135: Why don’t Israelis trust the UN?

(soft music) Okay, back to subscriber questions. Why are Israelis quite so distrustful of the UN? This is a question I get, a tremendous amount. Probably a couple of times for every episode we publish, every debate I ever have, you know, people come in, chime in on X, on substack, anywhere where we'll be and they'll cite the UN in one way or another for good or ill. I get this from the anti-Israel crowd, I get this from the pro-Israel crowd, I get this from the vast, curious middle. And the basic question is, it seems as though there is an international body that produces reports, that publishes findings, that sends fact-finding missions, where the US, Israel's ally, has a veto on anti-Israel resolutions, where in as much as there is such a thing as fairness in international affairs, that's where you find it. And the Israelis seem to just not trust this thing any farther than they can throw the thing. What is up with that? That's a very fair question. And it goes to what you see when you are small, that you maybe can't see if you're everybody else. So let's get into it. The Israeli argument basically boils down to the idea that the UN is structurally incapable of delivering justice or fairness, or even just a fair hearing to Israel, because it operates as a majority rules block system. In other words, blocks vote for each other, members within blocks are voted onto, committees through UN regional blocks, and it's majority rules. It's majority rules of the general assembly, it's majority rules on the committees, it's majority rules everywhere. And when you have 57 Muslim countries or countries that are members of the OIC in one way or another, and one single Jewish state, which sometimes has American cover, but what else does it actually have, other than being a useful ally to a Germany arming against Russia or something like that? Autocracy's cover for each other at the UN, blocks cover for each other at the UN, and countries that dislike Jews, actual anti-Semitic opinions in those countries are through the roof, never mind, dislike Israel on the geopolitical stage, are a huge number. And so if you don't have a regional block, you're excluded from systematic alliances, from the systems of alliances at the UN, you become the perpetual scapegoat. Now, this Israeli view is supported by all the data. There's no way of parsing the data that doesn't show that the Israelis are absolutely correct. The focus on Israel at the UN General Assembly is so disproportionate and so heavily documented and so obvious in the math. And it's not that Israel is okay and therefore how dare you pass resolutions against it. You can think Israel is the worst thing in the world. It's still literally the worst. Worst than the Russian invasion of Ukraine and China's treatment of the weeders and of all of its citizens in that tyranny and North Korea and the Sudan war and Syria and Yemen all together all at once. Israel could be worse than that. It still doesn't explain the scale of the tilt against Israel in the data. So for example, in recent years, the General Assembly has consistently passed more condemnation resolutions against Israel than the rest of the world combined. In 2025, these are UN watch numbers. You can easily verify them on the UN website. This is all public information. In 2025, the UN General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions on Israel and 11 resolutions on the entire rest of the world. That includes one resolution for North Korea, one resolution on Iran, this is 2025, one resolution on Myanmar, six against Russia, two against the United States of America, and 15 against Israel, more than all the rest of the world combined. That was true before October 7. It was true before the Gaza war. In 2022, you had 15 against Israel, 13 against the rest of the world. Overall, between 2015 and 2024, the General Assembly passed 173 resolutions against Israel, 80 against the entire rest of the world combined, 173 against Israel, 80 against the entire rest of the world combined. At the UN Human Rights Council, you have 112 resolutions against Israel since this version of the council was created in 2006, 112 against Israel is more than half for large periods of time of all country-specific condemnation resolutions. So for example, 112 against Israel, only 45 on Syria, that's the number two, and it's by far ahead of everyone else, 16 on Iran, 11 on Russia, 4 on Venezuela. By the way, it has always been so. This pattern holds across decades. 