Last week, US President Donald Trump blasted the UN for betraying its founding ideals. “I realized that the United Nations wasn’t there for us,” he said. He also chided the General Assembly for offering Hamas “a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7.”
Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas leader cowering in Qatari luxury, called this push “to recognize a Palestinian state... one of the fruits of October 7.” He added: “Our weapons are a symbol of Palestinian dignity” – justifying rape, torture, and terrorism. How any civilized people, let alone supposed “liberals,” could cheer Hamas remains incomprehensible.
No wonder 63% of Americans believe the UN is “doing a poor job trying to solve global problems.” For decades, Jew-hatred has been the lubricant easing the UN’s slide into irrelevance.
Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Google’s Gemini estimates that “well over 90%” of New York Times articles covering these General Assembly meetings mentioned the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After all, it’s “the single most dominant global political issue being discussed there.”
Really? This conflict, involving 0.18% of the world’s eight billion people, is “most dominant!” That’s why in my new Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred, I added the word “obsession” to my post-October 7 definition of antisemitism. The Wall Street Journal editorial condemning “a Palestinian state for Hamas” quoted the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who asked an Israeli: “Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? Because you are our enemy. The interest in us stems from the interest in the Jewish question.”
Obsessive anti-Zionism is a boomerang bias, hurting the haters more than the hated. It makes peaceniks celebrate terror, feminists cry “rape is resistance,” democrats boost dictators, and the UN delight Hamas and demonize Israel.
Instead of recognizing a terrorist state in the making, two years after the October 7 horrors, the General Assembly should have solemnly marked the 50th anniversary of its declaring Zionism “racism,” on November 10, 1975. Contemplating that outrage, which violated the UN’s founding mission, could offer still valuable lessons, rather than rewarding Palestinian violence and exterminationism, again.
The history of the UN
Back in 1945, the Western world celebrated the UN’s founding. By defending “human rights,” the forum would avoid a third world war and another mass slaughter – especially against the Jews. Those high hopes help explain Americans’ deep disappointment when the UN betrayed America and democracy, not just the Jews.
Thirty years later, in 1975, America was reeling from the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam loss. Exploiting America’s weakness – and many developing countries’ fury over Vietnam – the Soviet Union hijacked the UN. Suddenly, it became the Third World dictators’ debating society. Tyrants used the kind of democratic rights their citizens never enjoyed to assert their anti-American power.
The Soviet Union allied with the Palestinians and the Arab countries to push General Assembly Resolution 3379, calling Zionism “racism.” Targeting one form of nationalism, Jewish nationalism, in this forum of nationalisms fused anti-Americanism with antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The Cuban representative told African delegates that “Zionism, capitalism, and American imperialism are all faces of the same monster.”
The PLO’s Farouk Kaddoumi praised the delegates for hearing the “voice of the victim,” a phrase capturing the new glorification of “the oppressed” defying the “oppressors.” Saudi Arabia’s UN ambassador, Jamil Baroody, derided the Jews’ penchant for “money changing.”
Many Americans gave up on the UN, reflecting their post-World War II protectiveness toward Jews and Israel. America’s UN ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recognized this biased assault on Jewish nationalism meaning Zionism as targeting America by targeting its ally. Moynihan scoffed that this unfair attack on a “member nation” undermines “the integrity of that whole body of moral and legal precepts which we know as human rights.”
“The terrible lie that has been told here today will have terrible consequences,” Moynihan thundered presciently on November 10. “Not only will people begin to say… that the United Nations is a place where lies are told but… it will strip from racism the precise and abhorrent meaning that it still precariously holds today.”
Most Americans, from Left to Right, black and white, deemed the resolution antisemitic, “aimed more at Jews than at the concept of Zionism itself.” Support for Israel soared to a margin of eight to one.
In 1991, the UN repealed the resolution – but the big lie lingered.
Claims of anti-Israel bias
The Soviets and Palestinians built an institutional launchpad for 3379’s ideological assault. General Assembly Resolution 3376 established a Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
This bureaucratized the ongoing attempt to criminalize Israel. UN Watch statistics show, for example, that from 2015 through 2023, the General Assembly adopted 154 anti-Israel resolutions and only 71 – overall – against any other countries.
Today’s anti-Israel obsession is again exposing the UN’s structural and ideological failures. To claim “Israel committed genocide in Gaza,” the UN Independent International Commission on Inquiry diluted the meaning of “genocide” from “intentional,” systematic mass slaughter, to mean thousands caught in the crossfire of war. And having rewarded the PLO during its terror tear of the 1970s through the Olympics, airports, and synagogues, the UN now rewards Hamas’s barbarism.
In 1975 Moynihan lamented: “A great evil has been loosed upon the world.” A lifelong liberal, Moynihan believed that words matter, that international law requires consistency, and that totalitarian countries and terrorist groups holding democratic Israel to standards they violated mocked sacred terms like “human rights,” turning them into political battering rams.
Tragically, this General Assembly session vindicated Moynihan, further diminishing the UN’s already cratering credibility.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is the author of To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism. His e-book, The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred, can be downloaded on the JPPI website.