A few weeks ago, at a ceremony in the headquarters of the United Nations, Secretary-General António Guterres lit an “eternal flame”. Beside him stood Annalena Baerbock, President of the General Assembly. The ceremony was a tribute to UN personnel who had died in the line of duty, and the names of the fallen were solemnly read aloud.
Among them was a man who had given more than a decade of his life to the education of Palestinian children in Gaza as a teacher, then a headmaster, at several UNRWA schools. The Secretary-General told the hall that it had been “the privilege of my life” to work alongside people like him. Such people, he said, “made our world a better place”. He committed himself to “carrying forward their work”.
Guterres may have been entirely sincere. He was also, it turns out, honouring a commander of Hamas. Is it any wonder that Matthias Schmale, the UN’s most senior official in Ukraine, went on the record to say that his own organisation was “no longer fit for purpose”?
The man Guterres was mourning was called Imad Yousif El Samhouri, and we know that he was a jihadi because Hamas told us itself. In a martyr video released by the Al-Qassam Brigades and unearthed this month by UN Watch, El Samhouri was filmed climbing out of the terror tunnels beneath Gaza and identified as a field commander in the Muhammad al-Shamali Battalion of the Al-Qassam Rafah Brigade. “We have chosen jihad as our path,” he says. “Death in the cause of Allah is our highest aspiration.” He gives thanks to God for the tunnels, “a means by which the Zionist enemy never imagines we will emerge from beneath the ground”.
Was this disgraceful scene in Schmale’s mind when he spoke out against his own organisation this week? The German aid official has spent 30 years in humanitarian work and serves as the Secretary-General’s personal representative in Kyiv, which makes him an unlikely candidate for the role of devastating critic. Yet he pulled no punches in an interview with the Telegraph. Reform is required, and urgently, he said, because “we may see, in the not-so-distant future, a collapse of what we have”. Then, with the weariness of a man who knows the data, he added: “I think it’s a really realistic option, sadly, that we may have to collapse to create something new.”
Nothing this radical has been articulated by any senior UN official in living memory. But Schmale didn’t stop there. The League of Nations, he went on – the forerunner of the UN, which was established after the First World War and dismantled after failing to stop the Second – was also built to solve common problems. It too was abandoned once its members grasped that it could not; and when it failed, something new was assembled from the wreckage. His diagnosis is that the disease is structural. Five permanent Security Council members hold a veto, and one of them is currently prosecuting a war of conquest in the country where he works. That member can strike out any attempt to hold it to account.
“That is not appropriate for a global body,” he said, rather stating – or understating – the obvious. As I write, Vladimir Putin’s drone pilots are running what Ukrainians grimly call “safaris” through the markets of Kherson – earlier this month, a 52-year-old woman selling vegetables was hunted down on video – and the Security Council can do nothing, because the man ordering it can overturn every resolution.
Schmale deserves credit for saying this from inside the building. But his diagnosis is far too flattering to his employer, because it locates the rot in the architecture rather than in the institution’s soul. A design flaw may explain why the UN cannot stop Russia, but it does not explain Guterres’ eternal flame.
El Samhouri was not a man leading a double life with any great subtlety. His social media accounts, still publicly available, show him posing with Hamas officials and celebrating the kidnapping and murder of Jews. In his capacity as an educator, he brought Hamas figures into UNRWA schools to address the pupils and preside over ceremonies, and scouted and recruited children into Hamas-linked organisations. UN Watch lists him within a network of more than 400 UNRWA staff with documented terror ties. As Hillel Neuer, its executive director, asked in an open letter to Guterres and Baerbock this month, how many UNRWA teachers must emerge from Hamas tunnels before the UN concedes that the terrorists are not merely beneath its schools but inside them? (You can watch Andrew and I having a fascinating conversation with the heroic Neuer on The Brink here.)
(The President of the General Assembly, incidentally, who also lit that infernal “eternal flame”, signed off €570 million of German taxpayers’ money to UNRWA while she was foreign minister.)
An institution can be unlucky, of course. One rotten employee, one embarrassing ceremony; these things happen in any organisation of 30,000 people. But this is not an aberration. It is a culture, and the culture has a clear target. We see it in the UN Human Rights Council maintaining a permanent agenda item, Item 7, dedicated to the condemnation of a single country, a body chaired at one point by Iran. We see it in Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur, insisting that the perpetrators of October 7 were not “cut-throats, people armed to the teeth, or fighters” but a “political force”. We see it in Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, telling Radio 4 that 14,000 babies would die in Gaza “within 48 hours” – a false claim which was repeated by 13 MPs in Parliament before quietly evaporating without a single resignation, neither from Fletcher nor anybody else.
We see it in the General Assembly standing in silence to mourn Ebrahim Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, and lowering its flags to half-mast for him. Only last month, the UN elected Algeria to preside over a key body overseeing human rights. This month it made Eritrea, a country that conscripts its own citizens indefinitely, chair of the Human Rights Council’s Social Forum.
The pattern is not difficult to read. This is an assembly in which democracies are outnumbered by autocracies and kleptocracies seeking global legitimacy, and in which a great many members derive domestic advantage from the ritual denunciation of the Jewish state. The moral authority offered by the brand, in other words, is freely given to the world’s worst regimes, which use it to further their nasty interests.
Which is why Schmale’s honesty, admirable as it is, does not go nearly far enough. Even if the UN abolished the veto tomorrow, enlarged the Security Council, handed permanent seats to countries in Africa, rewrote the governance and adopted every one of the 56 commitments for reform contained in the UN’s 2024 “Pact for the Future”, the crisis would not be solved. A body that lights an eternal flame for a man who filmed himself climbing out of a terror tunnel does not only have a procedural problem.
