Category Archives: United Nations

Guterres Informs That Holocaust Remembrance Is About the UN, Not Jews

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On Holocaust Remembrance Day, António Guterres reached for the safest symbol available: Nuremberg. He spoke of universal lessons, multilateralism, and the dangers of unchecked hatred. It sounded solemn, but it was evasive. By invoking Nuremberg instead of Eichmann, the UN spun a story in which institutions matter more than victims, and legality matters more than justice.

That choice is not accidental. It is institutional self-protection.

Why the UN Prefers Nuremberg

The International Military Tribunal flatters multilateral ideals. It universalizes guilt, diffuses responsibility, and allows the UN to present itself as the heir to postwar justice. It avoids a harder truth: the world did not finish the job. Genocide went unnamed. Jewish extermination was evidence, not the charge. Many perpetrators melted back into ordinary life.

The Nuremberg trials were necessary but insufficient. And on Holocaust Remembrance Day, sufficiency is the point.

“I have always understood the clear link between the horrors of the Holocaust and the spirit of multilateralism, justice and rights that founded our organization. Just over 80 years ago, the Nuremberg trials began. These trials represented the beginning of a new era in international criminal law; an era 78 which individuals, including the most powerful, are held accountable. Today, more than ever, we need to reclaim that spirit.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Eichmann Is the Missing Sentence—And the Turning Hinge

The trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem did what Nuremberg did not. It named genocide as genocide. It put survivor testimony at the center. It replaced bureaucratic fog with individual culpability. Eichmann was not tried as a generic war criminal; he was judged as an architect of the annihilation of Jews.

Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem, many years after the Nuremberg trials

As Hannah Arendt observed, the case exposed how extermination was operationalized by ordinary men. And it exposed a global failure: Eichmann lived freely for years after the war. Many like him were never tried at all.

That is why Eichmann is not an “example” to be mentioned in passing. He is the pivot of postwar justice—the moment when the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged as what it was.

Universalism That Erases the Crime

Guterres’s language collapses the Holocaust into a general warning about hatred. of course hatred matters. But flattening the crime turns extermination into general prejudice and genocide into an abstraction. The Holocaust was not simply bigotry run amok; it was a state-organized project to destroy a people everywhere it could reach them.

“let us together pledge to stand against antisemitism and all forms of hatred — and against bigotry, racism and discrimination anywhere and everywhere.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on Holocaust Remembrance Day

Universalism should follow truth—not replace it. When remembrance avoids naming genocide plainly, “Never Again” becomes a slogan that comforts institutions rather than indicts them.

The Uncomfortable Lesson the UN Avoids

The defining act of Holocaust justice did not come from the UN system. It came from a Jewish state acting unilaterally. Without Israel, Eichmann would have died untried, his crimes dissolved into postwar amnesia. That is not a political claim; it is a historical conclusion.

The UN prefers Nuremberg because Eichmann exposes its limits. Nuremberg affirms process; Eichmann exposes failure. One reviews general war crimes while the other points the finger squarely at demonic antisemitism. One is safe to cite as the other forces accountability.

Holocaust Remembrance Day is not a seminar on international law. It is a reckoning with a singular crime and a singular abandonment. The Jewish state does not exist to teach the world lessons, but we see plainly that the world failed to protect Jews—and then failed to prosecute their murderers. And it fails to recognize the clear difference to this day – on the very day designated to remember.

The Line That Cannot Be Dodged

Remembrance without judgment is theater. On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the honest citation is not Nuremberg’s promise but Eichmann’s dock. One symbolizes aspiration. The other delivered judgment.

If the UN wants this day to mean more than ritual, it must say the truth it avoids: the Holocaust was finally understood, named, and judged because Jews had a state willing to act when the world would not. That is not a complication of remembrance. It is its core.

The Myth of Pocketbooks

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The United Nations has chosen the wrong enemy.

António Guterres wants the world to believe that peace can be engineered with a spreadsheet — that inequality is the disease, redistribution the cure, and justice a matter of financial rearrangement. In his January 15 address, he warned that concentrated wealth corrupts institutions and that most low-development countries are in conflict. The implication is unmistakable: balance the books and peace will follow.

