The UN’s Anti-Israel Ecosystem
This paper was written with the assistance of Noam Yakoby.
- Over decades, the UN has developed a vast, complex, and interconnected ecosystem dedicated to condemning and singling out Israel, promoting its demonization and delegitimization, and advancing political, economic, and legal measures against the Jewish state. This report aims to map and analyze the UN’s institutionalized and highly resourced Israel-focused machinery, expose the dangers it poses not only to Israel but to all democracies, and recommend practical ways to counter it.
- The report presents a systematic mapping of dozens of UN bodies and officeholders involved in anti-Israel activity, including specialized agencies, committees, Secretariat units, investigative mechanisms, and Special Rapporteurs. For each, it details the mandate under which it operates, its composition, and the way its members or officeholders are selected or appointed, together with a record of the anti-Israel activity it has advanced: resolutions, reports, investigations, publications, and political and legal initiatives. The mapping identifies who drives this activity, the authorities and tools they employ, and how the actions of different bodies combine into a sustained institutional campaign against Israel. On that basis, the report offers practical recommendations for confronting the system and changing the mechanisms that enable it.
- This report highlights how the parts of this ecosystem reinforce and complement one another. General Assembly majorities create mandates, committees, budgets, reporting requirements, and legal referrals. Secretariat units turn those decisions into permanent bureaucratic infrastructure. Human-rights mechanisms convert political claims into purported legal findings. Humanitarian and technical agencies supply statistics and institutional authority, while communications bodies disseminate the resulting narratives. One UN body cites another until allegations generated within the system acquire the appearance of independent validation.
- October 7 exposed the consequences of this structure. Hamas carried out the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust, kidnapped hostages, fired rockets at Israeli cities, and operated from within Gaza’s civilian environment. Yet much of the UN quickly returned to its established framework: Israeli conduct was investigated, condemned, and transformed into legal demands, while Hamas’s responsibility was often marginalized or treated as background context – if it was mentioned at all.
- The machinery is rooted in the UN’s basic political structure. Under the one-country-one-vote system, every General Assembly member has the same formal voting power regardless of population, financial contribution, democratic status, or human-rights record. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Arab Group, Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), and Group of 77 and China (G77+China) can generate automatic or near-automatic majorities. Since 2015, the General Assembly has adopted 187 condemnatory resolutions against Israel, more than twice the number adopted against Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Myanmar, Qatar, Pakistan, Cuba, and Venezuela combined.
- The system goes far beyond resolutions. Israel is the only country subject to a dedicated country-specific Human Rights Council agenda item at every regular session. It is also subject to an open-ended Commission of Inquiry and a uniquely indefinite Special Rapporteur mandate focused on Israeli conduct. Permanent Palestinian-focused institutions, including the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), the Division for Palestinian Rights, the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL), the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, UNRWA, and a dedicated communications programme, provide reports, databases, advocacy, and public-information infrastructure for one side of the conflict, with no comparable system for Israel.
- The same pattern extends through bodies with ostensibly universal or technical mandates. OCHA, OHCHR, UNICEF, UN Women, WHO, UNDP, ESCWA, UNESCO, the ILO, WFP, and other agencies repeatedly single out Israel for country-specific reporting, resolutions, programmes, and scrutiny rarely applied in comparable fashion to other states or conflicts. Their work focuses overwhelmingly on one side of the conflict, while paying far less sustained attention to Hamas, Palestinian armed groups, terrorism, and Palestinian governance.
- Almost every specialized arm of the UN has translated the war into the language of its own field – thereby creating an additional channel through which to accuse Israel. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) turned Gaza into a case study in ecological destruction, measuring construction debris, soil and water contamination, damage to vegetation, the collapse of sewage systems, and the accumulation of 61 million tonnes of rubble. Yet the vast underground system built by Hamas – hundreds of kilometres of tunnels, the diversion of cement, fuel, and electricity for military purposes, and the storage of explosives in densely populated areas – received almost no analysis as a source of environmental damage. UN-Habitat followed a similar pattern: it mapped the destruction of homes, infrastructure, and the built environment in Gaza and proposed reconstruction plans, but did not examine in parallel how Hamas transformed homes, roads, public buildings, and the underground urban space into military infrastructure. The result was reporting on cities destroyed by Israel with almost no explanation of how and why the city itself had been turned into a battlefield.
