The UN’s fatal formula for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The antics of Colombia’s outgoing leftist president, Gustavo Petro, have dominated headlines about the United Nations over the last week.

Petro arrived in New York to chair a special debate on the Middle East at the Security Council, which Colombia is currently chairing, on the heels of a tweet that read simply, “Heil Hitler.” The Colombian leader later attempted to clarify that the intent behind the post had been ironic.

He had, he explained, been commenting on an editorial in a Colombian newspaper, ahead of the second round of the country’s presidential election, that endorsed the conservative candidate for his commitment to “order, authority and economic freedom.”

If those three things are the core ingredients of Nazism, then we must all be pretty deluded!

Petro then doubled down. While sitting in the chair’s seat in the Security Council, he used the war in Gaza as the primary illustration for his contention that the world is “going back to the era of the Nazis.”

When Ambassador Jennifer Locetta, the U.S. representative, opened her remarks by underlining that “the United States condemns any antisemitic rhetoric and any comments that reduce the atrocities of the Holocaust,” Petro rebuked her, asserting that his goal was not to diminish the Nazi Holocaust but to warn against “a Holocaust now, targeting the people of the Third World.”

The overarching point here is that the United Nations is regarded by politicians like Petro as a benign forum for this kind of bombastic, cavalier rhetoric. And there is no issue more suitable in that regard than the conflict between Israel—the Jewish state built in the wake of the Shoah—and the Palestinians.

For most of its existence, the motley tyrannies with membership of the U.N. General Assembly, along with a significant portion of the world body’s own bureaucracy, have demonized Israel through comparisons with the Nazis, as well as with the former apartheid regime in South Africa and repeated, patently false, accusations of “genocide.” The cluster of pro-Palestinian member states, together with a complex of U.N. committees and protocols dedicated to serving Palestinian propaganda, has ensured that.

That is perhaps why I was struck not so much by Petro’s words—entirely natural coming from a man who invoked the repugnant comparison between Israel and the Third Reich in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas-led pogrom—but those of the outgoing Secretary-General António Guterres.

Guterres is not as distasteful as Petro, with his patronizing smirk and his list of tired, far-left talking points. That said, he is a hypocrite. For much of his 10-year term, Guterres sounded like he both understood and was concerned by the rise in antisemitic discourse and agitation pegged to Israel’s alleged offenses. But after Oct. 7, he insisted that the bestial Hamas assault “did not happen in a vacuum,” a classic example of subtly blaming the victim. He also placed the Israel Defense Forces on a blacklist of militaries around the world that abuse children, alongside the rapists of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Speaking to Security Council on June 10, Guterres faithfully repeated the mantra that has guided the U.N.’s approach to the Middle East for far too long. “We must address the crisis that lies at the root of wider regional instability,” he said (my emphasis.) “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has gone unresolved for decades.”

This formula reflected the sentiments behind the declaration of the U.N.’s Alliance of Civilizations in 2006, which argued that the “Israeli-Palestinian issue has taken on a symbolic value that colors cross-cultural and political relations … well beyond its limited geographic scope,” as well as claiming that “the Palestinian issue … is a major factor in the widening rift between Muslim and Western societies.”

The core idea here does not reflect reality as it is, but an interpretation that the United Nations seeks to impose. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is seen as the anchor of the region’s broader woes, that is not because the cold data bears it out, but because much of the world has been swayed by a decades-long propaganda effort that was first initiated by the Soviet Union and its Arab allies, and is now eagerly echoed by a raft of states in the democratic world, such as Spain and Ireland. At its most basic, this argument essentially holds that resolving this conflict is the key to the peace of the world.

But Palestinians are no more human than the other religious and national minorities in the Middle East, like the Kurds and the Yazidis, who have faced actual genocide and who have never carried out an atrocity like Oct. 7 against the populations complicit in their oppression. Nor are they more deserving of self-determination than the Uyghurs or the Tibetans, two nationalities that continue to endure occupation and persecution at the hands of the Communist Party of China.

When it comes to a realist calculus, the idea of assigning the conflict such an elevated position veers on the nonsensical. There are no natural resources involved. The Jews of Israel—the villainous colonialists in this rubric—are not operating on behalf of any one mother country, as has been the case with colonialism in general. And the Palestinians—the passive victims by the same set of considerations—are a component of a Greater Arab nation numbering 500 million people. The corruption, the kleptocracies and the vast social, gender-based and economic inequalities that plague the Arab world would not be alleviated one jot by the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

What this tells us is that we are dealing with ideology before anything else. I doubt that Guterres would call himself an anti-Zionist (at least, not publicly). However, his words and the similar utterances of secretaries-general before him carry the fundamental tropes advanced by those who seek Israel’s elimination: Nothing is more important, more significant, more morally repugnant and more urgent than this one conflict out of a global total of 65—the highest number recorded since World War II, which gave rise to the United Nations in the first place.

Moreover, it doesn’t even regard Israelis and Palestinians as equally culpable. All the blame is placed upon Israel (and the Jews). That is why the world body retains a committee solely dedicated to the advancement of Palestinian rights; a special rapporteur for the human rights of Palestinians “under occupation”; and a series of mechanisms that ensure wildly disproportionate attention on Israel in the full range of the U.N.’s committees and agencies. Lurking behind this imbalance is the key formula—a mass “return” to Israel of the descendants of the original Palestinian refugees, which would effectively destroy Israel as a Jewish, democratic state.

Is it any wonder, then, that Petro and others like him regard the agency as the unrivaled forum for defaming Israel, spurred by its institutionalized bias against the Jewish state?

If we are to prevent similar Petro-like outbursts in the future, then we need to focus on changing how the United Nations operates. At the end of this year, it will have selected a new secretary-general, who will inherit both unprecedented financial disarray as well as a crisis of identity and focus across its agencies. Given the scale of the problem against a background of increasing conflict around the world, it should be patently obvious to Guterres’s successor that there are many more pressing issues than the Palestinian one.

Acting on that knowledge will take courage, but it will also help with rescuing the United Nations as a body that all the states in the international system, including Israel, can regard with confidence.