It’s time for Israel to exit the UN

This week the United Nations General Assembly convened with strongmen, dictators and demagogues from around the world descending on Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood. Despite all the lofty UN language surrounding the event, there is little doubt that the main focus of attention will be Israel, the Mideast’s only democracy, which will get taken to task by authoritarian regimes like Russia, Iran, Syria and China.

This, however, will be old news for the Jewish state, which has endured decades of scorn from the supposedly neutral global body. But as Israel fights a kinetic war on five fronts—and diplomatic and media wars on many more—going to the UN to beg for a fair hearing calls to mind the adage about doing the same thing and expecting different results. Instead, it’s time for Israel to flip the script and exit the UN. It’s time for an Israexit.

In case you have any doubt about the intentions of the UN, only last week the United Nations General Assembly adopted an advisory opinion on Israel and the Palestinian Territories calling on the Jewish state to withdraw from territories and pave the way for a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem. North Korea, Iraq, Pakistan, Qatar, Nicaragua and Yemen were among the human rights “exemplars” that sponsored the text.

While the UN is billing the General Assembly’s most recent action as “historic,” the reality is that, in the context of unrelenting anti-Israel activity, it’s disturbingly mundane. Since 2015, Israel has been subjected to 155 condemnatory resolutions by the UN. Compare that to the number of combined negative resolutions against China, Cuba, Qatar, Pakistan, Venezuela, Libya and Zimbabwe which amounts to—zero. In fact, only Russia comes close to rivaling Israel’s negative showing at the UN, with a measly 24 resolutions condemning it.

Since October 7, the United Nation’s bespoke agency for the Palestinians, UNRWA, has been caught not simply aiding and abetting Hamas (though with Hamas command centers nested inside of UNRWA schools and offices, that’s undoubtedly the case) but including paid staffers actively participating in the massacre of Israeli civilians. Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that 10% of the agency’s staff in Gaza were found to have ties to Hamas, including the dozen or so UNRWA staffers who actively took part in the murder, rape and kidnapping of civilians on October 7. The UN now has the gall to seek immunity for its employees who committed murder, mass rape, and terror.

Shocking as it is, this is a trend that’s deeply rooted in UN history and culture. Nearly 50 years ago, the UN adopted Resolution 3379 which declared that Zionism, the belief that Jews have a right to political self-determination, “is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” Just as Israel has no equal when it comes to UN condemnatory resolutions, there was not at that time, nor has there since been, a parallel action taken by the UN to delegitimize the very existence of one of its own member states.

For decades, the writing has been on the wall. Israel has labored under the belief that if it can just prove its case in front of the UN, that prized legitimacy on the world stage will be hers. Nothing could be further from the truth. What Israel has witnessed is that the more it attempts to prove itself, the more extreme UN efforts to delegitimize Israel have become. In the post-October-7 world, we saw this trend reach its nadir as the UN’s various committees and agencies dedicated to women’s rights could scarcely bring themselves to hear testimony regarding hundreds of Israeli women who were brutalized, raped, murdered, and kidnapped by Hamas terrorists. For once, when it came to Israel, the UN fell silent.

Israel must now remove itself from the web of delegitimization and demonization that has kept it ensnared for far too long. The impact of this act would be earth-shaking. Voters would question why their countries choose to send billions to an institution whose Human Rights Council is populated by the planet’s worst violators of human rights. Democratic leaders could shake off the notion that they need to seek the approval of despot-led nations. It would be a profound act of a nation asserting democratic sovereignty.

Israel’s continued presence in the UN serves only to legitimize the legal and moral corruption mustered against it on a daily basis. While Israeli diplomats at Turtle Bay speak with passion about the ongoing injustice the country faces, it is now clear that the only choice for Israel is to protest not in word but in deed and leave the UN.

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Ashley Rindsberg is a journalist and author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History.