The United Nations and Israel: Are Human Rights Measured by Two Different Standards?

Something has been bothering me for quite some time.

Why does the United Nations seem to devote so much attention to Israel, so persistently and, above all, so differently from the attention it gives to other countries where terrible atrocities are also being committed?

I’m not trying to justify Israeli military operations, deny Palestinian suffering, or disregard Israel’s obligations under international law. Nor is this an attempt to defend Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

I’m concerned with something far more basic: the universal nature of human rights and the consistency of those who are supposed to defend them.

Because once you start comparing the UN’s structures, its resolutions, the mandates of its investigators, and the human tragedies unfolding around the world, some rather uncomfortable contradictions begin to emerge.

And frankly, I think they’re worth a few questions.

A Country with Its Own Reserved Seat

In 2007, the United Nations Human Rights Council introduced a permanent agenda item known as Item 7, specifically dedicated to Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.

At first glance, that might seem reasonable. After all, we’re talking about a long and extremely complex conflict.

But there’s a catch.

No other country has an equivalent permanent agenda item devoted specifically to its situation.

Not Russia, despite its invasion of Ukraine. Not China, despite the persecution of the Uyghurs. Not Iran, despite its repression of its own population. And not Sudan, where one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes is unfolding.

All these countries can be investigated through other UN mechanisms, and several of them are.

But Israel has its own permanent place on the Council’s agenda.

Why?

Is there a sufficiently convincing legal explanation for this exceptional treatment? Or are we looking at an institutional arrangement that, over the years, has simply become a political habit?

I’m certainly not the only one asking.

On March 31, 2026, the British government officially stated that Item 7 unfairly singles out Israel and represents disproportionate scrutiny.

Interestingly, Britain made that criticism while continuing to condemn Israeli settlements and reaffirming its support for Palestinian self-determination.

In other words, something that ought to be remembered more often: you can question the UN’s treatment of Israel without defending the policies of the Israeli government.

The Numbers Raise Questions, Too

UN Watch, an organization known for criticizing the UN’s treatment of Israel, published a count of resolutions adopted by the General Assembly in 2025.

According to its classification, 15 resolutions focused on Israel, compared with 11 concerning all other countries combined.

Fifteen versus eleven.

Of course, we need to be careful with statistics. UN Watch uses its own classification criteria, and several resolutions concern issues that are reviewed every year.

These figures are not an objective measure of the seriousness of each conflict.

Still, the concentration is striking enough to deserve an explanation.

What determines how many resolutions a country should receive?

The number of victims? The severity of the violations? The length of the conflict? Or simply the diplomatic majorities available to pass them?

Let’s look at what is happening elsewhere.

Sudan: A Tragedy Without an End in Sight

Since April 2023, Sudan has been devastated by a war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces.

International reports describe mass killings, ethnic persecution, rape, the destruction of entire communities, and forced displacement.

The death toll remains extremely uncertain. Some estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands may have died, but there is still no complete, independently verified national count.

In November 2026, UNHCR data on the Sudan crisis recorded approximately 11.35 million displaced people, according to the categories included in its monitoring.

More than eleven million human beings forced from their homes.

It’s almost impossible to imagine.

Yet Sudan does not have a permanent Human Rights Council agenda item equivalent to the one devoted to Palestine.

I’m not suggesting that the United Nations has ignored Sudan. It has investigated, condemned atrocities, and organized humanitarian assistance.

What I’m asking is why the institutional treatment is different.

Syria and Yemen: Other Tragedies on an Enormous Scale

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated that 306,887 civilians were killed directly as a result of the Syrian conflict between March 2011 and March 2021.

And that doesn’t include indirect deaths caused by hunger, disease, or the collapse of essential services.

In Yemen, the UN Development Programme estimated approximately 377,000 direct and indirect deaths by the end of 2021.

Nearly 60 percent were attributed to indirect consequences, including hunger, disease, and lack of medical care.

That doesn’t mean 377,000 people were deliberately murdered. The distinction matters.

But the human devastation remains enormous.

Both conflicts have been investigated by the United Nations.

Neither, however, has a permanent agenda item comparable to the one devoted to Palestine.

Why not?

China, Iran, North Korea, and Afghanistan

We should also remember that human rights violations cannot always be measured by counting the dead.

In China, the UN Human Rights Office concluded that arbitrary detention and other abuses against Uyghurs and Muslim minorities in Xinjiang may constitute crimes against humanity.

In North Korea, an international commission documented persecution, torture, imprisonment, and a system of repression that it concluded involved crimes against humanity.

