by Rabbi Alan Silverstein, PhD | President of Mercaz Olami (Representing the global Masorti/Conservative movement)
As a child I remember bringing a UNICEF canister door-to-door to support the good work of the United Nations. Along with many other American Jews, my family believed in the value of international collaboration in furthering acts of hesed. Over the years, my view of the UN has shifted; I now regard the body as a major and obvious perpetrator of antisemitism.
The secretary-general of the UN is complicit.
My negative sentiments have intensified since the shocking Hamas massacres on October 7, with rapes, beheadings, burning people alive, torture, and kidnapping of Israelis. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres responded by “justifying” Hamas’s war crimes, insisting that they must be placed “in context.”
Guterres, other UN leaders, and UN agencies became “cheer leaders” in condemning the “manner” in which Israel engaged in its obligatory war of self-defense against Hamas. From the “top,” the UN insisted that the IDF “is intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population.” On November 8, Guterres proclaimed that given the number of Gazan civilians whom Hamas claimed to have been killed, there must be something “clearly wrong” with the IDF. Without corroboration, Guterres announced that “we have in a few days in Gaza thousands and thousands of children killed.”
Yet John Spencer, West Point’s chair of urban warfare, assessed that “Israel has done more to prevent civilian casualties in war than any military in history.” The Gaza Hamas Health Ministry figures are uncorroborated; they do not distinguish between the deaths of terrorists and those of noncombatants, the deaths of Gazans caused by Hamas and those caused by Israel, deaths in warfare and deaths due to natural causes. In early May, “Newsweek” reported that UN sources were forced to revise their numbers by at least 50 percent, acknowledging that they were “wildly off the mark.” The Hamas-inflated numbers had not been substantiated by concrete evidence.
UN sources falsely accuse Israel of causing a famine in Gaza.
The UN has slandered Israel with the claim of its fomenting a famine in Gaza as “a tactic of warfare.” UN agencies joined with Hamas officials in insisting that Israel intentionally did not permit sufficient amounts of food, drinkable water, and medicine to enter into the Strip. This canard has been countered by COGAT (Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories), the Israeli military’s mechanism for aid to Gaza. COGAT attributes food insecurity not to the IDF but to the UN itself, claiming that UN organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) are responsible for the failure to distribute the humanitarian materials once they pass the Israel-Gaza crossings.
COGAT has documented that “international organizations operating in Gaza are limited in their capacity to absorb and distribute aid. This in turn causes backlogs and delays in the entire logistical process and the ultimate receipt of aid by civilians. Hundreds of trucks wait to enter Gaza even after having undergone IDF security checks.”
A particular challenge to distribution is posed by UNRWA, which has been exposed as a Hamas surrogate, deflecting food and medicine to terror groups rather than to the civilians. Why? The IDF security establishment has reported that “out of 12,000 UNRWA workers in Gaza, 450 are active in the military arm of Hamas, meaning terrorists currently fighting against the Israel Defense Forces.”
“14 UNRWA workers even took active part in the October 7 massacres.”
“About 2,000 other UNRWA employees are registered Hamas operatives, but not actual members of the military wing.”
“An additional 7,000 UNRWA employees have a first-degree relative who is a Hamas terrorist.”
Columnist Melanie Phillips, who writes for for “The Times,” “The Jerusalem Post,” and “The Jewish Chronicle,” reports that “in March the Famine Review Committee of the US Agency for International Development, which depends upon UN sources, warned that “famine is now…imminent” in northern Gaza and was expected to take hold before the end of May. Yet by early June, Phillips qualified these dire predictions: “The Famine Review Committee had ignored or underestimated the value of both commercial sources of food and certain forms of humanitarian aid. The availability of food had increased so significantly in March and April that nearly 100 percent of daily kilocalorie requirements were available….”
It is clear that the UN’s International Criminal Court and the UN General Assembly had joined Hamas in blaming Israel for a “famine that never was.” They knew this accusation was untrue. They were weaponizing this claim in order to force a ceasefire and save Hamas from defeat.
The UN condemns Israel more often than all other countries combined.
For a typical year — 2022 — UN Watch documented that the General Assembly “approved 15 anti-Israel resolutions versus 13 resolutions criticizing [all 193] other countries [combined].”
UN Watch took particular note that nations well known for violations of international law were spared any disapproving resolutions whatsoever.
Joshua Hoffman in his blog “Future of Jewish” writes: “The UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), one of the world’s most disreputable bodies, has passed more resolutions condemning Israel than against Iran, Syria, North Korea, China, Cuba, and Venezuela combined. The council’s members comprise the world’s worst rights abusers, such as China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Cuba.
“Israel is the only country that the UNHRC has a standing agenda item against in each session. Item 7, titled ‘Human Rights Situation in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories,’ is also the only item that singles out a specific country, guaranteeing Israel gets condemned in every session.”