80% and 90% of country critical resolutions specific to a country. Target Israel in most sessions of the UN General Assembly. Syria's Civil War, which had hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced, Yemen, which had hundreds of thousands of dead, have much less attention, not attention of the US, where we sometimes hear yes, but we fund your army, attention of the United Nations. Arab states at the UN paid more attention to in Israel when there were no wars happening than to Syria and Arab nations hosting a million refugees or more than two million, three million like Jordan, like LeGlebanon from the Syrian war. Paid more attention at the UN to Israel than to the Syrian war. The UN Human Rights Council has a permanent agenda item, agenda item seven. On Israel, it's on Palestinians, it's a human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories. That is the name of it. It is permanent. It is a permanent part of the UN Human Rights Council agenda. And it is the only standing agenda item that is permanent and specific to one country. There is no agenda item that is permanent and specific to the 47-year regime in Iran, which has tyrannized and abused women and minorities and the entire population of Iran for decades or North Korea, little hermit kingdom that literally leaves its people several inches shorter than South Koreans because of the poverty forced on them by the regime or China or Russia or Syria. UN Secretary General Ban Kim-un has said this. He called that permanent agenda item a historic anomaly. It's an unacceptable signalling out that the permanent agenda item is actually officially opposed by the US and the UK and a handful of others as discriminatory, as contrary to the UN principles of universality and non-silectivity, non-democracies, the biggest rights abusers on earth have chaired all the UN human rights bodies. Libya chaired the commission on human rights, which was the precursor to the council. Iran, the committee on women's rights, Iran, where women have been arrested and killed by security forces for the wrong headgear or improper wearing of headgear. It defies belief. Israel faces structural barriers to equity, to equal participation to leadership. And it faces it because it is Jewish. If it was Arab, nobody would notice any inequality. There are Arab states with open public slavery, Arab states, where only 10% of the population are citizens or over decades, over generations. Nobody cares. It is the Jewishness of Israel that is the reason it sits in the dock in that way. That's the Israeli perspective. And all the data agrees what could another interpretation of the data possibly be. What if the international community has nothing to do with fairness? It's just a majority rule. Israel is the only country with no group that defends it. It faces ritual condemnation. The condemnation is a religious ritual of the international elites. And it has nothing to do with the context. It has nothing to do with a particular year or particular political issue or particular problem. It's not about Palestinian dispossession. Palestinians and Lebanon have had no rights to own property, working certain professions, or gains, citizenship across five generations. But that was a problem of Israel. So Lebanon comes in for no critique. The international community is a majority rules politics. It's not at all about consistent application of law or universality or any of those things, any of those laudable words that international elites throw at Israel. So what do the Israelis think about the UN? That it is structurally incapable of fairness for a small democracy without a voting block? That it amplifies the strong or the numerous at least, and it leaves the weak or the isolated completely exposed. Thosidides wrote, I think about the Athenians who built their empire, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. That to the Israelis at the UN is basically elite Western left ideology. Anti-nationalism for Jews specifically, only for Jews. So the next time you hear Israelis say that the UN doesn't matter, um shmum has been gorean famously put it, they're right. They're right. The UN knows their answers. And next time you hear Israelis say only bilateral ties matter with the US, the Abraham Accords, what weapons Israel can sell to Europe, that's the stuff that matters. But the international community is one big giant hypocritical dishonest immoral fake out. By the way, one final point, this is bad for Palestinians. A, it fuels their strategy of internationalizing the conflict because they get this automatic boost at the UN, at the ICC, at the ICJ. The ICJs of course serves partly a best of the general assembly. And that has allowed Palestinian elites to refuse to have any campaign, any advocacy, any real engagement of any kind, even very aggressive rights demanding protest engagement with the Israeli body politic, with Israeli civilians with Israeli politics writ large. Because that international path is so much more favorable to them and is all aligned against Israel with them. So why would they do the hard work of coming to the Israelis, where you would have to, for example, face the fact that your major political factions have been telling the Israelis they need to die for generations. It's the same question when it comes to the UN's massive aid systems. All the aid programs that the UN is very famous for and some of which it had been quite an extraordinary success story. For example, UN refugee agency is one of the great refugee rehabilitators of history of the 20th century. The Palestinians at the UN are the only people in the world who have a separate distinct refugee agency just for them. Whereas