In Iran, UN investigators documented killings, arbitrary detention, sexual violence, and persecution during the crackdown on protests that began in 2022.

In Afghanistan, the persecution of women and girls by the Taliban has prompted international investigations.

So it would be wrong to claim that the United Nations only pays attention to Israel.

What I still don’t understand is why its monitoring mechanisms are so different, and who makes sure the criteria behind those differences are consistent.

And What About the Kurds?

There’s another people whose history should make us think seriously about the international community’s priorities.

The Kurds.

Living mainly across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria, they have endured generations of persecution, forced displacement, and serious violations of their rights.

In 1988, Saddam Hussein’s regime carried out the Anfal campaign against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq.

Human Rights Watch estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 people were killed.

The organization described the campaign as genocide.

That same year, a chemical weapons attack on Halabja killed approximately 5,000 people.

Villages destroyed. Families wiped out. Hundreds of thousands displaced.

And the persecution is not merely a chapter from the past.

Erdoğan: The Champion of Morality and the Kurdish Question

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has become one of Israel’s most outspoken critics.

His statements about Gaza often carry a level of moral outrage that is impossible to miss.

On July 22, 2025, he went so far as to say that anyone who remained silent in the face of genocide in Gaza was complicit in Israel’s crimes against humanity.

Strong words indeed.

And he has every right to denounce human rights violations wherever he believes they have occurred.

But there’s something I’d like to ask.

With what moral authority does Erdoğan demand such severe international accountability when his own country’s security forces have also faced extremely serious allegations of abuse?

According to official figures cited by Human Rights Watch, the conflict between Turkey and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) had caused approximately 44,000 deaths by 2008.

Let’s be clear: that figure includes Turkish soldiers, Kurdish militants, and civilians. It does not mean that the Turkish state killed 44,000 Kurds.

We must also acknowledge that the PKK committed terrorist attacks and serious abuses.

But state responsibility has been documented as well.

Human Rights Watch investigated the killings and disappearances of thousands of civilians, predominantly Kurds, during the 1990s.

Much of that happened before Erdoğan came to power.

But the allegations did not end with his arrival.

Between July 2015 and July 2023, during his administration, the International Crisis Group recorded 6,677 deaths in the conflict between Turkish security forces and the PKK.

Of those, 4,409 were classified as PKK militants, 1,428 as members of the Turkish security forces, 614 as civilians, and 226 as people whose affiliation could not be established.

Again, these deaths cannot all be attributed to Turkish forces.

But during security operations in 2015 and 2016, the United Nations documented serious allegations involving civilian deaths, destroyed homes, restrictions on medical assistance, and forced displacement.

The European Commission estimated that approximately 355,000 people were internally displaced during that period.

So we’re not talking only about something that happened decades ago.

And my question remains.

Why is Erdoğan’s outrage over Palestinian victims so visible, while his own government’s policies toward Kurdish regions deserve equally rigorous scrutiny?

The moral authority of someone demanding international justice also depends on their willingness to accept investigation when the accused is their own government.

Or are Kurdish civilians somehow entitled to less consideration?

Curiously enough, there is no permanent Human Rights Council agenda item specifically devoted to them, either.

Israel: A History That Didn’t Begin on October 7

There’s another aspect I believe we need to address if we want to understand this conflict without focusing exclusively on its most recent events.

Israel was not born into an atmosphere of universal acceptance.

In November 1947, the United Nations proposed dividing British Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish and one Arab, with a special international arrangement for Jerusalem.

The Jewish Agency accepted the plan, although with reservations. Palestinian Arab leaders and the Arab states rejected it as unjust.

After Israel declared independence in May 1948, war broke out with neighboring Arab countries.

For Israel, it became the War of Independence.

For Palestinians, the Nakba: the catastrophe involving the flight and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.

Both experiences are part of history.

But there is another reality we shouldn’t overlook.

From its earliest years, Israel faced adversaries who were not merely challenging its borders or policies. Some rejected its very existence as a state.

In 1967, following the Six-Day War, the Arab League summit in Khartoum adopted its famous Three No’s: no peace, no recognition, and no negotiations with Israel.

That did not mean every Arab wanted the physical extermination of Israelis. Political rejection should not be confused with genocidal intent.

But it did express an explicit refusal to recognize the State of Israel.

Over time, some positions changed.

Egypt and Jordan signed peace treaties. The Palestine Liberation Organization formally recognized Israel in 1993.

Yet organizations such as Hamas maintained an ideology for decades that rejected Israel and endorsed armed struggle. Its 1988 founding charter also contained openly antisemitic language.

