My Word: Guterres and the gutless United Nations

"Why do Israelis so often criticize the UN?” is a question I hear a lot.

The answer can be found by reversing the words: The UN bashes Israel literally as a matter of routine. It is mandated to discuss Israel’s perceived faults and wrongdoings every three months in the Security Council, three times a year in the Human Rights Council, and finishes every year with a round of condemnations in the General Assembly.

In short, Israel is never far from the UN spotlight as the “bad guys,” while an entire department is dedicated to promoting the Palestinian narrative.

Guterres spouted his usual mantras: “The work of this committee reminds the world that we must never lose sight of the core objective: resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The occupation must end, as affirmed by the International Court of Justice. The inalienable rights of the Palestinian people must be realized. International law must be respected, and accountability ensured. The unity, contiguity, and integrity of the Occupied Palestinian Territory must be preserved.”

The fact that the Palestinians in Gaza and Judea and Samaria (“Occupied Palestinian Territory,” in UN terminology) don’t have peace even among themselves – and are not demanding to live in security alongside Israel, but to destroy it – did not faze him.

And if you think the Old City of Jerusalem, which is about the size of New York’s Central Park, could be peacefully split into the shared capital of two states that have different religions, speak different languages, and work according to different calendars, you might want to check what you’re smoking in your pipe dream.

Had the Palestinians and the Arab world wanted to live in peace with the Jewish state, they wouldn’t have attacked Israel in 1948 and 1967. Losing the wars they launched in the hope of eliminating the Jewish state is what led to these lines and “the Occupation” in the first place.

I have written all this before and will no doubt write it again: I am one of those Israelis who sees the UN and its various departments such as UNRWA, dedicated solely to Palestinian needs, as part of the problem, not the solution.

But it wasn’t Guterres’s words on the Palestinian issue that caused me last week to wonder out loud whether he had completely lost the plot or become part of it. On February 11, I heard a news item about the UN leader congratulating Iran on the occasion of the 47th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution. I wasn’t sure if I was hallucinating or if Guterres was delusional.

I looked through the UN secretary-general’s social media posts and couldn’t find the celebratory greetings, but before breathing a sigh of relief I turned to official Iranian media. They had obviously received the message loud and clear.

“According to official sources, Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations, in a letter addressed to Masoud Pezeshkian, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, extended his warmest congratulations on the occasion of Iran’s National Day....”

The head of the body ostensibly dedicated to world peace, democracy and human rights, was congratulating a jihadist regime that encourages global war and terrorism, calls for Israel’s destruction, oppresses ethnic and religious minorities, is fundamentally misogynous, and sentences members of the LGBTQ community to death.

The blood of thousands of brave protesters who were slaughtered after taking to the streets calling for a regime change had barely dried when Guterres sent his message to their murderers. Guterres’s kick in the gut came amid continued reports that wounded demonstrators are being killed by regime forces in their hospital beds.

Incidentally, Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, noted that, “this week, the Islamic Regime in Iran will take a seat on the United Nations Human Rights Council’s advisory committee.” Absurdity and hypocrisy have become part of the UN’s DNA.

If the deaths of the Iranian demonstrators didn’t cause him to think again, there was little hope that the UN secretary-general would consider Iran’s crimes against Israel (and the rest of the world) before applauding the ayatollahs’ anniversary.

The Iranian regime has been the major backer of terrorist proxies Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, among others. In last June’s 12-day Rising Lion War alone, Tehran launched some 550 ballistic missiles and 1,000 drones on Israel – every one a war crime. Among the places hit were Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, where ground-breaking research labs were destroyed – an incalculable loss for human healthcare.

This week in Gaza, where Guterres pretends love and peace will prevail, Israel’s long-standing claims that Hamas has been operating out of hospitals received an unexpected validation. The NGO Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) announced that it had suspended all non-critical operations at Nasser Hospital after staff reported armed men were moving weapons there and interrogating patients (a tactic they might have learned from their Iranian sponsors).

French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot showed more guts than Guterres last week. France is calling for the dismissal of Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, after her comments at the 17th Al Jazeera Forum in Doha earlier this month. She clearly felt enough at ease there to declare in a rant against Israel: “We who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms, and weapons – we now see that we as humanity have a common enemy.”

Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic backed France in calling for Albanese to be fired for the latest in a string of anti-Israel and antisemitic comments.

Even Guterres’s spokesperson Stephane Dujarric, when asked in a press briefing, distanced the UN secretary-general from Albanese’s statements, saying that his office “doesn’t agree with much of what she says, and wouldn’t use the language that she uses to describe the situation in the region.”

Nonetheless, Guterres did not act against Albanese. Similarly, Dujarric attributed his boss’s greetings to the Iranian regime as standard protocol on national days.

Guterres is head of an increasingly detached world body. All that remains is for it to go through the motions – particularly those aimed against Israel.