestinian ambassador immediately jumped up and interrupted him, “That’s another Jewish lie! None of my people were even in that area at the time!” The Israeli continued, “Now that the Palestinian ambassador has verified that they have no historic claim to the land, I would like to continue my speech.” A silly joke, but based on a kernel of truth about the history of Israel.
Despite the ancient and legitimate claim the Jewish people have to the Holy Land, and even though Israel as a modern nation has existed for 75 years (longer than many other modern nations around the world), the United Nations continues to support those who would see Israel (and America) destroyed.
Most recently, on Tuesday, Sept. 19, the UN General Assembly gave the stage to a speech by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi so that he could condemn Israel and the United States and tell the U.S. how they must show goodwill towards Iran by re-entering the failed and hypocritical nuclear deal that Obama established with Iran. His speaking about goodwill is so ludicrous that the response of Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan to Raisi’s speech was appropriate: he walked out when the Iranian started to speak, holding a sign above his head with a picture of Mahsa Amini and the statement, “Iranian women deserve freedom.”
The irony of Raisi speaking about goodwill is huge, given that this is a man and country that do not even recognize Israel and publicly demonstrate for the destruction of both Israel and the United States. Raisi is not only a bad player on the world’s political stage, but he is also a consistent anti-Semite who believes Israel and all Jews should be destroyed. He has been responsible for more atrocities than almost anyone, including the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners and the Iranian morality police’s recent murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini for “improperly” wearing her hijab. It is monumentally hypocritical that the United Nations, whose mission includes “the suppression of acts of aggression,” invited this aggressive hate-monger to speak.
But sadly, it is not surprising.
The United Nations has demonstrated anti-Semitism by attacking Israel for decades. Since the formation of Israel, the Arab bloc of nations in the UN has worked to isolate and weaken Israel through leverage in the General Assembly. Many of us remember Nov. 10, 1975, when the UN declared that “Zionism is racism and racial discrimination.” Although that disgusting resolution was repealed in 1991, it laid the groundwork for the UN, led by the Arab bloc (who because of oil had and has leverage with Western nations) to go down a path of promoting the destruction of Israel.
For decades, Israel was prevented from admission into any regional group, a necessity to participate in any UN body or committee. It still is not allowed in the Asian Regional Group, Israel’s natural geopolitical grouping. The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) includes in its permanent agenda. “#7: Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories: Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” The destruction of Israel is part of the HRC’s agenda, despite being entirely silent about the real human rights violations by nations such as Iran.
Israel is the only nation in the world with a standing agenda item against it. Not North Korea, with over 100,000 of its citizens in gulags, nor Syria, which has gassed its own people. Israel is alone in being the recipient of UN attacks in this way. The UN has appointed “rapporteurs,” who have officially justified Palestinian terrorism as an “inevitable consequence of Israel’s actions” (John Dugard in 2008), officially endorsed the anti-BDS movement, compared Israel to the Nazis in the Holocaust (Richard Falk 2008-2014), and in 2016, blacklisted companies operating in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
The HRC has gotten so blatantly evil and committed to destroying Israel that the United States pulled completely out of the HRC in 2018. From 2006 to 2023, there were two condemnatory resolutions passed against Sudan, three against Venezuela, 14 on Iran, 16 on North Korea, 42 on Syria, and none on the real human rights violators of China, Pakistan, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Turkey, or Saudi Arabia. In the same time period, the United Nations Human Rights Council resolved to condemn Israel 103 times. From 2015 to 2022, the United Nations General Assembly has adopted 140 resolutions against Israel. At the same time, it only adopted 68 resolutions against all other countries combined.
According to the UN, Israel commits almost twice as many atrocities as every other country in the world combined! (Truly amazing when we remember that Israel has less than one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population.) It is no wonder that the UN would embrace having the authoritarian Iran regime’s President Raisi speak to the Assembly.
Israel is not only the only true democracy in the Middle East, but it is also our only true and consistent ally in the region. In the Arab world, attacks on Israel and attacks on the U.S. are interchangeable. The entire world knows the mutually supportive relationship between the two nations.
Our allies like England, France, Japan, et al., look to how we treat Israel to see if we will be true to our alliances with them. When we weaken our support of Israel for some questionable and temporary benefit, those allies wonder when we will turn our backs on them as well and look to strengthen their relationships with other superpowers like China or Russia. By abandoning Israel, we weaken our alliances across the world.
When we look at the many decades-long anti-Israel agenda of the United Nations, it is not surprising that they welcomed and supported Raisi. The real question is why does the United States still support the UN given its hate for our ally, Israel, and it’s disdain for all things American?
According to the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2021, the United States gave 12.5 billion dollars to the UN, almost one-fifth of the UN budget. Why are we spending so much money on an organization that supports our enemies and seeks to destroy our allies? It is clearly not in our country’s self-interest to continue to donate to an organization that seeks our demise.
President Trump withdrew us from UNESCO and the HRC and announced his intention to withdraw us from the World Health Organization (also a specialized agency of the United Nations). Biden unilaterally rescinded these withdrawals. This issue of whether we support the UN and its hate for Israel and the U.S. needs to become a talking point in the upcoming elections.
We each need to pressure every candidate for every office on the question of whether they will support withdrawing from the United Nations until the UN truly becomes an organization devoted to world peace. For as long as it continues to hate Israel and America, we are financing our own destruction.
May we soon see the United Nations become a true organization committed to world peace, or when we see the United States withdraw completely from it. In either event, may the time come soon when the world is committed to peace and to the support of the two great democracies in the world: the United States and Israel.
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