There were wars, terrorist attacks, occupation, attacks on civilians, reprisals, and opportunities for negotiations that ultimately failed.

That combination of existential threats, competing national aspirations, and political decisions helped fuel a spiral of violence that punished entire generations of Israelis and Palestinians.

Recognizing this does not justify every Israeli military decision.

But ignoring it doesn’t help us understand the conflict, either.

Two Displaced Peoples. Two Histories Worth Telling.

And here we come to another historical aspect that often gets pushed aside when discussing Israel’s creation.

The war of 1948 did not produce only one refugee tragedy.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes.

But in the following years, there was also a massive exodus of Jews who had lived for centuries in Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and other Middle Eastern and North African countries.

Two different histories, both marked by uprooting and loss.

And I think they’re worth comparing.

Palestinian Refugees and Their Arab Neighbors

When UNRWA began operating in 1950, it assisted approximately 750,000 Palestinian refugees.

More than seven decades later, around 5.9 million people, including descendants of those original refugees, were eligible for its services.

That’s an extraordinary increase.

But we need to explain what the number actually means.

It doesn’t mean that nearly six million people personally fled their homes in 1948.

The figure includes subsequent generations registered under UNRWA’s rules. It reflects demographic growth, family continuity, and the persistence of a refugee situation that remains unresolved.

What I find particularly striking is that, after all these decades, many Palestinians still face significant obstacles to full citizenship and effective social and economic integration.

Arab host countries have followed very different policies.

Jordan is an important exception. Most of the approximately 2.3 million registered Palestinian refugees living there in 2024 had Jordanian citizenship and participated in the country’s economic and political life, although certain groups, particularly people displaced from Gaza in 1967, continued to face restrictions.

In Lebanon, however, the situation has been far more restrictive.

Generations of Palestinians have lived without Lebanese citizenship, facing serious limitations on certain professions, property ownership, and access to public services.

According to a UNRWA socioeconomic study, approximately 83 percent of Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon were experiencing poverty in 2023.

In Syria, Palestinians historically enjoyed greater access to employment and certain public services, although generally without citizenship. The civil war subsequently displaced many of them again and dramatically worsened their situation.

So it would be inaccurate to say that no Arab country ever integrated Palestinian refugees.

But we cannot ignore the fact that millions have remained registered as refugees or descendants of refugees for generations, with very different prospects for citizenship and integration depending on where they live.

And that raises another question.

To what extent did Arab governments help resolve the human tragedy of these families? And to what extent did the refugee issue remain trapped in the political confrontation with Israel?

It’s a question worth asking without denying Palestinians’ right to seek recognition, solutions, and compensation for their losses in 1948.

The Other Exodus: Jews from Arab Countries

The other story is less widely known.

During the twentieth century, particularly after 1948, hundreds of thousands of Jews left communities that had existed for centuries, sometimes for more than two thousand years, throughout the Arab world.

In Iraq, the Jewish community had an extraordinarily long history.

But in June 1941, Baghdad witnessed the Farhud, a violent anti-Jewish pogrom in which at least 128 Jews were killed, according to official findings cited by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Hundreds more were injured, and many homes and businesses were destroyed.

The violence left a lasting scar.

Between 1950 and 1951, the vast majority of Iraq’s Jewish community emigrated to Israel.

Elsewhere in the region, Jews also experienced persecution, anti-Jewish attacks, legal restrictions, loss of property, and expulsions.

Circumstances varied significantly from country to country. Not everyone was expelled, and not everyone emigrated for the same reasons. Zionism, family opportunities, political changes, and fear for the future all played roles.

But the historical outcome is undeniable: Jewish communities that had formed part of these societies for centuries virtually disappeared from many countries.

It is estimated that approximately 850,000 Jews left Arab countries from the late 1940s through the following decades, although estimates vary according to the countries and periods included.

Approximately 586,000 arrived in Israel between 1948 and 1972, according to one historical count.

And here’s where a particularly interesting difference emerges.

Israel and the Integration of Those Refugees

Israel was a newly established state, small, economically struggling, and facing serious military threats.

Yet it received hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries, along with Holocaust survivors and other European immigrants.

Its population nearly doubled during its first four years.

It was anything but easy.

Many newcomers had to live in temporary transit camps known as ma’abarot, often under difficult conditions.

Jews from the Middle East and North Africa also experienced social and economic discrimination within an Israeli society whose leadership was largely of European origin.

It would be foolish to romanticize the process.

But it would be equally unfair to ignore what happened afterward.

These immigrants received citizenship, raised families, developed businesses, and gradually became part of the country’s political, cultural, and social life.

