The U.N. vs. Israel

Meet the radicals running the U.N. and Israel’s surprisingly most popular politician.

View of the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations. (Arie Leib Abrams/Flash90)

It’s Thursday, May 28, and the United Nations is expected to announce the inclusion of Israeli entities on its blacklist of countries and terrorist organizations that commit sexual violence in conflict zones. Far be it from me to challenge the United Nations’ unassailable moral integrity, but who exactly are they citing for this designation?

Perhaps it was the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor—the organization behind the recent dog-rape libel published in The New York Times. What the Times conveniently omitted is Euro-Med’s true pedigree. Its chief, Ramy Abdu, and former chairman, Mazen Kahel, were both named on a 2013 Israeli intelligence list of primary Hamas operatives in Europe. Both men previously held senior roles at the Council for European Palestinian Relations, a group Israel outlawed that same year as a European proxy for Hamas. Consequently, Euro-Med itself was formally designated as a terrorist organization by Israel in 2015, according to researcher Eitan Fischberg.

How did a designated terror front operate in plain sight in Geneva for nearly a decade? It hid behind a typo. Israel originally designated the group under its former name, “Euromid Observer for Human Rights.” When the organization rebranded to “Euro-Med” in 2015, the altered spelling shielded it from standard international sanctions databases. Now that this loophole is closing and the sudden prospect of international sanctions looms, it is no coincidence that the group is quietly packing up its Geneva offices.

Still, back to the matter at hand. The U.N. placing Israel on a monitoring list based on Euro-Med’s claims would certainly explain the tone-deafness of the declaration. Just two days after New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof amplified the group in the Times, Abdu brazenly denied the sexual violence of October 7. Confronted with a Civil Commission report based on 10,000 media files and 430 victim testimonies detailing widespread gender-based violence, Abdu claimed it lacked a “single solid piece of information”—unlike, apparently, the entirely verified story of Israeli prison guards expending time and effort training dogs to commit rape.

But Euro-Med is hardly the U.N.’s only vehicle for projection and propaganda. Consider the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem. Much like Abdu, Alsalem categorically refused to acknowledge or investigate the extensive, verified evidence of mass rape and sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas against Israeli women. Hiding behind procedural excuses, she claimed she could not make “sweeping statements” without receiving evidence. In 2025, she took her denialism a step further, declaring that “no independent investigation found that rape took place on October 7”—willfully ignoring the U.N.’s own report confirming Hamas’s use of sexual violence that day. Yet, without a shred of that same required evidence, she eagerly labeled the war in Gaza a “femi-genocide,” proclaiming that "what is happening to Palestinian women and girls is the intentional destruction of their existence and bodies."

This newsletter is intended to provide a unique perspective on current events, reporting that the U.N. is rabidly anti-Israel is about as timely as announcing JFK’s trip to Dallas, and as groundbreaking as declaring that fire is hot. But it is still worth noting the hypocrisy of an organization whose preamble vows “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights” that has worked tirelessly to spread atheism in Israel that those rights belong to them as well.

Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar attends a meeting at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on the medical condition of hostages held in the Gaza Strip, 2025. (Liri Agami/Flash90)

Take the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Michael Fakhri, who, according to a recent U.N. Watch report, led the famine libel campaign against Israel while entirely ignoring Hamas’s documented starvation of emaciated Israeli hostages. Fakhri utilizes his official U.N. platform to push radical anti-Western narratives—including inserting antisemitic tropes into a General Assembly report, accusing Canada of “genocide,” and demanding sweeping economic sanctions against Israel and its allies.

United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health Tlaleng Mofokeng uses her U.N. mandate to openly endorse terrorism, publicly declaring that Hamas fighters “are not terrorists” and explicitly backing their violent “armed struggle.” Her tenure is defined by extreme anti-Western hostility and erratic, unprofessional behavior, including telling Western leaders to “f— off” and launching racist tirades against critics on social media.

Then there is, of course, Israel’s best friend, United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Her rap sheet of absurdities is longer than this newsletter allows, but a personal highlight was her attempt to connect the wildfires in Los Angeles to Israel’s war in Gaza, tweeting: “On our small planet, all injustices are connected.” One can only assume she shares a meteorologist with the Iranian official who accused Israel of causing a national drought by stealing their rain clouds.