the UN refugee agency works on all other refugees in the 20th century combined, including the Jews, the millions of Jewish refugees. The Palestinians have had UNRA alone for them. And the reason that for Israelis, UNRA reflects exactly the kind of hypocrisy and inequality they find at the UN deliberative bodies, like the General Assembly, everything we've talked about now, is that UNRA, unlike the UN refugee agency, is not about in the Israeli perspective solving the refugee crisis, but actively perpetuating it to maintain political leverage against Israel. We've had on the podcast Dr. Inant Wilff, who has argued that UNRA acts as a bureaucratic entity that inflates the scale of the conflict because it inflates the number of refugees, meaning it tells Israelis, "A, any refugee return would automatically overwhelm you because it would be millions and millions and millions of people." It wouldn't be the literal refugees from '48. It would be millions who would basically replace you or turn you into a minority and there would be no more Jewish self-determination. That's a odd thing to tell Israelis if you actually want refugees to ever go back. And secondly, by being a unique set of rules that doesn't exist for any other refugee anywhere else. So for example, UNRA grants automatic refugee status to descendants. No UN agency does that, for any other refugee group, even if they can't go back. Even if they'll never go back. Most have never gone back. These refugees from Baghdad have never gone back. India, Pakistan, exchanged 20 million people. None of them can go back. Millions of Germans were kicked out of Eastern Europe after World War II. By force, none of them can go back. Most refugees from the 20th century can't go back. And their refugee status isn't conferred on their descendants. Even if their descendants are born in another country and have citizenship in that country, as with, for example, most Palestinians in Jordan. Many under UNRA rules, can you be a refugee without wanting to be a refugee categorized at the UN agency? There's a small, by the way, addendum to this, UNRA grants that heritable refugee status patrilineally. In other words, the descendants of male refugees are automatic refugees. A woman who has automatic UNRA status as a refugee can't confer her refugee status onward. I don't know where the feminists are on that. If it is a principle, why is it only patrilineal to contrast that, okay, with the UNHCR or UN refugee agency, which has existed since, I believe, the 1951 convention, which talks about solutions. Voluntary repatriation, if that's possible, again, usually not. Sometimes yes. Local integration. Third country resettlement. It has all these massive programs, and it actually tries to coordinate in international spaces to get countries to take in refugees who can't go home. And it's important to know that Palestinians were deliberately excluded from that 1951 resolution and placed under a separate mandate for UNRA. Automatic registration of descendants. Okay, the vast majority of the 5.9 million Palestinian refugees on the books were not asked. They were put there automatically by these automatic systems. No refugees are probably tens of thousands today at most, and all the rest are multi-generational. In other words, UNRA has collaborated with the Arab refusal to resettle these people, and made sure that the issue grows larger. And why? A nutwelf has argued something very simple that this is quoting from evidence she has submitted to the UK parliament. UNRA has ensured that the refugee issue only grows larger by automatically registering descendants of the original refugees from the war as refugees themselves in perpetuity. And the decision to automatically grant refugee status in perpetuity while also avoiding any resettlement efforts is without parallel in any other conflict. It's entirely UNRA's own decision. And why do they do it even when these people hold another citizenship like in Jordan, even when they're considered citizens of Palestinian authority and they still have refugee status, no other group in the world registers as refugees while holding citizenship somewhere or living in the very homeland under their own authority that they claim that their refugees are. The reason, the real goal of UNRA, the inflated numbers, the perpetual status, is about the right of return. It's about absorbing millions of Palestinian descendants into Israel to end it as a Jewish majority state with self-determination. It's about making sure there's no two states for two people's outcomes. And how do we know that this is the reasoning and the thinking and the deepest goal of UNRA as opposed to UNHCR and the UN refugee agency, which actually is about solving refugee problems? UNRA schools. We've heard a lot of scandals about UNRA schools where Hamas penetrated their ranks, siphon, their salaries, taught people bad things. That's not the great scandal. Most international aid systems operating in bad dictatorships ultimately get slightly co-opted because they're a source of money and revenue. That's not the great crime of UNRA. The