Take Note, President Trump
Adding to the indignity, former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, once the symbolic guardian of impartiality, has now lent his name to this group, reportedly serving as a leading figure in its mobilization. That a former Secretary-General—who above all should understand the sacred principle of neutrality—would lead such an effort is not only a betrayal of the institution he once helmed, but also a direct threat to its legitimacy.
Anticipation is building for President Donald Trump’s address to the UN General Assembly on September 23rd. Trump’s speech is the perfect moment to castigate the United Nations—and take concrete action to clip the global body’s wings– for becoming a global platform of hate and violent incitement against Jews.
The Erosion of Neutrality
The issue at stake is not whether staff members or retired officials may have personal political opinions. Everyone does. The issue is whether United Nations employees and former top leaders and staff can turn the mantle of neutrality into a mask for advocacy—including advocacy that, by omission or implication, legitimizes those who attacked Israel on October 7 and those who continue to murder Israelis on the streets of Jerusalem today.
When families mourn, when trauma still scars Israel from the north and south to the capital, the last thing the UN should tolerate is the exploitation and weaponizing of its name, its emblem, and its premises for political campaigns. That is what “UN Staff for Gaza” has done. By holding rallies inside UN facilities, by operating social media accounts under the UN name, and by presenting themselves as a quasi-official faction, they have implicated the UN itself in their cause.
Danon’s Warning to Guterres
Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Ambassador Danny Danon, put it starkly in an August 29 letter to Secretary-General António Guterres. He underscored that the activities of this group are “in direct violation of the Staff Regulations and Rules of the United Nations, as well as established policies regarding impartiality and the use of UN property and symbols.”
More pointedly, he warned: “By fostering a politically charged and hostile environment within UN premises, [these actions] pose a direct threat to the safety, security, and wellbeing of Israeli and Jewish UN staff members.”
These words are grounded in a painful reality. For months, Jerusalem has reeled under fresh waves of stabbings, shootings, and car-rammings—terrorist tactics encouraged by the same extremist movements lionized by activists rallying under the UN Staff for Gaza banner.
From October 7 to Jerusalem’s Streets
No one can erase the memory of October 7: children slaughtered in their beds, grandparents kidnapped, women raped and brutalized in the most inhumane ways imaginable. Hamas announced to the world, with deadly clarity, exactly what it stands for and that it would repeat the massacre. That same warped ideology is what fuels the assaults carried out on ordinary Israelis walking through the heart of Jerusalem today.
For UN staff and a former Secretary-General to adopt “neutral” institutional symbols in service of a cause indistinguishable from those same extremists’ propaganda is intolerable. Neutrality has not been eroded here—it has been abandoned outright.
Danger from Within
To those who believe this is merely an internal HR matter, consider the precedent. If the United Nations cannot restrain its own employees, what moral standing does it have to restrain warring nations? If its own top retirees can openly align with partisan factions, what confidence can any member state have in the UN’s neutrality?
Worse still, it places Israeli and Jewish UN staff in the line of fire. The climate of intimidation is no longer theoretical. When colleagues use the UN’s platform to align with causes that celebrate violence against Israelis, they turn workplaces into hostile environments and strip away the very protection international civil service is supposed to guarantee.
Accountability Is Non-Negotiable
The Secretary-General must act—clearly, publicly, and quickly. Ambassador Danon’s demands remain the baseline: investigate the group’s conduct, disavow their claim to UN representation, shut down unauthorized channels, discipline the officials involved, and reaffirm impartiality as inviolable. There is an added dimension now: a former Secretary-General must not be permitted to parade his office’s legacy as a political weapon against a member state.
Silence, or hesitation, is complicity.
The Fish Stinks from the Head
Make no mistake: This blatant breach of the UN Staff Rules and the UN Charter’s imperative of impartiality began at the top—with UN Secretary General Guterres’s statement on October 8, 2023 conflating victim and terrorist: “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished. Their hopes for a political solution to their plight have been vanishing.”
The UN Charter endows the Secretary General with an inviolate responsibility: impartiality.
Guterres issues one-sided specious statements against Jerusalem while sidestepping decades of terrorism and rocket attacks against Israeli civilians. He obfuscates the savage Hamas massacre on Oct. 7th and Israel’s legitimate self-defense with Orwellian moral equivalence between terrorists and victims and gives second billing to the plight of Israeli hostages tortured, starved, sexually abused and buried alive in Hamas tunnels.
While the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has gripped global attention, conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, Syria, the DRC, and Ukraine have led to exponentially higher death tolls, displacement and genuine mass starvation. Yet, Guterres remains focused like a laser beam on Gaza, wailing “genocide,” “killing fields,” and “man-made famine” from the UN echo chamber. He relies on fraudulent UN, IPC (the UN-backed food crisis metric) and Hamas casualty figures despite hard evidence to the contrary and refuses to cooperate with US-Israel humanitarian aid efforts for Gazans. His megaphone weaponizes these allegations to influence legal tribunals and fuel the media and social frenzy driving antisemitic violence against Jews worldwide.
This posture has made Guterres persona non grata in Israel, a country that—love its politics or not—is a sovereign UN member state whose borders were violated by Hamas terrorist thugs ruling Gaza and ruthlessly dedicated to annihilating Israel. When the head of the UN alienates a member state this completely, he loses any ability to perform one of his core functions: serving as an honest broker in disputes. No one can seriously believe he is fit to resolve the Gaza war.
A Choice for the UN
A United Nations that tolerates staff members masquerading as political activists does not stand as a beacon for peace but as an accomplice in eroding it.
Ambassador Danon’s words stand as a wakeup call: the integrity of the United Nations—and the lives and dignity of civilians whom it claims to protect—hang in the balance.
The October 7 massacre still burns in Israeli consciousness; the stabbings and shootings in Jerusalem today prove the same hatred persists. Against this backdrop, the United Nations faces a stark choice: will it be an institution of impartiality upholding the Charter, or will it surrender itself completely to political theater– where even its former leaders and staff campaign on behalf of one side in a violent conflict?
President Donald Trump’s Message to the UN General Assembly
When President Trump addresses the UN General Assembly on September 23rd it behooves him to put Ambassador Danon’s warning front and center. Trump’s speech is the perfect moment to castigate the United Nations and take concrete actions to clip the global body’s wings for becoming a global platform for hate and violent incitement against Jews.
The blood of October 7, and of Jerusalem’s newest victims, demands no less.
