It’s all too rare now for the news to make one smile. But I have to admit to a full-on belly laugh at a story which has been doing the rounds in recent weeks but which is so preposterous that every time it’s mentioned it brings on a large grin.
“Jewish candidate for top UN post wins initial Security Council straw poll”, ran one headline. “Holocaust survivor's daughter leads early UN race to replace Guterres as secretary-general”, went another. The stories refer to Rebeca Grynspan, a former vice president of Costa Rica who is now secretary-general of the UN Trade and Development agency (UNCTAD). Grynspan is being mooted as a “prominent candidate” in the 2026 race to become the next United Nations Secretary-General – not just prominent but the actual front runner.
According to Middle East Eye, “Her parents were European Jewish refugees who fled persecution in the lead-up to the Second World War, while members of her extended family were killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Her sister, Frida Greenspan, moved to Israel at 17 and lives in Mevaseret Zion, near Jerusalem. Her children served in the Israeli military, including as officers. ‘We are Zionists by birth,’ her sister told Ynet. The Israeli newspaper described Rebeca Grynspan as ‘one of the distinctly pro-Israel candidates’ and reported that she has relatives living in the occupied West Bank. Ynet added that ‘she herself is proud of her Jewish heritage, and has maintained close ties with officials in Jerusalem over the years’.”
Given that Middle East Eye is reliably wrong about everything I’d be inclined to think that Grynspan is in fact a practising Catholic. But on this one occasion it seems to have run a story that is vaguely correct. So, of course, you can be sure it doesn’t like the idea of Grynspan. Not at all: “She has rarely placed Israel at the centre of her public political identity, leaving her approach to longstanding UN positions on Palestine largely untested.”
Which is, of course, why the idea of Grynspan as UN Secretary-General is so preposterous. The notion of the UN appointing a Jew as its Secretary-General is, to use the formal term, away with the fairies. Pretty much the only thread that ties together many of the UN’s constituent parts and its member states is a form of institutionalised hate – of Jews and, even more widely, of Israel. Even if Grynspan was not actually Jewish, there would not be the remotest possibility that someone like her who isn’t actively hostile to Israel could become Secretary-General. Attacking Israel is a key part of the job – especially so when Israel is under actual attack.
Take António Guterres, the current Secretary-General, whose term expires this year. The former prime minister of Portugal made clear where he stood a few days after the October 7, 2023 Hamas massacre – when he followed his condemnation of the attacks by in effect blaming Israel, saying that the Hamas attacks "did not happen in a vacuum", adding that Palestinians had endured "56 years of suffocating occupation".
The following month he said Gaza was "becoming a graveyard for children" – joining in the lynch-mob accusing Israel of effectively committing war crimes, despite there being nothing as useful to the accusation as actual evidence. Last December he said there was "something fundamentally wrong in the way this operation was conducted with total neglect in relation to the deaths of civilians and to the destruction of Gaza", and that there were "strong reasons to believe" Israeli forces may have committed war crimes.
In December 2023 Guterres invoked Article 99 of the UN Charter – the Secretary-General's power to bring a threat to international peace to the Security Council's attention – to press for a “ceasefire” – in other words to demand that Israel halt its military operation against Hamas. And shockingly, but not at all surprisingly, it took him 55 days before uttering a single word about the sexual violence committed on October 7. Then in May Guterres's office listed Israel – whose citizens were the victims of sexual violence – on the UN's annual list of parties credibly suspected of conflict-related sexual violence.
Last August Guterres endorsed the IPC finding of famine in Gaza, calling it "a failure of humanity itself". Once again, the absence of evidence for such an accusation did not trouble Guterres. Indeed, a new report using the most recent figures provided by Unicef, WHO, and the World Bank shows that the percentage for severe malnutrition in the UK is 0.4 per cent, in Germany 0.5 per cent, in Egypt 3.3 per cent and Iran 4.3 per cent. In Gaza the figure is between 0.2 per cent and 0.8 per cent.
In April the Jewish People Policy Institute published an analysis of more than 1,100 Guterres statements from January 2017 to April 2026. It found Israel mentioned nearly three times as often as Iran with more than half of Israel references negative – the highest proportion of any country studied – against mostly neutral references to Iran. JPPI president Yedidia Stern: "The picture that emerges is one of a clear gap between the way the UN Secretary-General treats Israel and the way he treats other countries."
All of which makes an interview given this week by Guterres to the Financial Times astonishing. This is a man, remember, who gives every impression of regarding Israel as the main problem in the Middle East and who goes out of his way to berate and attack it. Yet even Guterres believes, as he put it to the FT, that UN special rapporteurs are "completely out of control" over Israel.