“The top 1 per cent holds 43 per cent of global financial assets.  And last year alone, the richest 500 individuals added $2.2 trillion to their fortunes.

Increasingly, we see a world where the ultra-wealthiest and the companies they control are calling the shots like never before — wielding outsized influence over economies, information, and even the rules that govern us all.

When a handful of individuals can bend global narratives, sway elections, or dictate the terms of public debate, we are not just facing inequality — we are facing the corruption of institutions and our shared values.” – UNSG Antonio Guterres

But choosing the wrong enemy guarantees the wrong war.

Because evil is not an accounting problem.

The UN’s failure begins in its diagnosis. It treats terrorism as a social pathology when it is, in fact, an ideological one.

Terrorism is not born in empty wallets. It is born in minds captured by belief.

Two decades of research have demolished the claim that poverty causes terror. Terrorists are rarely the poorest of the poor. They are often educated, middle-class, and technically trained — the engineers of jihad, the lawyers of holy war. The suicide bomber is seldom starving. He is convinced.

If poverty produced terrorism, the poorest societies would be its factories. They are not. Many desperately poor states remain largely untouched by global jihad, while terror movements arise from politically radicalized societies with functioning middle classes and ideological incubators.

What correlates with terrorism is not poverty, but ideas combined with power: religious absolutism, revolutionary nationalism, grievance cultures, and failed identity — not failed GDP.

Arab girls at the Dalal Mughrabi High School for Girls, named after a terrorist who killed dozens of Israelis, including 13 school children

This is not an academic distinction. It is the fault line between clarity and catastrophe.

If money could defeat jihad, Gaza would be the proof. It is not — it is the refutation.

Gaza has received billions in international aid. What emerged was not prosperity, but the most elaborate terrorist war machine ever embedded in a civilian population: tunnels beneath hospitals, command bunkers under schools, rockets from playgrounds, children trained for martyrdom.

This was not a failure of funding. It was the success of ideology. And the UN instigates that very ideology claiming that Israel should have no sovereign control of who enters its country, and specifically that almost every Arab living in Gaza will move into Israel with UN support.

“We are totally committed in the cause of peace in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and far beyond.” – UNSG Antonio Guterres

Hamas did not build tunnels because Gazans were poor. Hamas built tunnels because its charter demands Israel’s destruction, because martyrdom is sacred, because jihad is identity. Money did not create this worldview — it merely financed its execution.

You can flood a society with aid, but if its governing ideology is annihilationist, all you finance is a more capable war machine.

Once the UN misdiagnoses ideology as economics, the next failure becomes inevitable.

For decades, it has constructed and sustained a grievance system around the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) that functions symbiotically with jihadist aims. Through its agencies and resolutions, it has promised millions of SAPs who have never lived in Israel that they will one day “return” en masse into Israel — effectively proposing Israel’s demographic erasure through mass population transfer via international decree.

No state can survive if an external body claims authority over who may enter it and redefine its citizenship from the outside. Yet the UN has made this assault on sovereignty a central plank of its Palestine policy — while calling it “humanitarian.”

Through UNRWA’s unique multigenerational refugee status, displacement becomes inherited identity rather than a temporary humanitarian condition. Grievance becomes doctrine. Statelessness becomes culture. A territorial dispute becomes a perpetual weapon.

And then the UN asks for more money to sustain it.

Why does the UN persist in this inversion?

Because it refuses to judge belief systems.

It will not confront jihad as an ideology.
It will not describe Islamic terrorism as such.
It will not wade into cultural or civilizational dynamics because it sees itself as a neutral global body.

But neutrality toward ideology does not produce peace. It produces permission.

And because the UN will not fight belief systems, it substitutes economics.

It reframes terror as inequality.
It reframes jihad as deprivation.
It reframes mass murder as misallocated capital.

In doing so, it becomes part of a broader machinery seeking to shift wealth and power from the Global North to the Global South — not merely for development, but as moral rebalancing, regardless of whether this addresses the real drivers of violence.