The U.N. Watch report details a toxic pattern of anti-Western vitriol from these U.N. representatives, who routinely use extreme and inflammatory hyperbole to castigate democratic nations. United Nations Special Rapporteur Ben Saul has officially labeled the United States a “rogue state,” a “dystopia,” and a “gangster state,” going so far as to publicly demand the arrest of the U.S. President and Defense Secretary for “mass murder.” This hostility manifests as crude, personal mudslinging—such as Mofokeng denouncing the British Prime Minister as “filthy” and Special Rapporteur Mary Lawlor advocating for sending Donald Trump to the moon on a one-way ticket—while simultaneously challenging the very legitimacy of international law by branding it a tool of Western “imperialism, colonialism, and racism,” a bizarre comment to make when enforcing it is your entire job.

A complete vacuum of oversight allows these mandate-holders to violate rules with impunity. Despite an explicit U.N. Code of Conduct prohibiting the acceptance of flags, gifts, or financial benefits that could compromise independence, Rapporteurs quietly pocket hundreds of thousands of dollars from brutal autocracies like China and Russia without providing any public accounting or breakdown of expenditures. When egregious misconduct and blatant breaches of neutrality are exposed—such as Mofokeng launching racist tirades against critics on social media or Albanese hiding thousands in travel funding from partisan lobby groups—the U.N. refuses to enforce its own rules. Instead, complaints are buried by the U.N. Coordination Committee, a body composed of fellow Rapporteurs that effectively functions as an advocacy union to shield its own peers from consequence.

The most absurd aspect? It’s an anti-Western campaign sustaining itself on Western funding. Over 70 percent of total United Nations funding comes from members of the OECD; they are essentially loading the gun pointed at their own heads. Thankfully the Trump administration has aggressively cut funding and involvement in the U.N., withdrawing the U.S. from 31 UN entities. I can only hope Trump also finds a better use for that block of New York City real estate, like a nice park, or perhaps a sinkhole.

But back to the most recent libel. Placing Israel on the U.N. blacklist relies on the exact same desperation for false equivalence as the International Criminal Court seeking arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in the same breath, alongside the unending and absurd comparisons of the Gaza War to the Holocaust. We saw this same reflex in Kristof’s conveniently timed column, which suggested that the sexual violence inflicted on women on October 7 “happens to Palestinians every day”—published the day before a definitive Israeli report on Hamas’s October 7 atrocities was released.

This intellectual rot is much like the modern distortion of military proportionality, which has been degraded into a crude demand for equal body counts. To the U.N., neutrality no longer means equal treatment; it means splitting the difference between good and evil. Even then, it tilts toward the latter, driven by a resentful impulse to penalize the West for having it too good for too long. It is, at its core, a morality for children. Though, to be fair to children, their moral compass is far more developed.

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Donald Trump at the Congressional Picnic. (White House)

If Israel were the 51st state, it would have been the reddest state in the 2024 presidential election, making Montana look like a Kamala Harris stronghold. In Israel, President Joe Biden’s approval ratings crashed as the arms embargo intensified. And Donald Trump? He was always popular in Israel. A poll conducted on the eve of the election revealed that he would have beaten Harris by a margin of 54 percent.

Trump was elected even without the 15 imaginary electoral votes of the Great State of Israel, but since then his standing has significantly deteriorated in the U.S. And what about Israel? This isn’t just intellectual curiosity, but a question with potential implications for the upcoming elections. After all, rumor has it that the U.S. president is supposed to visit here in the final stretch before the polls, thereby aiding Netanyahu with a speech of support. Have the advanced negotiations with Iran, and what appears to be a dictate limiting operations against Hezbollah, damaged his popularity, and consequently, Netanyahu’s chances of being reelected?

Well, it seems that if Trump were running in the elections here, he would be the most popular politician by a wide margin. In Israel, 58 percent of citizens hold a favorable view of him, while 35 percent hold a negative one. While this is a slight drop, it registers mainly in areas where voters didn’t plan to vote for Netanyahu anyway: in the Arab sector he loses 73 percent to 15 percent, and on the left 54 percent to 38 percent. In contrast, in the areas where the elections will be decided—the right and center-right—the U.S. president still enjoys massive support of 76 percent versus 20 percent.

Does this mean Trump will be enough for Netanyahu to win? Not necessarily. Israeli history is full of American presidents who tried to influence the outcome and failed; most of the time, they were actively working against Netanyahu. Thirty years ago tomorrow, President Bill Clinton called the newly elected Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. “I tried to screw you, but I failed,” he told him, and they both burst out laughing. President Barack Obama tried to do the same thing, minus the phone call. Trump’s efforts to help Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán avoid defeat also failed in Hungary. The difference is that the Hungarians don’t adore the president like the Israelis do. Will Trump succeed where his Democratic predecessors failed? And how hard will he try? A minor issue to address when the dust settles.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

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English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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