The United Nations is no longer an international body dedicated to justice or peace. It has become a hollow, politicized and hypocritical institution, where antisemitism is cloaked in diplomatic language. Instead of serving as a global moral compass, the UN has deteriorated into an arena in which an automatic majority dictates industrial-scale falsehoods. An organization born out of the trauma of world war and a historic promise of “never again” has, over the years, turned into a mechanism unable to distinguish between aggressor and defender.
Israel is the clearest example of this collapse. There is no other country in the world scrutinized through such a distorted magnifying glass. While murderous regimes oppress millions, imprison political opponents and carry out ethnic cleansing, the UN Human Rights Council insists on turning Israel into a permanent obsession. This is not legitimate criticism; it is a political mechanism designed to mark a convenient target. The resolutions repeat themselves, with changing wording but a constant message: Israel is guilty by default.
In every vote, the same pattern emerges: a coalition of non-democratic states, some of them systematic violators of human rights, lectures Israel on morality. An organization that allows dictatorships to judge democracies has lost the right to speak in the name of humanity. This is not a discourse on human rights; it is a cynical use of moral language for political ends.
The deep problems of the United Nations
Part of the absurdity lies in the makeup of the states most influential in this arena. Countries such as Iran, whose regime slaughters its own people and finances and arms terrorist organizations, sit in international forums preaching morality to others. South Africa, which leads an aggressive political line against Israel while ignoring other violent regimes, and which itself is accused of violence and discrimination against the LGBTQ community, has become a central voice in the delegitimization campaign. Some European countries, led by Spain and Belgium, which present themselves as defenders of human rights, adopt a selective approach that grants political legitimacy to extremist narratives instead of taking a clear stand against terrorism in all its forms.
The UN’s organizational structure enables a political majority to impose a narrative even when it is detached from reality. When anti-Israel bias becomes a “diplomatic” method, the path to institutionalized antisemitism is very short. That antisemitism is already here-wrapped in polite diplomatic language and providing legitimacy to terrorism.
At the center stands UN Secretary-General António Guterres, a figure bordering on the pathetic, who more than anyone symbolizes the organization’s decline. Under his leadership, the UN has not corrected its distortions; it has deepened them. Instead of serving as a voice of international responsibility, the organization has embraced a one-sided political discourse that distances it even further from the status of a credible mediator. A secretary-general unable to set clear moral boundaries leads an institution that has lost its own boundaries. Silence in the face of injustice is not neutrality; it is a choice.
The collapse is not only moral; it is also financial. The UN is approaching insolvency, and not by chance. Donor states are weary of funding a massive apparatus that produces statements instead of results. Billions are poured into bloated bureaucracy while public trust collapses. When an organization ceases to be morally relevant, it also loses its economic right to exist. A budget without trust is a body without a soul, destined to collapse.
This is a moment of truth. The UN continues to exist by inertia alone. It survives by diplomatic habit, not by trust. The wider the gap between its pretensions and reality, the stronger the sense that it speaks in the name of humanity without representing it. The world is changing rapidly, and the UN remains stuck in power structures of the previous century.
The problem is not criticism of Israel per se. States should be subject to scrutiny; the problem is selectivity. When terrorism is met with understanding and self-defense is presented as a crime, the moral system is inverted. When the UN leads this injustice, it becomes an institution that legitimizes it. International morality turns into a political tool.
Deep reform is no longer an option; it is a condition for survival. Without transparency, without balance, without oversight mechanisms that prevent cynical political exploitation, the UN will continue to disintegrate-not in a dramatic explosion, but in a slow rot of lost trust. Institutions do not die in a single day; they erode until they become irrelevant.
History is unforgiving toward institutions that lose their purpose. If the UN does not awaken, it will be remembered not as a promise that protected humanity, but as a warning of what happens when international power becomes detached from basic morality. The question is whether this archaic body still has the will to change and to represent its members morally and equitably, or whether it will continue to exist only as a shadow of itself.
The author is CEO of Radios 100FM, honorary consul and deputy dean of the Consular Diplomatic Corps faculty, president of the Israeli Radio Communication Association, and formerly a correspondent for Army Radio and an NBC television reporter.