The modern human-rights order was built in the shadow of the Holocaust. The United Nations itself acknowledges that the murder of six million Jews left a profound mark on the foundational legal documents adopted in 1948. And yet the single Jewish state on earth has become the most persistently and exceptionally scrutinised subject across large parts of the UN system. That contradiction is not an accident of recent headlines. It is structural, and it is old.
The tension was present at the creation. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration. The Jewish leadership accepted the UN’s framework. Palestinian Arab leaders and the surrounding Arab states rejected it; fighting broke out; and when Israel declared independence, five Arab armies invaded. The institution that once helped midwife Jewish self-determination would, over the following decades, become a central forum for reopening its very legitimacy.
Let me be clear about what I am and am not arguing. Criticism of Israeli governments is legitimate — necessary, even — exactly as it is for any state. The question is not whether Israel may be criticised. It is whether Israel is treated as one country among many, or as a uniquely suspect project whose right to exist is endlessly relitigated. On the evidence, important parts of the UN have chosen the second path.
Architecture, not rhetoric
The clearest proof is not in any one speech. It is in the machinery. The UN Human Rights Council still convenes under Agenda Item 7, a permanent fixture devoted solely to Israel and the territories connected to it. Every other situation on earth — Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Iran — is handled under a general item. A Brookings analysis observed that Israel and Palestine form the only file granted a standing place on the Council’s agenda. Earlier this year, even the United Kingdom told the Council in formal remarks that Item 7 represents a disproportionate focus on Israel, and that no comparable country is subjected to anything like it.
The numbers behind the architecture tell the same story. That same Brookings study found that between 2006 and 2015, seven of the Council’s sixteen commissions of inquiry concerned Israel and Palestine, as did twelve of the thirty-five reports those inquiries produced. Item 7 resolutions have averaged roughly five a year. At the General Assembly, the United States’ own voting-practices report counted sixteen Israel-related plenary votes in 2024 alone. The monitoring group UN Watch — an advocacy body, and worth citing as such — tallied seventeen General Assembly resolutions against Israel that year, against a handful for the entire rest of the world combined. Even discounting for the conflict’s visibility and longevity, that is an extraordinary concentration of one institution’s energy on one state.
None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only what bureaucracies always produce: path dependence. Once you have a permanent agenda item, a dedicated rapporteur, recurring special sessions and an open-ended commission of inquiry, the system reproduces itself. New staff inherit old templates. Yesterday’s framing becomes today’s common sense. Tellingly, when the 2021 commission was established on an indefinite basis, it was not only Israel that objected. In 2025, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Norway and the UK — none of them reflexive defenders of Israeli policy — jointly noted that the commission had been set up open-endedly, against usual practice. They were not denying Palestinian suffering. They were questioning the uniquely permanent shape the scrutiny had taken.
From a policy to a verdict on a people
The deepest wound is older still. In 1975, the General Assembly passed Resolution 3379, declaring that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination. The Assembly revoked it in 1991. But revocation cannot un-ring a bell. The proposition that the Jewish national movement is inherently racist had been installed at the symbolic heart of the world’s foremost international body, and the precedent outlived its formal repeal.
This is where the line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism becomes unavoidable. The IHRA working definition is careful: criticism of Israel comparable to that levelled at any other country is not antisemitic. But it lists as antisemitic the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, the application of double standards demanded of no one else, and the holding of Jews collectively responsible for Israel’s conduct. Even the more permissive Jerusalem Declaration — drafted precisely to protect robust anti-Zionist argument — concedes that casting Israel as the “ultimate evil” can become a coded way of stigmatising Jews.
That distinction is the whole point. The strongest case against the UN is not that every criticism of Israel is bigotry; that claim is false, and it discredits those who make it. The case is narrower and sturdier: that some UN discourse crosses from criticising a state into recasting the Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate, uniquely malign, uniquely undeserving of the rights granted routinely to others. Once Zionism is treated as the one nationalism that is intrinsically racist, the argument is no longer about checkpoints or settlements. It is about whether Jews may exercise collective political agency at all.
There is an older shadow here, too. Classical antisemitism imagined Jews as either helpless dependents or hidden manipulators — never as an ordinary nation exercising open sovereignty and defending itself in daylight. It is reasonable, if stated with restraint, to suspect that some of the singular fury aimed at Israel reflects not only disagreement with policy, but unease with visible Jewish power itself.
Why it happens
The mechanics are not mysterious. Begin with arithmetic: the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation has fifty-seven members, the Non-Aligned Movement a hundred and twenty, the Arab League twenty-two. In a chamber where coalitions set agendas, blocs of that size do not need to persuade; they need only to vote. Add the usefulness of the Israel file to governments that would rather not have the world’s gaze turned inward — condemning Israel is far safer than answering for one’s own treatment of women, minorities, journalists or dissidents. Add a post-colonial intellectual fashion that flattens Israel into a European settler project, erasing the UN’s own recognition of Jewish self-determination, the ancient Jewish tie to the land, and the Middle Eastern and North African origins of much of Israel’s Jewish population. Add, finally, an open submission pipeline in which activist NGOs feed narratives into UN mechanisms that re-emit them as international legitimacy. None of these factors is sinister on its own. Together they manufacture a culture.