great crime of UNRA is that its schools, which uniquely ended among refugee situations, is an entire school system. There isn't another. They have simply given Palestinian authorities, including when they ruled themselves completely as in Gaza, up until October 7th from the 2005 Israeli withdrawal, to not have to worry about schooling, while also using Palestinian curricula. And that curriculum fosters a Palestinian nationalism that isn't just about who Palestinians are and where they come from. It's explicitly focused on return and rejection of Jewish sovereignty and the ultimate dissolution of Israel. The UN will create completely different understandings of what a refugee is. And whole refugees in Lebanon, for example, whether or not allowed, as I said, to work to own property, to work in certain professions. The rules that Zara Strasheh imposed on Jews, Lebanon imposed on Palestinians for generation and nobody cared. Not nobody cared. That was considered a good thing. UNRA, as a representative of the UN, does not care that Palestinian refugees suffer. It cares about making sure to engineer the Palestinian refugee question to the destruction of Israel. Point three, the umbrella that folds in the rain. UN peacekeeping forces have only ever failed Israel. International guarantees, Israelis will tell you, the average Israeli will tell you, are worthless as soon as you need them. But Eben coined the metaphor of the umbrella for this dynamic about the UN presence in the Sinai. He said, the quote is, "In our country and in many others people ask, what good is the presence of the United Nations as an umbrella if it is removed as soon as it starts to rain?" And he's talking about the United Nations Emergency Force, the UNEF, which was in the Sinai after the 56 war to act as a buffer between the Israelis and the Egyptians. On May 16, 1967, about three weeks before the start of hostilities, the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasr decided he wanted to threaten Israel directly. He closed the straits of Tehran, placing the Israeli southern port of Elad under a naval blockade. He moved troops to the border. He remilitarized the Sinai. And he ordered the UN troops out. Now these are, of course, the famous Qasus belly for which Israel then went to that preemptive war. The Israelis are absolutely convinced because the Egyptian state radio was saying that they were going to go to war and destroy the Jews that this war was coming. And that's why they launched the preemptive strike that launched the 1967 war. Nasr orders the UN forces. out. And Secretary General, you thank immediately complies, eagerly complies. He doesn't even force a UN Security Council debate. It's an amazing thing. The United Arab Republic of NASA, that's the official name of Egypt at the time, tells the UN the emergency force on the territory of the United Arab Republic and did the Gaza Strip is no longer wanted. And the Secretary General of the UN just says it only operates with Egypt's consent is Egyptian territory. So it's gone. Unifil is the nail in the coffin of any Israeli ability to ever trust UN forces ever again. Unifil is the UN force in Lebanon, mandated by UN Security Council Resolution 1701 from 2006, that ended the 2006 war between Israel and Chisbala to ensure that South Lebanon is disarmed, is free of any Chisbala armed personnel, assets, weapons systems other than those of the Lebanese government and the Lebanese army. Unifil's literal mandate by the UN that was a condition for Israel ending the war against Chisbala was that the UN force would disarm Chisbala. And then UNIFIL moves in and it had been there before but it had been a much weaker force with a weaker mandate and becomes a human shield system for the very Chisbala that it is supposed to disarm. Chisbala built all kinds of tunnel systems, subterranean infrastructures, stockpile tens of thousands of rockets exactly in the zone where the UN was actively supposed to be demilitarizing them. And often next to or under those very UN installations that belong to Unifil on the theory that the Israelis would think twice about opening fire on a Chisbala asset within the blast radius of a UNIFIL facility. It wouldn't want to kill soldiers from far and third party countries. So not only was UNIFIL not fulfilling its one mission, Israel agreed to end a war on the basis of UNIFIL fulfilling this mission. It in fact did the very opposite. The next time the Israelis on Chisbala fought, UNIFIL was a very serious problem in the field as a human shield. By the way, UNIFIL never challenged Chisbala. Ever. It never even just came to a known Chisbala facility visible from the walls of a UNIFIL facility in South Lebanon and just videotaped themselves telling Chisbala that's wrong. Nothing, nothing. Ever. They literally only served as human shields. Israeli intelligence told them about violations, told them where to go. Their patrols are routinely obstructed by Chisbala fighters holding guns in the street in front of the UN patrol cars. Nothing. There also been, you know, huge numbers of incidents of corruption, of