When the Truth Struggles to Break Through: The UN, Israel, and the Search for Light
As we and the rest of the Jewish world prepare for the Yamim Noraim (High Holy Days) and cheshbon hanefesh, soul searching, it is impossible not to bring to our prayers and reflection the heavy sense of isolation we feel as a Jewish people. Nearly two years after the atrocities of October 7, the wounds remain raw, hostages are still in captivity, and the strategy to defeat Hamas seems as elusive as ever. At the same time, the very institution meant to guard international peace continues to treat the Jewish state as an outlier whose legitimacy is always questioned.
The UN General Assembly’s “September 12, 2025 New York Declaration” was promoted as a roadmap for a Palestinian state. Its adoption by 142 votes to 10, with 12 abstentions, was nothing more than a sham. Buried inside Article 39 was a reaffirmation of the so-called “right of return,” a demand that millions of descendants of 1948 refugees be allowed to settle inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Every serious negotiation, from Camp David to the Geneva Initiative, has recognized that such an influx would end Israel as a Jewish democracy. Yet the General Assembly repeated it anyway, knowing that Israel could never accept it.
This vote, once again, exposed a pattern stretching back to the UN’s early years. In 1947, the UN passed the Partition Plan (Resolution 181) giving international legitimacy to a Jewish state beside an Arab one. But since that time, there has been a consistent and hateful bias against Israel. For instance, UNRWA was created in 1949 to care for Palestinians, a unique creation among other refugees, as it extended refugee status, indefinitely, to descendants. The 1951 Refugee Convention and UNHCR set different rules for every other refugee population, from Europeans displaced by World War II to later crises in Africa and Asia. For Jewish refugees driven from Arab and Muslim lands, about 850,000 between 1948 and the early 1970s, no dedicated agency, compensation scheme, or UN resolution ever happened. Displaced Jews rebuilt their lives in Israel, Europe and America, without international aid or a “right of return.”
This inequality became even sharper in 1975, when the General Assembly declared that “Zionism is a form of racism.” Though rescinded in 1991, this false accusation revealed how far political majorities in the UN could knowingly drift from historical reality. The most obvious disdain for Israel is made completely apparent in today’s Human Rights Council. Israel alone remains a standing agenda item (Item 7), while gross violators, such as Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar, those who truly create heinous crimes against humanity, receive little or no attention.
Against that record, and to make matters worse, the positions of Western democracies in last week’s vote appear, at best, timid. The United States, Israel, Argentina, Paraguay, Hungary, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga voted “no.” Twelve states, Albania, Cameroon, Czech Republic, DRC, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Fiji, Guatemala, Moldova, North Macedonia, Samoa, South Sudan, abstained. But truly disgraceful, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, and most of Europe voted “yes,” even while issuing careful statements that the refugee clause was “aspirational” and must be resolved in negotiations. They wanted to salvage the resolution’s call for a two-state solution. Yet their support allowed language to pass that served to isolate Israel even more. Perhaps, given Europe’s long history with the Jews, it should not have come as a surprise.
The moral and historical inversion is striking and extraordinarily frustrating and alarming. Jewish presence in the Land of Israel spans three millennia. Waves of Jewish immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries were not colonists from an imperial state; they were communities escaping pogroms in Russia, antisemitism in Europe, ultimately the Holocaust, and then persecution across the Arab world. Meanwhile, it was the Islamic conquests of the 7th century that overtook earlier Jewish and Christian societies across the region. To brand Zionism as “colonialism” is to erase an indigenous people’s return to its homeland, thus making a mockery of truth.
Why, then, does the UN maintain a standard unique to Israel? Part of the answer is in the makeup of the UN itself. The UN is actually a coalition of Arab and Muslim states, joined by much of the Global South (mostly formally colonized countries). This combination of nations makes up majorities in the Assembly. In addition, they share and promote the false narrative, born in the anti-colonial 1970s, that Jewish self-determination (Zionism) is nothing less than foreign intrusion. And sadly, the other part of the answer is the West’s reluctance to take a moral stand. The result is a perfect storm, a Jewish state held to impossible expectations no other nation could meet, while its adversaries are spared any responsibility. A UN, made up of a majority of countries that would love to see Israel disappear, that doesn’t hide its hatred toward Israel, cannot be viewed as a legitimate body promoting international cooperation and peace. It should then come as no surprise that just a few days after the September 12th vote, a UN inquiry declared Israel is committing genocide.
We Jews have to reconcile with the reality that most people have no idea how the UN is configured and that most participating countries hold anti-Israel and anti-Western views. Further, the UN makes these declarations and Western media just amplifies their talking points without any serious analysis or critique of the biases of the UN itself. It has become self-evident that they control the narrative and have convinced too many in the West to accept their version of reality. As a result, Israel and the Jewish people are more isolated than at any other time since the founding of Israel in 1948.
Rosh Hashanah calls Jews to look inward, to name truth, and to imagine renewal even in dark times. The story of Israel, a people returning to its homeland, surviving wars and terror, building a democracy despite relentless delegitimization, is itself an act of light against despair, even when we may have real concerns with the current government. As we hear the shofar this year, may its determined blasts remind us that clarity and courage are still possible in scholarship and journalism that corrects distortions and falsehood, in diplomacy that actually prizes fairness, in friends and neighbors that stand with us for the right of our small Jewish nation to live in peace. While we feel alone, there are still many who stand with us.
I believe history will judge whether the UN can transcend old habits and whether the West can speak truth. I have faith in the arc of justice. But, for now, Rosh Hashanah invites us to do our own self-judgement first, to affirm that facts matter, that Jewish peoplehood is neither colonial nor provisional, and that even in a world turned upside-down, steadfast truth can still break through. It is up to us to stand together and speak that truth.