- The same mechanism operated in fields even further removed from the conflict. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) translated the war into the language of pregnancy, childbirth, hygiene kits, and women’s hardship: only six days after October 7, it was already addressing the war’s possible impact on Palestinian women without mentioning that Israeli women and children were still being held hostage. The International Labour Organization recast the suspension of Palestinian workers’ entry into Israel after the October 7 massacre as a workers’ rights crisis for which Israel was responsible, without mentioning Israeli workers who were murdered, evacuated, or called up for reserve duty. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) calculated the ‘economic cost of the occupation’ and the collapse of the Palestinian economy, but not the economic cost of Hamas rule, tunnel construction, or Palestinian rearmament. The International Organization for Migration framed events as a story of Palestinian displacement without establishing a parallel mechanism for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis displaced by attacks from Hamas and Hezbollah. Across these fields, the same template prevailed: Palestinians were presented as victims, Israel as the active and responsible party, while Hamas and the war it initiated were marginalized or disappeared altogether.
- The claims and statistics produced in this way circulate from body to body across the UN system, acquire the authority of technical or professional expertise, and are then cited by governments, journalists, NGOs, courts, and other UN bodies. The result is a self-reinforcing institutional echo chamber in which ostensibly independent bodies repeatedly validate and amplify one another’s conclusions.
- The machinery increasingly produces concrete political, economic, and legal pressure. Human Rights Council and OHCHR mechanisms have generated corporate blacklists and calls for arms restrictions. Special Rapporteurs have promoted sanctions, boycotts, asset freezes, and pressure on private actors. General Assembly initiatives have generated proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), whose conclusions are then used to justify further measures. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) is not a UN body, UN decisions helped create the pathway for Palestinian accession, while UN-generated claims and findings shape the wider environment surrounding its cases.
- Much of this machinery is extraordinarily difficult to reform because it is rooted in the UN’s basic political structure. Under the one-country-one-vote system, authoritarian regimes, governments hostile to Israel, and states aligned with terrorist organizations can help create mandates, elect officials, determine budgets, and shape international norms on the same formal basis as liberal democracies. Organized blocs magnify their influence and allow them to preserve politicized institutions and shield themselves and their allies from comparable scrutiny.
- Yet the states that exercise this influence often bear only a small share of the financial burden. Democratic governments and their taxpayers provide a disproportionate share of the resources that sustain the UN system, including the mandates, offices, agencies, investigations, reports, databases, and bureaucratic structures directed against Israel. In 2024, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, and France together provided roughly 59 percent of all direct government contributions to the UN system; the United States alone contributed more than 183 other member states combined. The result is a striking inversion: democracies finance institutions that authoritarian and anti-Western blocs can use to undermine democratic allies, weaken democratic interests, and advance norms and mechanisms those same democracies often oppose.
- The danger extends far beyond Israel. The anti-Israel machinery generates legal theories, investigative practices, open-ended commissions, Special Rapporteur mandates, corporate blacklists, arms-embargo campaigns, sanctions proposals, and international criminal proceedings that can establish precedents for use against other democratic states. Methods developed against Israel can later be leveraged against democracies conducting counterterrorism operations or confronting terrorist organizations embedded among civilians. They can expose democratic officials and soldiers to politicized legal proceedings, pressure companies that supply democratic militaries, and delegitimize essential national-security tools.
- In this sense, Israel is not an isolated target. A system that normalizes permanent discriminatory machinery against one democracy lowers the barriers to its use against others, weakens the distinction between democratic self-defense and terrorism, and gives authoritarian regimes new instruments with which to constrain free societies.
- Challenging this machinery does not require defending every Israeli policy or arguing that Israel should be immune from scrutiny. The question is whether scrutiny rests on common standards, credible evidence, genuine impartiality, due process, realistic interpretations of international law, and equal consideration of all parties. Permanent mechanisms for one state, combined with a system that treats democratic self-defense as the central problem, undermine the principles of universality and equality on which legitimate international institutions depend.