Their children and grandchildren are now an inseparable part of Israeli society.

Israel made absorbing those immigrants a national policy, even though genuine integration was accompanied by inequality and social conflict.

And that brings me back to another uncomfortable question.

Why did the integration of Jewish refugees in Israel follow such a different path from that experienced by many Palestinian refugees in some Arab countries?

The answer cannot simply be reduced to goodwill on one side and bad intentions on the other.

There are historical, political, economic, and legal differences.

Palestinians also maintain claims regarding their former homes and property, while many Jews who left Arab countries built new lives in Israel without receiving compensation for what they had lost.

But this complexity shouldn’t prevent us from examining the responsibilities of host countries.

Shouldn’t we also ask what was done — and what wasn’t done — to offer generations of Palestinians a fully integrated life, with meaningful rights, without forcing them to abandon their identity or historical claims?

The Hostages: A Question That Still Troubles Me

And then came October 7, 2023.

On that day, Hamas and other armed groups attacked Israeli communities, killed approximately 1,200 people, and abducted 251.

The hostages included women, children, elderly people, and foreign nationals.

People taken from their homes and held captive for months and, in some cases, years.

And there’s one issue I believe should have occupied a much more central place in the international debate.

How much sooner could the war in Gaza have ended if Hamas had immediately released all the hostages?

I don’t know the answer. And I’m skeptical of anyone who claims to know it.

Israel declared other military objectives, including dismantling Hamas’s operational capabilities. Nor can we ignore decisions by Netanyahu’s government that contributed to prolonging the fighting.

But certain facts are clear.

In November 2023, a temporary truce allowed hostages to be released in exchange for Palestinian prisoners.

In January 2025, another agreement again linked hostage releases to a temporary halt in military operations.

Negotiations for a more lasting settlement failed, and fighting resumed in March.

Finally, in October 2025, an internationally mediated agreement led to the release of the last twenty Israeli hostages still alive in Gaza, alongside the release of Palestinian prisoners and detainees and a new ceasefire.

The relationship between the hostages and negotiations to stop the war is not speculation.

It is documented.

What we cannot prove is that their immediate release would have guaranteed a definitive end to the Israeli offensive.

But we can certainly ask how many opportunities to reduce human suffering were lost during those two years.

Because abducting civilians and holding them hostage is a crime that cannot be erased by the political circumstances surrounding a conflict.

At the same time, the existence of hostages does not release Israel from its obligation to protect Gaza’s civilian population.

Israel is responsible for its military decisions. Those who abducted and held the hostages are responsible for those crimes.

Why is it so difficult to acknowledge both at the same time?

Francesca Albanese: Independent Rapporteur or Convictions That Carry Too Much Weight?

The UN mandate currently held by Francesca Albanese was created in 1993 to investigate Israeli violations of international law in the occupied Palestinian territories.

It was not originally designed as a symmetrical investigation of every party to the conflict.

Part of the imbalance in its focus is therefore built into the mandate itself.

But the mandate is one thing. The personal responsibility to carry it out with rigor, objectivity, and independence is another.

Albanese has made extremely serious allegations against Israel, some supported by international investigations and others subject to legal and factual dispute.

Certain public statements of hers deserve particular scrutiny.

In February 2024, she challenged French President Emmanuel Macron’s description of the October 7 massacre as antisemitic, arguing that the victims were killed in response to Israeli oppression rather than because they were Jewish.

She later clarified that she condemned Hamas’s crimes and rejected antisemitism.

Still, I find her original reasoning troubling.

Why should a political motivation necessarily exclude an antisemitic one?

Can’t both exist at the same time?

Her comparisons between certain Israeli statements and arguments used by Nazi officials have also generated controversy, as have some of her sweeping assessments of the Israeli judicial system.

I’m not claiming that these incidents prove she violated her professional obligations.

But I do believe they raise a legitimate question about whether some of her interpretations reveal a predisposition against Israel — a possible anti-Israel bias.

The distinction matters.

A UN rapporteur doesn’t have to devote exactly the same number of critical statements to every party.

The question is whether she applies the same intellectual and evidentiary rigor when examining facts that support or challenge her conclusions.

The UN Code of Conduct requires mandate holders to ensure that their personal political opinions do not interfere with their professional assessments.

And Israel is not the only country to have raised concerns about Albanese.

On November 9, 2026, the British government confirmed in a parliamentary response that ministers had expressed concerns about several of her statements to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and continued to call for their examination under the Code of Conduct.

That does not establish that she committed a violation.

