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“A move to downgrade Israel’s status at the United Nations would be a new low, even for an organization that is as rife with antisemites as the U.N.,” Sen. Tom Cotton said.

Andrew Bernard

(JNS)

Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho), ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and 27 other Republican senators introduced legislation on Tuesday that would cut off U.S. funding to the United Nations and its subsidiary agencies if they downgrade Israel’s status.

“Reports indicate that the Palestinian Authority will attempt to downgrade Israel’s status at the United Nations” following a U.N. General Assembly vote in May, the 28 senators wrote. That vote saw Palestinians gain new rights within their existing non-member “permanent observer” status, which is short of full U.N. membership.

“Any attempt to alter Israel’s status at the United Nations is clearly antisemitic,” Risch stated. “That said, if the U.N. member states allow the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization to downgrade Israel’s status at the U.N., the U.S. must stop supporting the U.N. system, as it would clearly be beyond repair.”

Risch added that he is “disgusted that this outrageous idea has even been discussed and will do all we can to ensure any changes to Israel’s status will come with consequences.”

Titled the “Stand with Israel Act,” the bill would forbid the federal government from disbursing funds to “the United Nations or any of its funds, programs, specialized agencies or other related entities” if the global body “expels, downgrades or suspends membership, or otherwise restricts the participation of Israel.”

The United States is the United Nation’s largest contributor, giving it and its agencies $18 billion in 2022—about one-third of the total U.N. budget.

Those contributions are mandatory for members of the U.N. General Assembly under the global body’s “assessed contributions” system. Countries that fall into arrears on paying their contributions are stripped of their vote in the General Assembly.

Objections are longstanding in Washington to paying for the budget in Turtle Bay.

In 1982, then-Secretary of State George Schultz threatened U.S. withdrawal from any U.N. body that did not seat Israel. The United States nearly lost its General Assembly vote in a budget dispute in 1999. Former president Donald Trump cut off funding to the U.N. Palestinian aid agency, UNRWA, in 2018 and negotiated a lower overall U.N. budget in 2017.

U.S. President Joe Biden restored funding to UNRWA before suspending it again in March, after Israel accused UNRWA employees of participating directly in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks.

Several of the senators co-sponsoring the Stand with Israel Act said that Jew-hatred at the United Nations undermines the global body’s effectiveness.

“A move to downgrade Israel’s status at the United Nations would be a new low, even for an organization that is as rife with antisemites as the United Nations,” stated Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

“Unfortunately, antisemitism has pervaded the United Nations for decades and discredits the U.N. mission,” stated Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska). “It must end.”

Under existing U.S. law, Washington must cut off funding to the United Nations or any of its subsidiaries if the Palestinians are granted full membership outside of a negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) introduced companion legislation to the Senate act in the House in August with bipartisan support.

Image: Pascale Christine Baeriswyl (left), the Swiss envoy to the United Nations and U.N. Security Council president for October, greets Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian “permanent observer” to the global body, ahead of the Security Council meeting on the situation in the Middle East on Oct. 9, 2024. Credit: Eskinder Debebe/U.N. Photo.

By attending a three-day summit in Russia and lending credence to Putin’s despotism, the U.N. secretary-general is effectively spitting in the faces of both Ukraine and Israel.

Ben Cohen

(JNS)

It’s often said about antisemitism that Jews are the canary in the coal mine: What starts with them won’t end with them, and sooner or later, the rest of society will suffer the consequences of this thoroughly anti-democratic ideology. I’m not going to delve into that proposition here, save to say that while I don’t entirely agree with it, there are times when its core observation can prove useful.

A case in point concerns the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres. Back in June, I gave voice to the disappointment I know is shared by many other Jews over the evolution of his stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After initially appearing quite promising and making all the right noises on why antisemitism is a global threat that needs to be dealt with, Guterres transformed for the worse after the Hamas pogrom in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, joining the chorus chiding the Jewish state on the international stage—from Ireland to South Africa, from Spain to Chile, and all points in between. Particularly disgraceful was his decision to place Israel on a blacklist of countries whose militaries abuse children, alongside such paragons of virtue as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Burma/Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan and Yemen. Other democracies, including the United States, France and the United Kingdom, could easily end up on a list like this given the actions of their militaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, but they don’t because the United Nations understands that the political costs of such an action are minimal only when it comes to Israel.