- The report’s detailed mapping provides a basis for action: identifying which bodies and mechanisms advance the campaign against Israel, how they operate, and who funds them – and then using budgetary, diplomatic, and legal tools to change the situation. To that end, the report proposes eight practical steps:
- End automatic funding and determine where the money goes. Donor states should conduct and publish a comprehensive mapping of their financial transfers to the UN system: how much money is transferred, to which bodies, for which activities, and through which channels, including indirect transfers through pooled funds and intermediary organizations. Recipient bodies should be required to provide detailed reporting on how funds are used and where they are transferred onward. Continued funding should be subject to explicit, periodic approval by the executive and legislative branches, in accordance with each country’s constitutional division of powers. This would require governments and legislators to examine the activities they finance and accept public responsibility for them.
- End or reduce funding for bodies that discriminate against Israel. Donor states should use the report’s mapping to identify bodies that devote resources to discriminatory activity against Israel and reduce or terminate their funding. Funding decisions should be based both on a body’s mandate and on its actual conduct, including the reports it publishes, the initiatives it promotes, and the way it uses its resources. Safeguards should ensure that withdrawn funds do not return to the same activity through a pooled fund, intermediary body, or alternative budget line.
- Condition additional funding on dismantling special mechanisms directed against Israel. Donor states should establish defined conditions for continued funding: abolishing Human Rights Council Agenda Item 7, which singles Israel out for a separate standing debate; terminating the open-ended Commission of Inquiry concerning Israel; ending the uniquely indefinite Special Rapporteur mandate; and abolishing permanent institutions that promote one side of the conflict, including CEIRPP and the Division for Palestinian Rights in the UN Secretariat. The release of additional funds should be conditioned on implementing these changes according to predetermined benchmarks and timelines.
- Apply transparency and oversight across the UN system. Scrutiny should not end with anti-Israel activity. Donor states should require all UN institutions to provide transparency concerning budgets, work programmes, appointment processes, implementing partners, and subcontractors. The objective is to enable democracies to identify when institutions they finance are being used by authoritarian regimes to advance anti-Western agendas and damage democratic interests – and to act on those findings.
- Deny funding, cooperation, and political backing to discriminatory lawfare mechanisms. Donor states should refrain from funding mechanisms and initiatives that promote legal proceedings, corporate blacklists, boycotts, and sanctions against Israel on the basis of discriminatory mandates. They should not participate in, sponsor, or adopt the conclusions of such initiatives without independently examining their evidence and methodology, and should avoid providing practical assistance to their operations. A resolution or report bearing the UN emblem should not receive automatic support when the process behind it fails the tests of equality, credibility, and fairness.
- Take targeted measures against those driving the campaign. Alongside institutional action, governments should consider measures against UN officials, Special Rapporteurs, and other officeholders who abuse their authority to advance discriminatory activity or engage in serious misconduct. Depending on their conduct and the legal authorities available, such measures may include visa restrictions or denials, economic sanctions, and the freezing of assets and bank accounts. Where there is a sufficient evidentiary and legal basis for involvement in, or support for, terrorism, governments should also consider using counterterrorism authorities, including designation under appropriate sanctions regimes. Any measure should rest on documented conduct and individual responsibility.
- Establish a coordinated democratic front against lawfare and selective enforcement. Democratic states should create a permanent framework for political and legal coordination: sharing information on discriminatory initiatives, developing common legal positions, coordinating votes, and jointly opposing biased mandates and appointments. They should also support one another when such mechanisms target elected officials, soldiers, or companies operating in their jurisdictions. In the face of organized voting blocs within the UN, democracies require sustained collective action that insists on the application of the same standards to all states.
- Make clear that anti-Israel activity at the UN has consequences for bilateral relations. Israel should take each state’s conduct at the UN into account when shaping its relations with that state. Sponsoring discriminatory resolutions, voting for them, and participating in special mechanisms directed against Israel should affect Israel’s willingness to support that state’s international candidacies, expand cooperation with it, or grant it benefits. Israel should state in advance which actions will damage bilateral relations and apply those consequences consistently. At the same time, it should encourage its allies to consider such conduct when making decisions on aid, trade, and diplomatic support. States should understand that activity against Israel in international forums carries a price in their direct relations with Israel and its partners.