by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been using set piece speeches to the United Nations for years to deny it. In 2017, he said that he was at the “center of global anti-Semitism” and that “the absurdities of the United Nations regarding Israel knew no bounds”, but that the tension between himself and the body he mocked was not he has ever achieved.
Since the October 7 coup by Hamas, Israel has ignored four UN resolutions calling for a cease-fire in Gaza and has not directly described the UN agency for Palestinian refugees UNRWA as a terrorist state, but has launched a campaign to his bankruptcy. Arab delegates walked out when the Israeli ambassador began to speak.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, which is now almost a full member of the United Nations, told the general assembly in his speech on Thursday that Israel no longer deserved to be a member, since it had broken its resolutions.
The historic role of the UN in the birth of the state of Israel, together with a state for the Palestinians, with the partition solution of November 1947 makes Israel a central and difficult issue for the organization. After blessing the creation of Israel, by 1975 the UN general assembly passed a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism and racial discrimination.
History is catching up with both sides. When the UN’s top court, the international court of justice, found in July that Israel’s expanded occupation of the Palestinian territories was discriminatory, the role of the UN in the birth of the state of Israel was the cornerstone of its wider judgment.
The United Nations general assembly demanded that Israel leave the occupied territories within a year, and that the secretary general, António Guterres, would prepare a report on progress towards this goal within a month. During the last high-level week at the UN, speech after speech came from world leaders condemning Israel for violating international law, thereby undermining the authority of the UN. There was a lot of raw material, such as the president of Turkey comparing Netanyahu to Hitler.
Israel has long called the United Nations human rights council the terrorist rights council, but the conflict between the United Nations and Israel is now visceral. In his farewell speech in August, the outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, said: “In this warped place, I hope one day you will also see the bias and deviation of morality here, and I pray that you will see the truth.”
Erdan’s theatrical and passionate defense of his country has won him few friends, but he is passionately supported back home. Pew research published earlier this month found that the percentage of people in Israel who had a favorable view of the UN in Israel fell from 31% – which was already quite low – to 21% over the past year. The median among 35 countries was 58%.
Erdan’s successor, Danny Danon, has this week attacked the United Nations for its agency for Palestinian refugees. “Peace is hard to come by and the United Nations is always too lazy to deal with the sinister reality that one of its agencies, Unrwa in Gaza, has been overrun by Hamas terrorists,” he wrote in an article for Fox News. “For that reason, and for the sake of peace for the Israelis and the Gazans, Unrwa must cease.”
After a meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations in support of Unrwa, Jordan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ayman Safadi, said it was unacceptable that a UN agency was being described as a terrorist, and subject to a campaign of political assassination. “The attack was undermining the entire UN system,” he said.
The head of Unrwa, Philippe Lazzarini, said that behind the Israeli attack was an attempt to deprive the Palestinians of refugee status, and even their right to self-determination. But in the short term what will bother Netanyahu, a former Israeli envoy to the UN, is not hostility in mainstream UN opinion. He had entered the lion’s den many times before and finally emerged unscathed.
Related: Lebanon’s ceasefire hopes to falter as Netanyahu issues conflicting statements
What Netanyahu will be practicing is the obvious tension between himself and the US administration over his behavior before finally rejecting the US plan for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon. The deal was supposed to be the day diplomacy fought back, but by Thursday it looked like it was the day it fell over. The United States clearly feels that it has rejected an agreement, and not for the first time since October 7.
One senior European diplomat, long opposed to the US strategy, was incredulous that the US did not seek clearer assurances from Netanyahu before going public with the 21-day ceasefire plan.
Expressing US anger, US national security spokesman John Kirby pointedly said: “That statement we worked on last night was not drafted in a vacuum. It was made after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed it, but with Israel itself.”
French president Emmanuel Macron, who was at the heart of the talks in New York, said the proposal had been “prepared and negotiated with [Israeli] the prime minister and his staff, both by the Americans and by us”.
But this is not the first time the west has thought Netanyahu is making a strategic mistake, only to be unable or unwilling to force him to reconsider.