bribery. Chisbala has admitted publicly, bribing peacekeepers for access to certain areas that the peacekeepers were meant to control. And the contingents that cycled into UNIFIL of forces are from countries with anti-Israel positions. In other words, they were not a passive observer even. They were supposed to be an enforcer. If not an enforcer, at least be a passive observer. They weren't even that. They were an enabler of Chisbala entrenchment. They were a part of the enemy, but that Israel could not engage. There isn't a trajectory, a vector of Israeli experience or engagement or encounter with the UN. That's anything other than this. And it's at the service of tyrants and dictators and Middle Eastern ideologies that seek our destruction. There is one thing, one boon, one benefit the UN ever gave the Israelis that keeps getting thrown in the Israelis face. And that is this idea that the Israel draws its legitimacy from the UN. In 1947, the UN General Assembly voted to partition the land between a Jewish state and an Arab state. That vote was an international acceptance that there would be a Jewish state. Had there not been that vote, there would not have been an international acceptance and there would not have been a Jewish state. So goes the argument. There are two problems with this argument for Israelis. One, history. The very idea that that vote had anything to do with the UN, qua UN, as the UN itself is simply historically untrue with its ignorance. Many things were happening in that UN vote that are not about the UN in any way. And secondly, if the Jews hadn't built a powerful polity that could stand on its own two feet in a war under a British and American arms embargo at that moment of 4748, they would have died anyway. They would have collapsed anyway. And once they had that polity and that ability to stand on their own two feet, the UN vote is what determined that they would have a state. In the 40s, a whole great many states came into existence. In fact, two thirds of the current member states of the UN came into existence after the 1947 partition vote establishing a Jewish and Arab state in the land in the wake of the breakdown and collapse of the British mandate. So a lot of states were coming into being not by UN vote. In fact, what the UN vote might have done is establish an Arab state and the Arabs not rejected the vote and not just the vote. Even the minority position, which was not separation, it was a kind of Cantonized federalism with no Jewish immigration. It was permanent Jewish minority, but the Jews have autonomy. The Arabs rejected that. The Arabs rejected no Jewish state, but still some Jews. That they rejected. Not just partition into two equal states. The actual vote on resolution 181, the 1947 partition vote, was an anomaly. It was not a triumph of UN justice or legitimacy granting. It was geopolitics. It was a rare case of great power alignment. The Soviets supported the establishment of a Jewish state at that moment, and by the way would then turn on it very quickly and for a very long time and viscerally and brutally and supply armies to destroy it. But at that moment, they supported partition. Why would the Soviets support partition and a Jewish state? Because the Jews were expelling the British Empire from the Middle East. The British and the Soviets were on opposite sides of the Cold War, kicking out British and French imperialism from the Middle East was a core Soviet geopolitical interest, and the Jews were going to help with that. So the Soviets could support Arab nationalism against the British and Jewish nationalism against the British. The enemy was the British. It helped that Israel was socialist at its founding, and a bunch of socialists ran the place. The Soviets believed that Israel would become a communist beachhead in the Middle East. Now, who else believed this? The Egyptians at the time. In the Egyptian Declaration of War against Israel in the 48 war, the Declaration of War literally says we're going to war against nihilism and atheism. By which they mean Marxism. Israel being a potential communist beachhead as the Soviets believed it was because it helped them against British imperialism was what the Egyptians thought was happening. That's the Soviet calculus. What's the American calculus? Why would the Americans vote yes alongside the Soviets? We're deep into the Cold War by now. Truman, President Truman, faces immense domestic pressure to resolve the displaced persons crisis in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees cannot go home to Eastern Europe, can't go anywhere, and they're living in DP camps, which are old concentration camps, like Dachau. No one on earth will take them in. The US Congress won't lift the quotas that prevent them from coming into America, no matter how much Truman begs. The US Army has to feed them day in, day out by 1947 for two and a half years. There are non-stop problem, a thorn in the side of America, in the defense budget, as America is trying to demilitarize and send everyone back home to the GI Bill and rebuild the American economy after the Great