Last week, on my final day as Israel’s international spokesperson at the United Nations, I took one last walk through its hallowed corridors overlooking New York City’s East River. For two years, those hallways and chambers had been my workplace. History unfolded in real time here — from emergency Security Council sessions being convened at the beginning of the 12-day war involving Israel, Iran and the United States, to recently released Israeli hostages taking the stage to share their harrowing experiences.
I also witnessed something more troubling within these walls: an institution that too often seemed to have lost sight of the critical mission for which it was created.
For eight decades, the United Nations stood as the world’s foremost symbol of international cooperation. Built on 18-acre land donated by John D. Rockefeller Jr. and established from the ashes of the failed League of Nations, its purpose was ambitious but clear: to provide a forum where diplomacy could triumph over conflict and where every nation, large or small, could seek peaceful solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges.
That vision remains as compelling today as it was in 1945. Yet after spending two years inside the institution, I came away convinced that the United Nations is confronting a profound crisis of credibility, and that 2026 may well determine whether it regains the world’s confidence or continues its slide into irrelevance.
Nowhere has that crisis been more evident than in the UN’s treatment of Israel. Time and again, I watched agencies and committees established to uphold universal principles devote an inexplicably disproportionate amount of attention to Israel while some of the globe’s worst human-rights abusers escaped comparable scrutiny, or even mention. Rather than serving as impartial arbiters, too many UN officials and mechanisms appeared to become participants in political campaigns that undermined confidence in the institution itself.
And more often than not, the issue extended beyond rhetoric. Hundreds of employees of Unrwa have been found to have been complicit in terrorist activity, including in the appalling atrocities of October 7. Allegations of this magnitude should have prompted deep institutional soul-searching. Instead, UN leadership adopted a policy of denial, which further eroded public trust in an organisation whose legitimacy depends upon its impartiality.
The same pattern has emerged elsewhere across the UN system. Watchdog organisations such as UN Watch have repeatedly documented instances in which independent human rights experts like Francesca Albanese and Reem Alsalem have appeared to eviscerate the line between impartial investigation and political activism. Whether one agrees with every criticism is almost beside the point. The perception that the United Nations applies different standards to different countries has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Nor is the institution only facing a crisis of confidence. It is facing a financial one as well. The outgoing secretary-general, António Guterres, has warned that the organisation is effectively racing toward insolvency, with a significant number of member states failing to pay their assessed contributions on time. An institution that struggles to fund its own operations cannot credibly claim to be equipped to solve the world’s most pressing challenges.
Yet despite all of this, I have not lost faith in the promise behind the United Nations. In fact, working inside the institution strengthened my appreciation for why it exists. In an increasingly fragmented world, there remains enormous value in having one place where virtually every nation can sit around the same table. Even amid bitter disagreements, diplomats continue to meet, negotiate and, occasionally, make progress. Those conversations rarely generate headlines, but they matter. The alternative – a world with no global forum at all or where that forum exists in a non-democratic capital – is far less appealing.
That is why the stakes this year are so significant. With Guterres concluding his tenure at the end of 2026, the UN has an opportunity for genuine renewal. The race to succeed him comes at a moment when confidence in the institution has rarely been lower, yet the need for effective international diplomacy has rarely been greater. Encouragingly, nearly every serious candidate hoping to lead the UN has acknowledged the same uncomfortable truth that it must change if it hopes to remain relevant.
Former Senegalese president Macky Sall has argued that the organisation “should be reformed to be efficient”. Costa Rican economist Rebeca Grynspan, who is vying to become the first female secretary-general in UN history, has warned that trust in the UN is eroding and that defending the institution requires “the courage to change it”. At the same time, the US – the UN’s largest financial contributor – has begun pressing for sweeping reforms to reduce bureaucracy, improve efficiency and restore accountability. Nearly every day, I watched tour guides lead groups of students and visitors through the UN headquarters. They would stop inside the cavernous General Assembly chamber and look on toward the iconic green marble podium and listen as guides explained the organisation’s founding purpose. For many, it was their first encounter with the idea that the nations of the world should have a place dedicated not to war, but to peace.
Their sense of wonder always stayed with me. The United Nations has spent too many years squandering goodwill and undermining confidence in its own institutions. It has too often fallen short of the principles it was created to defend. But institutions can reform and, with the right leadership, can once again earn the trust they have lost.
The coming year offers perhaps the best opportunity in a generation for the United Nations to begin doing exactly that. For the sake of an increasingly divided world that still desperately needs a place where genuine diplomacy can prevail over conflict, I hope it does.
Jonathan Harounoff is Israel’s former international spokesperson at the UN and the award-winning author of Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt
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