The UN’s International Court of Justice routinely singles out Israel for abuse while ignoring unjust practices in other countries around the globe. Similar bias is reflected by the work of the UN-affiliated International Criminal Court, which recently compared the terrorist practices of Hamas with the scrupulously legal warfare policies of the Israel Defense Forces.
This consistent pattern of injustice is condemned by human rights attorney Alan Dershowitz, who wrote about the hypocrisy of the UN’s alleged “justice” organizations by noting: “Israel is the only nation in the Mideast that operates under the rule of law. Its record on human rights compares favorably to that of any country in the world that has faced comparable dangers. Its Supreme Court is among the best in the world, and it has repeatedly overruled the army and the government and made them operate under the rules of law….”
Regrettably, the collective impact of these unfair practices have practical implications. They have led “UN experts” “to warn arms and ammunitions manufacturers against transferring weapons to Israel, which is currently at war and in need of resupply.” They insist that helping Israel might “make the arms makers complicit in alleged human rights and international law violations.”
The UN educational system furthers indoctrination of hatred of Jews.
The role played by Gaza’s UNRWA-led educational system is also alarming in that it indoctrinates youth in hatred of Jews and virulent anti-Israel feelings. UN Watch submitted the following statement to the UN Committee, created to investigate the evidence of UNRWA complicity with Hamas:
“On behalf of an educational monitoring group, Gianluca Pacchiani [the Arab affairs reporter for ‘The Times of Israel’] reported the following examples of indoctrination: A map of the Middle East in a geography book makes no mention of the State of Israel. A history book narrates a 1968 battle between the Israeli army, the Jordanians, and the Palestinian fedayeen…extolling the latter’s courage in wearing explosive belts [for suicide bombing]…, a chemistry book asks students to analyze the type of chemicals contained in bombs allegedly dropped by Israel…, an Islamic studies book describes the goals of jihad as ‘terrorizing the enemy’ and ‘achieving martyrdom.’”
UN Watch records that “UNRWA education has also proved successful in turning out graduates who go on to perpetrate murderous terrorist attacks.”
“In their 2020 book about UNRWA, ‘The War of Return: How Western Indulgence of the Palestinian Dream Has Obstructed the Path to Peace,’ Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz describe this indoctrination in UNRWA schools in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ‘80s and how UNRWA schools drilled in students the idea of a violent return into the territory of Israel.” All the maps of Palestine used in the schools showed the whole of Israel. In short, “UNRWA’s education system effectively has become an instrument for the mobilization of the population of the camps for the Palestinian armed struggle.”
As examples, Wilf and Schwartz point out that “the perpetrators of the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre, in which 11 Israeli athletes were murdered, almost all were raised and educated in UNRWA schools…. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, who masterminded the October 7th massacre, was also educated in an UNRWA school.”
“UNRWA continues to educate and graduate future Palestinian terrorists, including the perpetrator of the April 2023 drive-by shooting in which Lucy Dee and her two daughters were killed.”
UN Watch’s testimony also includes evidence of the use of UNRWA educational and administrative facilities to further terrorism. For example, “on February 11, 2024, the IDF revealed that it had discovered a sophisticated Hamas data and intelligence center right beneath the UNRWA Gaza Headquarters, connected to UNRWA electricity cables. The tunnel system and data center included a kitchenette and living quarters. There was also a perimeter wall with a gate and security cameras documenting who entered and exited the complex.”
The latest UN Watch report documents UNRWA educators’ terror teaching at work: “A telegram group of 3,000 UNRWA teachers in Gaza celebrated the October 7 Hamas massacre…. Kill them one by one…, leave none of them behind…, execute the first settler on live broadcast.” As noted by a “New York Post” editorial, “UN staff helped lay the groundwork for the terrorists’ atrocities, then endorsed Hamas propaganda when Israel struck back.”
The UN seeks to keep the conflict alive into perpetuity.
Finally, the UN seeks to keep the Israel-Palestinian conflict alive in perpetuity. It prevents the resettlement and relocation of the descendants of the original Palestinian refugees of 1948 into new lands. Wilf and Schwartz explain that “the vast majority of [nearly 6 million Palestinian] refugees” registered by UNRWA “have never fled their homes. [Instead] they are the descendants by now into the fifth generation of the original [1948] refugees.”
This is unlike the manner in which the UN treats all other refugees around the world. “In 1965, UNRWA changed the eligibility requirements…to include third-generation descendants, and then in 1982 extended it again to include all descendants…. The result is the creation of a permanent and perpetually growing population of [5.9 million] Palestinian refugees” — including people who are now citizens of other countries of residence, including the United States.
For these reasons and many others, my positive regard for the UN and its agencies formed in my childhood has been thoroughly dissolved. At a time of the rampant growth of antisemitism, rather than remedy this plague, the UN has become an engine for its increase.