Now Guterres is burrowing deeper into the authoritarian, conspiracy-addled universe from which antisemitism springs. Last week, the U.N. chief arrived in the Russian city of Kazan for a three-day summit of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) bloc of states, which bills themselves as an alternative to the economic institutions, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that have dominated the post-World War II global order.

The summit was hosted by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who delightedly used the occasion to demonstrate that his illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine hasn’t exactly robbed him of allies. More than 20 world leaders joined him in Kazan, among them Chinese President Xi Jinping, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Other states eager to enter the BRICS fold, including Ethiopia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, also sent senior representatives to sit at Putin’s feet.

By attending the summit in Russia, Guterres was effectively spitting in the faces of both Ukraine and Israel. In doing so, he proved that when you flirt with antisemitism and legitimize its tropes, you open yourself up to embracing all of its associated baggage—fake news, outlandish theories and the recasting of terrorism as a form of “resistance.”

BRICS isn’t an exact copy of the Warsaw Pact—the treaty organization that bound the Soviet Union to its Communist satellite states during the Cold War—but it is certainly making moves in that direction. Among its five founders, only Brazil and India have an interest in keeping relations cordial with Western democracies, but they are no match for Chinese or Russian imperatives in this regard. Meanwhile, South Africa and those states that have knocked on the BRICS door more recently—like Turkey, despite its status as a NATO ally—regard the bloc as much more than an economic association. Critically, BRICS will provide rogue states like Iran and even North Korea with a veneer of legitimacy denied to them in Western circles.

Indeed, none of the subjects that the Russian news agency Tass, quoting a Kremlin statement, reported as being on the agenda at a private meeting between Putin and Guterres concerned trade or economic development.  Their “discussion will be given to pressing issues on the international agenda, including the Middle East crisis and the situation around Ukraine,” the Kremlin said. What Guterres will hear from Putin is the standard Russian line, defaming Ukraine’s democratic government as a collection of “neo-Nazis” and richly complaining, nearly three years into the invasion of Ukraine, that it is Israel’s multi-front defensive war against an axis of Iranian proxies that is causing instability! Meanwhile, Iran continues to supply Russia with missiles and drones, while North Korea has—according to South Korean and Ukrainian intelligence reports—sent thousands of its troops to fight alongside the Russians.

By feting a group of states who represent, in the words of Kyiv Post commentator Orhan Dragas, “a worrying mix of authoritarianism, anti-democratic governance, and war crimes,” Guterres is compromising the basic values of the world body’s founding charter. His presence amounts to an approval of Russia’s actions in Ukraine and the deepening alliance between Moscow and Tehran. The only way to avoid that impression would be for Guterres to state clearly that Russia must withdraw entirely from Ukraine and that Israel, as a sovereign U.N. member state, has an unquestioned right to defend itself against an association of states and client paramilitaries seeking its destruction. He won’t, of course, say anything that comes even close to that.

The elephant in the room here is the U.S.-led alliance of democratic states around the world. Over the last 80 years, there has been any number of reasons for them to ditch the United Nations in favor of a new world organization that doesn’t allow its members to repress their own populations or sew regional havoc in the name of “national sovereignty.” Yet they have not done so, mainly because they fear an outcome in which they are unable to influence or check the behavior of authoritarian states. And with the future of U.S. foreign policy up for grabs ahead of the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5, Putin correctly calculates that now is the perfect time for him to strut the world stage, presenting a vision of international relations that will strengthen the positions of Russia and its allies while weakening ours.

The practical effects of this weakness are already painfully visible. To take a few examples: Qatar—an Iranian ally that practices a form of apartheid by disenfranchising nearly 90% of its population—has been elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council; UNRWA—the U.N. agency solely dedicated to the descendants of Palestinian refugees—continues to function despite copious evidence of the overlap between members of its staff and Hamas; and the U.N.’s top official is breaking bread with a Russian leader eager to revive the threat posed by his country during the Cold War.

I could go on, but it will suffice to say that the head-in-the-sand approach of Western leaders to our fracturing international institutions is in large part responsible for the situation in which we find ourselves. The only real pushback that Guterres has received so far has come from Israel, which has declared him persona non grata. As welcome as that decision is, it is an isolated one that will have little impact until other countries pluck up the courage to follow suit.

Image: U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres meets with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, on the sidelines of the general debate of the General Assembly’s 79th session on Sept. 24, 2024. Credit: Eskinder Debebe/U.N. Photo.