Redistribution becomes its ritual response whenever violence erupts.

Which means: more authority, more money, more relevance for the UN.

This is not accidental. It is institutional self-preservation dressed as virtue.

So the world is invited to believe the problem is billionaires rather than beheaders. That terror is born from inequality rather than indoctrination. That peace will come from redistribution rather than defeating enemies.

Evil is not a pocketbook problem.
It is an ideology.

And no amount of redistribution will make a death cult lay down its weapons.

Expendable Civilians: the Warning Signs in 2026

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Modern conflict is collapsing into a single, repeatable failure mode: when armed power replaces legitimacy, civilian life becomes expendable—and the international system normalizes the outcome rather than correcting it.

From Syria to Yemen, from the Gaza Strip to Somalia and Sudan, different wars follow the same script. Flags and slogans change; outcomes do not. Cities empty, economies collapse, millions flee, and societies become permanent humanitarian wards while armed elites persist.

The mechanics of collapse

Across all five regions, the structure repeats with grim consistency. Power flows from weapons rather than consent, with ideology serving as authority instead of constraining it. Civilians become leverage—through hunger, displacement, and terror—while the outside world manages suffering rather than ending the conditions that cause it.

These dynamics differ in context and scale. They converge in result.

Different conflicts, identical results

Syria survives by sacrificing its cities and people.
Yemen turns famine into strategy in a proxy war.
Gaza shows armed rule embedded among civilians, shifting the cost of war onto the population.
Somalia normalizes permanent instability under jihadist entrenchment.
Sudan mirrors the same logic through rival armed elites hollowing out cities and driving mass displacement.

The human outcome is uniform.

A shared demographic reality

Each of these societies is overwhelmingly Muslim-majority— above 90 percent. This matters for clarity. These disasters do not arise from religious diversity or minority rule. They unfold in largely homogeneous societies where armed authority crowds out the chance for peaceful legitimate governance. Shared faith does not restrain violence. Only accountable institutions do—and they are absent across all five.

Two warnings for 2026

First: recognition divorced from reality.
The push to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state reflects a dangerous inversion. Recognition is meant to affirm effective governance, restraint of armed actors, and protection of civilians. Gaza demonstrates the opposite. Armed rule persists, civilians absorb the cost, and failure deepens. Recognition under these conditions elevates symbolism over survival and legitimizes collapse.

Second: repression without war.
In Iran, an ideological regime in power since 1979 faces economic decline and eroding legitimacy. The response has been internal violence—security forces firing on civilians, mass arrests, repression replacing consent. Iran shows the same pattern without a battlefield: when legitimacy collapses, violence becomes governance.

The United Nations: institutionalizing failure

The United Nations was founded to prevent this exact depravity. Eighty years on, it increasingly fosters it.

The UN grants equal procedural authority—votes, committee chairs, agenda control—to entities regardless of whether they govern responsibly or sacrifice their populations. Collapse carries no institutional penalty. In January 2026, the UN Security Council, the highest body at the UN, handed the gavel to Somalia, a state unable to protect its citizens or control its territory. Committee chairs shape agendas, manage debate, and mute scrutiny. The signal was unmistakable: mass failure has no consequence.

Somalia assumes head of UN Security Council in January 2026

This structure protects actors who weaponize civilians, including groups like Hamas, while rewarding states that export instability. Humanitarian agencies attempt to save lives on the ground, but UN governance shields the forces that endanger them. Through regional rotation, states implicated in mass civilian harm routinely gain seats, votes, and leadership roles across UN committees—including those charged with protecting human rights—without meeting any threshold of civilian protection.

Entities that systematically sacrifice civilians should lose voting rights and committee authority until they demonstrate basic standards of governance and restraint. Without consequences, international law becomes theater and failure becomes permanent.

The verdict

Syria, Yemen, Gaza, Somalia, Sudan—and the trajectory now visible in Iran—show what follows when sovereignty outweighs civilian life and armed power is indulged as politics. By preserving authority for collapsing entities, the United Nations has become part of the problem it was created to solve.

