More than two weeks after Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre, the world’s leading body for maintaining peace and security still has not been able to reach a consensus to unequivocally condemn the attacks and uphold Israel’s right to defend itself.
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued an immediate condemnation of Hamas. Unfortunately, both Guteress and the United Nations (U.N.) as a whole give Hamas legitimacy by failing to label Hamas a terrorist organization and attempting to contextualize the murder and torture of civilians. Guterres seemed to rationalize Hamas, saying, “It is important to recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum; the Palestinian people have been subjected to fifty-six years of suffocating occupation.”
Guterres’ move to blame Israel for an alleged “occupation” of the Gaza Strip omitted information regarding Israel’s withdrawal from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in 2005. Following these statements, Israel’s U.N. ambassador, Gilad Erdan, called on Guterres to resign.
“This is false. It was the opposite,” Erdan said, describing Guterres’ words as “pure blood libel.”
Last week, Navi Pillay, head of a U.N. Commission of Inquiry, presented a U.N. report condemning Israel, in which he put the word terrorism in quotation marks. She justified the ‘armed struggle’ against Israel and backed the secretary-general’s contextualization of Hamas’ atrocities.
The U.N. Security Council has also faced intense criticism for its efforts to sanction Israel. The Security Council failed to adopt two competing resolutions to condemn the terror attacks, proposed by the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. resolution would have upheld Israel’s right to self-defense, urged respect for international law, and called for the delivery of aid to the people of Gaza. The Russian resolution would have created a moral equivalence between Israel and Hamas by adding a condemnation of indiscriminate attacks against civilians in Gaza. It also would have called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
The U.N. has long faced accusations of antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred. In 1975, a majority of U.N. member states passed a resolution equating the founding philosophy of the state of Israel– Zionism–with racism. This was overturned in 1991, but has caused lasting damage.
The late Israeli Ambassador to the U.N., Abba Eban, famously said, “If Algeria introduced a U.N. 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.”
From 2015 to 2022, the U.N. General Assembly passed 140 resolutions against Israel, but only one against Afghanistan, one against North Korea, zero against Venezuela, and zero against Hamas. In fact, during that time period, the rest of the world combined only merited sixty condemnations.
Every session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, now chaired by Iran (where women are beaten to death by “modesty” police for failing to cover their hair), features a standing agenda item targeting Israel. No other country in the world is singled out in this fashion.
“We have all witnessed that the U.N. no longer holds even one ounce of legitimacy or relevance,” Erdan said. “This organization was founded in the wake of the Holocaust for the purpose of preventing atrocities, yet the spectacle we just saw proves beyond a doubt that the U.N. is committed, not to preventing, but ensuring further atrocities.”