The seventh of October
Then came the test. After 7 October 2023, the world’s premier human-rights machinery was slow — conspicuously, woundingly slow — to name the sexual violence inflicted on Israeli women. By late November, critics were already accusing UN bodies of staying silent; a former vice-president of the UN’s own women’s-rights committee said the issue had been minimised. UN Women was not silent forever — its clearest acknowledgement came on 1 December — but that statement landed nearly eight weeks after the massacre, after sustained public outcry. By February 2024, Israeli rape-crisis centres were still pleading with international bodies, insisting that silence was no longer an option.
The UN’s own machinery eventually vindicated them. In March 2024, the Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict found reasonable grounds to believe that sexual violence had occurred on 7 October, and clear and convincing information that it had been committed against hostages, possibly still ongoing in captivity. The crimes were not invented by propagandists; the UN itself confirmed them.
The contradiction became painfully visible again this week. On 23 June 2026, Ilana Gritzewsky, who was abducted from Kibbutz Nir Oz and held in Gaza for 55 days, addressed the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. She confronted Reem Alsalem, the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who had claimed in November 2025 that no independent investigation had found that rape occurred on 7 October, despite the findings of the UN’s own Special Representative. Describing herself as “living proof” of Hamas’s sexual violence, Gritzewsky asked Alsalem: “Please look at me. Do you believe us now? Will you apologize?”
Alsalem subsequently alleged that Israel had denied her requests for access to survivors. Even if that claim were accepted, it might explain the limitations of her own inquiry, but it could not justify her categorical dismissal of evidence already assessed by another UN mechanism. Nor could it excuse the failure to extend basic solidarity to Israeli victims. The encounter distilled the deeper institutional failure into one devastating image: a survivor of Hamas captivity having to ask the United Nations official responsible for defending women simply to look at her.
That is why the delay is so damaging. Jewish women did not receive the immediate, categorical solidarity that UN language promises survivors elsewhere. Whatever the cause, whether ideology, excessive caution or fear of political backlash, the effect was that Jewish victims were made to wait for recognition that others are granted at once.
A real conclusion, not a slogan
Honesty cuts both ways, which is why the serious version of this argument must resist its own excesses. UNRWA is a case in point. Its definition of a Palestine refugee passes status down the generations, turning a humanitarian category into a permanent political one — yet the 2024 Colonna review found the agency had robust neutrality mechanisms even as it urged reform, and Israel’s most sweeping claims about its staff went unproven. The narrower findings were damning enough on their own: nine UNRWA employees were dismissed after a UN inquiry concluded they may have taken part in the 7 October attacks, and a tunnel network ran beneath the agency’s Gaza headquarters. Serious criticism must stay tethered to evidence. It does not need exaggeration; the documented record is sufficient.
So I will not say the UN is antisemitic in some total, cartoon sense. Most of its officials are not driven by hatred of Jews. The truer and harder claim is that significant parts of the UN system have developed a structurally anti-Israel culture — one in which exceptional scrutiny of the Jewish state is normalised, delegitimisation is treated as respectable, and Jewish suffering struggles to command immediate recognition when it disrupts the preferred script.
The UN does not need to be pro-Israel. It needs to be universal, in the real sense of the word. One standard for every state. An honest acknowledgement that Jewish self-determination is not a moral anomaly. And an unhesitating readiness to condemn terrorism and sexual violence when the victims are Jews as swiftly as when they are anyone else. Until then, the organisation’s problem is not merely political imbalance. It is a failure of moral vision — and it dishonours the very catastrophe from which the UN was born.
Yaakov Chaliotis is the founder of Group of Verified Intelligence (GVI), a London-based research, due diligence, and verification firm combining AI, data science, quantitative analytics, and algorithmic tools with expert human judgment. GVI works across geopolitics, corporate strategy, and social media and marketing intelligence, producing evidence-led analysis for complex decision-making. More about his work can be found at gvi.uk.com.
Originally from Cyprus, with roots in Kefalonia, Greece, Yaakov has lived and worked in London for fifteen years. His career spans senior roles in digital communications, strategy, and analytics, supporting CEOs, leadership teams, and UK government ministers with data-driven insight and strategic decision-making.
He previously served as Digital Strategy Manager at the UK National Lottery during the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, worked at the UK Department for Education during the pandemic, and later became Global Brand Analytics Lead at Shell.
Beyond his professional work, Yaakov is an active member of the World Jewish Congress Jewish Diplomatic Corps, focused especially on combating antisemitism and anti-Zionism.