Guterres accompanied his words with the standard denial of UN types that the organisation is biased against Israel. Of course; he is hardly likely to accuse himself of bias. But even for a man with so long a record of blaming Israel for the attacks it endures, the behaviour of UN special rapporteurs is a notch too much: “There are different entities in the UN and I cannot respond for the UN in its entirety because there are many entities in the UN that are independent. We have independent rapporteurs, and we have many that are totally out of control, from the point of view of the Secretariat.”
There is, of course, more than one UN rapporteur. But it’s clear which one Guterres had in mind: Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
In August 2022, just months after taking on the role, she tweeted: “Palestinians' right to resist is inherent to their right to exist as a people. An unlawful act of resistance does not make the resistance unlawful.” Her response to October 7 was to talk about Nazi Germany: “Fellow Europeans, Italians, Germans, after the Holocaust, we should instinctively know that genocide starts with dehumanising the other. If Israel's current attack [on] Palestinians doesn't prompt our strong reaction, the darkest page of our recent history has taught us nothing.” She has written of Palestinian “resistance” that “You’re defeated the moment you stop fighting.”
When French President Emmanuel Macron’s called October 7 the “largest antisemitic massacre of our century” she tweeted in response that the victims “were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.” The attack was, she said, a “reminder” of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. She questioned the truth of the sexual assaults and rapes committed on October 7 and has written that “the Israeli lobby is clearly inside [the BBC’s] veins” and has spoken of “Israel’s greed”. In 2024, she retweeted a claim that the “Israel lobby has bought and paid for Congress.” She has written that the US is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby”. These are classic antisemitic tropes.
Many of her accusations about Israel are self-evident nonsense. Last September, for example, she said that “380,000 children under five” were killed in Gaza. When it was put to her at a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council that this is more than the entire population of children under five in Gaza has ever been, Albanese did not respond.
No wonder she has been sanctioned by the US and governments of many different political complexions – including France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria – have sought to have her removed as a UN rapporteur. Even the UK government called earlier this year for an “urgent investigation” into Albanese over her “series of comments.”
But until this week there has been no comment from within the UN on her obvious unsuitability for her role.
Then again, it is becoming something of a pattern for a secretary-general who has acquiesced in the UN’s obsessive anti-Israel bias to distance himself from it as his term ends. But when the departing Secretary-General, Kofi Annan, spoke in December 2006 he went much further. It is worth reading his words at length, because in the subsequent 20 years the issues he highlighted have become so much worse even than the deplorable state of affairs he described: “Palestinians and their supporters will never be truly effective if they focus solely on Israel’s transgressions, without conceding any justice or legitimacy to Israel’s own concerns, and without being willing to admit that Israel’s opponents have themselves committed appalling and inexcusable crimes. No resistance to occupation can justify terrorism.”
…I also believe that the actions of some United Nations bodies may themselves be counterproductive. The Human Rights Council, for example, has already held three special sessions focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict. I hope that the Council will take care to handle the issue in an impartial way, and not allow it to monopolise attention at the expense of other situations where there are no less grave violations, or even worse ones.
“In the same vein, those who complain that the Security Council is guilty of a double standard – applying sanctions to Arab and Muslim Governments, but not to Israel – should take care that they themselves do not apply double standards in the other direction, by holding Israel to a standard of behaviour that they are unwilling to apply to other States, to Israel’s adversaries or, indeed, to themselves.
“Some may feel satisfaction at repeatedly passing General Assembly resolutions or holding conferences that condemn Israel’s behaviour. But one should also ask whether such steps bring any tangible relief or benefit to the Palestinians. There have been decades of resolutions. There has been a proliferation of special committees, sessions and Secretariat divisions and units. Has any of that had an effect on Israel’s policies, other than to strengthen the belief in Israel and among many of its supporters that this great Organisation is too one-sided to be allowed a significant role in the Middle East peace process?
“Even worse, some if the rhetoric used in connection with the issue implies a refusal to concede the very legitimacy of Israel’s existence, let alone the validity of its security concerns. We must never forget that Jews have very good historical reasons for taking seriously any threat to Israel’s existence.
“What was done to Jews and others by the Nazis remains an undeniable tragedy, unique in human history. Today, Israelis are often confronted with words and actions that seem to confirm their fear that the goal of their adversaries is to extinguish their existence as a State and as a people.”
It is all well and good Guterres finally highlighting the problems with Albanese et al, but his denial of the obvious UN bias against Israel renders his complaints about rapporteurs almost meaningless – not least because they were all appointed in his term as secretary-general. Guterres not only stood by while Albanese defiled the very meaning of objectivity: he defended her. Guterres is not a sinner who has repented. He is a hypocrite who has finally come to realise that the rest of us have his measure.
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