The League of Nations failed not because of its committee structure, but because it could see perfectly well that Mussolini was invading Abyssinia with mustard gas in 1935, named it, and then did nothing effective to stop it. Understandably, this led its members to conclude that an institution which cannot act with firmness is not worth defending. Fast-forward to today and Schmale thinks collapse is now a realistic option. On the evidence of the “eternal flame”, I am no longer sure it would be a tragedy.
But collapse into what? Before we can answer that, we need to understand how the organisation arrived here. Because this began long before Gaza. In fact, it began in Moscow.
After the Six Day War of 1967, the Kremlin – which had bankrolled the defeated Arab armies and watched millions of dollars of Soviet hardware turn to scrap in the Sinai — turned its formidable disinformation apparatus against the Jewish state. As I explain in Israelophobia, the campaign had a name – Sionistskiye Gosudarstva, or “Zionist Governments” – and a patron in Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB and later leader of the country. Its output ran to millions of books, articles and broadcasts. Yuri Ivanov’s founding text, Beware: Zionism!, sold 800,000 copies in 16 languages, from Arabic and French to Estonian and Slovak. The Novosti Press Agency, later reincarnated as Russia Today, coordinated the operation across 110 countries.
Ion Mihai Pacepa, the most senior intelligence officer ever to defect from the Soviet bloc, estimated that by 1978, some 4,000 agents of influence had been dispatched into the Islamic world alone, carrying Arabic editions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with them. The object, as the historian Izabella Tabarovsky has documented, was to empty Zionism of its meaning as a movement of national liberation and refill it with racism, fascism, colonialism and apartheid.
The UN was where that campaign cashed in. In 1974, Yasser Arafat famously addressed the General Assembly with a holster on his hip and denounced “imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism, the chief form of which is Zionism”. A year later, after nearly a decade of Soviet and Arab lobbying, the Assembly passed Resolution 3379, which declared that Zionism was a form of racism. Writing in the Spectator at the time, the journalist Goronwy Rees understood precisely what was at stake. “The fundamental thesis was that to be a Jew, and to be proud of it, and to be determined to preserve the right to be a Jew, is to be an enemy of the human race”, he lamented.
British students’ unions began banning Jewish societies. The resolution was only repealed in December 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Yet, as we see all around us today, the lies live on.
One of the reasons that the machine outlived its manufacturer, so to speak, was because the UN coalition that confirmed the lie that “Zionism is racism” was not limited to the Soviets. It was formed of the Eastern bloc plus the Arab states and the Non-Aligned Movement, and that arithmetic has endured. Given the history, that should be no surprise; while the organisation was founded by 51 states, many of them democracies fresh from the defeat of fascism, the majority of its 193 current members are not democracies at all.
In that greater global struggle between freedom and corrupt autocracy, Israel in itself has never really been the point. Why should it be? As Saul Bellow wrote in 1976, it is “territorially insignificant”, with a small population and no hostile regional ambitions. It has always been taken as a symbol rather than a real place. It has become a cipher for the West, and in recent years, the West has been complicit in its own destruction.
At the UN, Israel has always been the most convenient stand-in for everything the Third World bloc resented about the countries that had built the organisation. The notorious UN Durban conference in 2001 collapsed into open Jew-hatred. When it reconvened in 2009, the only head of state who spoke was then-Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who used the platform to call the Holocaust “ambiguous and dubious”. In the minds of the world’s worst regimes, this was not simply a peace forum that could be used as a battlefield, but it was never a peace forum in the first place. Add to this the waves of propaganda since October 7, and we find ourselves at a point where any regime that jails its journalists, disappears its dissidents and starves its people can purchase a great deal of moral cover in New York for the price of a speech about Palestine.
So the UN collapses. What then? Not nothing, one hopes; but given the decline of American hegemonic power, probably not one grand successor either. In truth, the UN has always been two organisations wearing a single badge. The unglamorous half works rather well. Aircraft do not collide because the International Civil Aviation Organisation sets the standards; letters cross borders because of the Universal Postal Union; the radio spectrum is allocated, epidemics are tracked, and humanitarian convoys reach the front line (Schmale’s own operation has run more than 5,000 of them in Ukraine). Nobody’s conscience was ever troubled by the Universal Postal Union.
It is the darker side that requires replacement. The stark truth is that the UN’s moral and political organs – the Human Rights Council, the Special Rapporteurs, the Assembly’s inexhaustible supply of resolutions – have been captured by states with a direct interest in ensuring that the phrase “human rights” means whatever they need it to mean to further their interests, which usually involves subverting Israel and the West (often with the latter’s cooperation). Those functions could be rebuilt among nations that practise what they profess: a league of democracies, if you like, with membership conditional on free elections, an independent judiciary and a press at liberty to insult the government without a knock at the door late at night.
Of course, America may no longer be willing to underwrite such a project. Washington is withholding nearly $4 billion from the UN and has left 31 of its agencies, while Beijing slow-walks its own contributions for leverage. But the decline of American influence is surely the argument for building something that does not depend upon a hegemon. The world’s democracies remain not just the wealthiest countries on Earth (the G7 alone accounts for 44 per cent of world GDP in nominal terms), but their culture of freedom allows for innovation, flourishing and happiness. Thirty or 40 of them sharing the bill would command more genuine moral authority than a chamber of 193 in which Eritrea chairs the forum on human rights. And they pay the lion’s share of the UN budget anyway.
It may be that the autocracies form a rival group of their own, but at least we’d know which side we were on, and would be free to actually do good in the world without it being subverted constantly from within. Something of the sort has been proposed before, by the late John McCain among others, and was dismissed at the time as unworkable. It looks a good deal less unworkable now.
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