Depression and the World War. And the best solution that the Washington can come up with is to give the Jews their own place, solve the problem once and for all. And so ending the DP crisis in Europe while not actually absorbing the Jewish refugees yourself is how Western nations led by America come to support the idea of a Jewish state. And again, the Arab rejection. The UN didn't want to vote for a Jewish state. The UN wanted to vote for some other system, some other solution, an Arab majority, Arab lead, federalized state that just allowed the Jews to run themselves. The Arab leadership rejected all those compromises. Not only that, at the 47 partition debates, how much did the Arabs force the UN's hand leave the UN with nothing else to vote on? The Arab representatives from Syria, Egypt, a few other countries actually said at the UN debates that a vote to establish a Jewish state would mean that the countries, the Arab nations would turn on their own Jewish minorities. It was doing a terrible, terrible thing to the Jews of the Arab world, they said, which kind of made the case for a Jewish state. If Europe just empties out of Jews through genocide, through mass extermination, or through the trapping of Jews behind the Iron Curtain in their millions, we're stalling and we would proceed to forcibly remove their culture, forcibly outlaw the study of Hebrew, the learning of Jewish religious texts. And now the Arab world was saying, if you give a Jews a place of their own, we're going to get rid of our millennia old Jewish communities. We will turn on them. And now the UN's thinking ways. you, you'll probably, if you can turn on them, you eventually will turn on them. We have a Jewish refugee problem ahead of us is what you just said. That's exactly the Zionist case. And they rejected the minority opinion for federalism. They rejected Cantonism with Jerusalem as an international body, the Arabs, I mean. So the UN ended up voting for the only thing left. Which was a Jewish state that could absorb Jewish refugees. These were not the only plans. It's worth saying. There were others. Every single one received the exact same Arab opposition. And the Jewish side accepted the plans despite imperfections, despite them not, you know, the Jewish side had slightly more than half the land, but the vast majority of the land of the Jewish side was uninhabitable and, you know, with the negate, was desert. You couldn't do agriculture there. And then the Jews said, no, but we will figure out a way to do great agriculture in the negate. Bangerian literally is buried down in the negate in a grave site that overlooks a desolate dry river valley because he said one day these will be forests. Now today Israel doesn't want to plant forests in that desert because the desert itself is a beautiful ecosystem. We know more about ecology today than they did in the 1940s. But the dream, the placing in their own minds, the idea that give us anything and we will make it flourish was the Jewish answer to anything on the table. And the Arab answer was absolutely nothing on the table that leaves Jews here is going to be acceptable and we're also going to turn on our Jews. All of those factors, Arab rejectionism, Soviet interests against British and French presence in the Middle East, American holding of the DPs not wanting to take them in. All of those reasons created a momentary in the height of the Cold War, a momentary alignment of great power politics for that one vote. If you're the Jews, okay, and you immediately had to fight a defensive war of Arab invasion after they rejected this vote. Then it wasn't really about the international community legitimizing it. Israel's legitimacy to the Jews has to do with Jewish presence in the land, continuous historical, with legal land acquisition, with self-determination, with victory in an existential war to exterminate them. Victory in a war to destroy you grants you certain, is it rights? Is rights the right word? You're there, you're alive, you get to be alive. And immediately after being established widespread recognition, that UN vote was a momentary act of power politics, not the ontological source of Israeli legitimacy. The UN didn't grant Israel legitimacy. The Israelis secured that legitimacy to their own actions, their own survival, their own historical connection, and their own need, desperate need, literally existential need. And since that moment, the UN's institutions have been hostile, adopted every ideological stance, position, and argument, Zionism is racism, resolution. Zionism is the only nationalism that's racist on this earth. There's no other nationalism that has that could that has that certainly none that has a UN resolution, deeming it so. No institution at the UN has ever pretended to be fair. It's in the data. Well, if the UN is structurally, inherently, and it has never been otherwise, and it can never be otherwise, anything other than hostile in a profoundly unequal way, in a ridiculous, in a comically unequal way, to the Israeli nation, then why should the Israelis think it is anything else? Thanks for listening.