There is something almost reassuring about the United Nations General Assembly. However much the world changes, however many wars rage and dictatorships rise and fall, you can be sure that sooner or later, everybody will start hating on Israel.
At this year’s gathering in New York, the hatred came sooner rather than later. What was different, however, was the identity of some of the people doing the hating. During the Cold War, the most lurid denunciations of the Jewish state came from Arab autocrats, Soviet satellites and assorted Third World dictatorships. Western democracies might have criticised Israeli governments – sometimes severely – but they generally retained some sense of proportion.
No longer. This week, the rhetoric of Israeli wickedness was found firmly in the Western mainstream. Take António Guterres. In his final address to the General Assembly as UN Secretary-General, he rightly described the Hamas atrocities of October 7 as “abhorrent”.
But then came the qualification. “What followed,” he said, “was an onslaught on Palestinians in Gaza, with a scale of killing and destruction unlike anything I have witnessed in all my years as Secretary-General.”
Really? As Jon Snow famously remarked in Game of Thrones: “What did father use to say? everything before the word ‘but’ is horse s**t”.
Let’s look at the facts. Guterres has occupied the post since January 2017. His tenure therefore encompasses the Tigray war in Ethiopia, one of the most appalling and under-reported catastrophes of our age, but one of which the UN should really be aware. Estimates of its death toll vary enormously, but as many as 600,000 people are thought to have died through violence, starvation and lack of medical care.
His tenure also encompasses Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where the UN has verified more than 17,000 civilian deaths since February 2022 – while stressing that the true figure is considerably higher – alongside astronomical military casualties. And I don’t even need to mention Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar. These wars may not have commanded the headlines, but they should certainly have commanded the attention of the UN. Guess not.
Gaza is unquestionably a human catastrophe, entirely of Hamas’ making. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been reported killed since October 7, including a significant number of combatants. But the suggestion that nothing in the past decade compares with Gaza is simply malicious nonsense, designed – yet again – to demonise Israel.
Then there was Emmanuel Macron. The French president became so carried away while berating Israel that he found himself claiming that “Hamas has never operated in the West Bank.” I’m not joking; he actually said it. Incredible, no?
As any world leader – especially one who is so vocal about “Palestine” – should understand, Hamas has operated there for decades. Its cells have been repeatedly uncovered; the Palestinian Authority arrests Hamas members. Even Le Monde, hardly a mouthpiece for Benjamin Netanyahu, described Macron’s assertion as a “factual mistake” and said the position was “indefensible”.
Indeed, a French citizen, Netanel Shukrun, a father-of-six, was shot dead on the West Bank just two days before Macron’s speech, by a Hamas gunman.
There was something revealing about Macron’s error. Israel’s critics increasingly appear so certain of the moral architecture of this conflict – powerful Israel, powerless Palestinians, Israel guilty and the Palestinians victims – that facts simply dissolve.
Not so with Netanyahu. Like him or loathe him, and there are plenty of reasons for both, his address on Thursday contained a string of home truths that the diplomatic world needed to hear.
Scores of delegates walked out as he approached the podium, and Netanyahu invited any remaining “moral cowards” to join them. This was vintage Bibi: theatrical, combative, entirely uninterested in making friends and influencing people.
Yet behind the bombast was a solid point. The smear of “genocide” is the new antisemitic trope of our age, enabled by the way in which the international community has developed a herd mentality that sees Israel’s enemies as vague background and Israel’s response as the main event.
Seen in this light, October 7 and Hamas pale into insignificance, and all that remains are Israel’s military campaign on the one hand, and suffering civilians on the other. Hence the purchase of idiotic allegations of “genocide”. Similarly, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Tehran’s nuclear ambitions are brushed off the table, while Israel’s actions are placed beneath an electron microscope.
Of course, this does not mean that everything that Israelis do is automatically justified. Take settler violence. Sure, they are dwarfed by Palestinian terror, but that doesn’t make them right. The Israeli government could be doing a lot more to clamp down upon this, and it is no more entitled to immunity from international law than anybody else.
But that isn’t the problem here. In fact, the problem is the exact opposite: Israel is condemned and criminalised out of all proportion, even when it is innocent.
The most extraordinary feature of the UN’s treatment of Israel has always been its capacity to invert scale. A tiny democracy of roughly ten million people becomes the heart of international wickedness, while vastly bloodier conflicts struggle for diplomatic oxygen.
The result is not merely unfair to Israel. It makes serious diplomacy harder. If Macron cannot even remember that Hamas operates in the West Bank, why should Israelis trust his prescriptions for their security? If Guterres cannot discuss Gaza without reaching for absurd historical superlatives, why should Israelis regard the UN as impartial?
Netanyahu’s great advantage at the UN is that his opponents keep supplying him with material. His great disadvantage is that his own government’s actions frequently supply them with material in return, which they magnify out of all proportion and use as tools of even more propaganda.
A serious international community would condemn settler violence proportionately, while recognising the extraordinary security threats Israel faces.
It would mourn Palestinian civilians without forgetting who began this war on October 7, and who refuses to give up its true ambitions of genocide. And it would subject Israel to the same moral standards as any other country, neither lower nor higher.
Chance would be a fine thing.
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