But it shows that the institutional question has been raised.

And I believe it deserves an independent answer.

Nor Can We Ignore Israel’s Responsibilities

At this point, I want to make something absolutely clear.

Questioning the United Nations’ conduct does not eliminate Israel’s responsibilities.

In July 2024, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territories was unlawful.

There have also been international investigations into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Gaza war.

There is no reason to minimize those investigations.

Nor can we ignore the devastation of Gaza, the deaths of civilians, the destruction of families, and the enormous humanitarian consequences of the fighting.

Palestinians have the right to live in freedom, safety, and dignity.

And so do Israelis.

The issue is not choosing which rights we want to defend. It is demanding that all of them be respected.

So, Is There Really a Double Standard?

After examining the UN’s mechanisms, the statistics on resolutions, the experiences of other peoples, and the statements of certain political leaders, I see documented reasons to take that possibility seriously.

Israel receives unique institutional treatment.

There is a substantial concentration of resolutions concerning its conduct.

Some mechanisms were specifically designed to investigate Israeli violations.

And democratic governments have officially questioned whether that level of scrutiny is proportionate.

Erdoğan’s example adds another dimension: leaders who make uncompromising moral demands of Israel while their own states’ actions also deserve rigorous international investigation.

The histories of Palestinian and Jewish refugees remind us, meanwhile, that the conflict produced different waves of displacement, followed by very different national policies and paths toward integration.

But precision matters.

Different institutional treatment does not automatically amount to unjustified discrimination.

Israel’s occupation and the legal obligations arising from it provide relevant reasons for special scrutiny.

What we should demand is that this exceptional treatment be justified by objective, transparent, and reviewable criteria.

And that those same principles be used when deciding how atrocities elsewhere in the world should be investigated.

One Final Thought

There’s something about this entire debate that troubles me deeply.

We’ve somehow managed to confuse solidarity with impartiality.

Solidarity grows out of empathy. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But impartiality requires something more difficult: the willingness to apply the same principles even when the consequences challenge our own sympathies.

This isn’t about holding some grotesque competition between the dead of Gaza, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine, or Kurdistan.

It isn’t about deciding which people have suffered more or which victims deserve more compassion.

It’s about asking whether an organization that claims to represent the conscience of the international community has sufficiently consistent standards for investigating everyone.

And whether those who present themselves as defenders of human rights are willing to apply those rights with equal rigor when responsibility lies with governments, movements, or causes they happen to support.

Israel must not be above international law.

But neither should it be subjected to exceptional mechanisms without objective, proportionate, and reviewable justification.

The same principle must apply to Turkey, Russia, Iran, and every other country.

Because the credibility of human rights cannot depend on the nationality of the victims or the political preferences of those claiming to defend them.

And after all these figures, resolutions, accusations, and declarations, I’m still left with one rather simple question:

If human rights are universal, shouldn’t the standards by which we measure them be universal, too?

Néstor Daniel Scherman
Münster, Germany

Selected Sources

1. United Nations General Assembly, Resolution 181 (II), Partition Plan for Palestine, 1947.
2. UN Commission on Human Rights, Resolution 1993/2 A, establishing the mandate on the occupied Palestinian territories.
3. UN Human Rights Council, Resolutions 5/1 and 5/2, 2007.
4. UN Watch, 2025 UNGA Resolutions on Israel vs. the Rest of the World.
5. UK Government, statement on Human Rights Council Agenda Item 7, March 31, 2026.
6. UK Parliament, Written Question HL4530, response dated November 9, 2026.
7. UNHCR, Sudan displacement data, November 2026.
8. OHCHR, civilian deaths in Syria, June 2022.
9. UNDP, Assessing the Impact of War in Yemen, 2021.
10. Human Rights Watch, Iraq’s Crime of Genocide: The Anfal Campaign Against the Kurds, 1994.
11. Human Rights Watch, Time for Justice: Ending Impunity for Killings and Disappearances in 1990s Turkey, 2012.
12. OHCHR, report on security operations in southeastern Turkey, March 2017.
13. International Crisis Group, Turkey-PKK conflict casualty data, 2015–2023.
14. Presidency of Türkiye, remarks by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, July 22, 2025.
15. UNRWA, Palestinian refugee registration and eligibility figures.
16. UNRWA, 2024 Annual Report and refugee conditions in Jordan.
17. UNRWA, 2023 Socioeconomic Survey of Palestine Refugees in Lebanon.
18. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, The Farhud.
19. Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, historical immigration statistics.
20. International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, July 19, 2024.
21. UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, Report A/HRC/56/26, 2024.