Civilian survival and protection must be the minimum requirement for legitimacy. If the UN cannot reform to enforce that standard INTERNALLY, then eighty years after its founding, it stands as a faint shadow of its founding principles at best, and an enabler of mass atrocities at worst.

UNRWA’s Jerusalem Exception

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Every UN humanitarian agency coordinates with the authority that governs where it operates—except in Jerusalem. That exception is not a footnote. It is the story. And it exposes a mandate failure driven by politics, not humanitarian necessity.

UNRWA holds that humanitarian work requires coordination with governing authorities. In practice, it does so almost everywhere: with Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Authority—and even with Hamas in Gaza, despite Hamas’s terrorist designation by the United States, the EU, the UK, and others.

In Jerusalem alone, UNRWA refuses to coordinate with Israel, the authority exercising full municipal, policing, and regulatory control over the city.

Call it “coordination for access” if you like. It is still coordination. And municipal coordination is not a sovereignty concession (if one believes that Israel does not have sovereignty over eastern Jerusalem despite annexing it in 1980); it is a humanitarian necessity.

How the Facilities Came to Exist

UNRWA’s Jerusalem facilities were established between 1949 and 1967, when Jordan seized and annexed the eastern half of the city in a move not recognized by the UN or the international community. UNRWA nonetheless coordinated with the Hashemite authorities to build schools, clinics, and service centers—because humanitarian work requires coordination with whoever governs in fact.

That history matters. UNRWA’s Jerusalem footprint exists specifically because it once coordinated with an unrecognized occupier.

UNRWA offices in Jerusalem (photo: First One Through)

The Reversal

In 1967, Jordan entered the war, violated the armistice, and lost control of Jerusalem. Israel assumed governance and unified the city. Palestinian Arab residents became permanent residents with access to Israeli courts, healthcare, municipal services, and the right to apply for citizenship.

At that point, UNRWA reversed its logic. Where it coordinated with Jordan despite non-recognition, it now refuses to coordinate with Israel—by labeling eastern Jerusalem “occupied Palestinian territory,” theoretically negating its obligation to work with Israel.

That label sits uneasily with the UN’s own history. The 1947 Partition Plan never intended Jerusalem—east or west—to belong to an Arab state. The city was designated a corpus separatum, an internationally administered entity. Jerusalem was never meant to be Arab sovereign territory.

The contours of “Corpus Separatum” (in pink) in the United Nations 1947 Partition Plan stretched over Greater Bethlehem and Greater Jerusalem, marking the region as an international Holy Basin to be administered by the UN

An Outlier by Design

UNRWA’s mandate emphasizes cooperation with local authorities to ensure access, security, and civilian protection. That cooperation exists everywhere except Jerusalem. UNRWA coordinates with armed groups and unrecognized authorities elsewhere, yet refuses coordination with the governing authority in the city where coordination is most essential.

Refusing to coordinate with the authority responsible for public safety is not neutrality. It is an affirmative political act—one that inverts humanitarian logic by privileging narrative over civilian protection. UN immunity exists to facilitate coordination, not to replace it.

Continuity of Care—and the Standoff

Israel has enacted laws to shutter UNRWA offices in Jerusalem. UNRWA refuses to comply, invoking immunity and operating facilities largely outside municipal oversight. The confrontation exists because UNRWA chose inconsistency in the one city where consistency matters most.

“The UNRWA Jerusalem Health Centre, which serves hundreds of Palestine refugee patients every day is, for most of them, their only possibility of having access to primary healthcare….
These [Israeli] measures are a violation of the inviolability of United Nations premises and an obstacle to the implementation of the clear mandate of the General Assembly for UNRWA’s continued operations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres January 15, 2026

The closure of UNRWA offices in Jerusalem would not create a humanitarian vacuum. Education, healthcare, and social services are already provided through municipal systems, national institutions, other UN bodies, and a dense NGO network operating in the city. What would end is not care delivery, but UNRWA’s parallel governance model.

Palestinian Arabs in Jerusalem rely daily on municipal emergency services, hospitals, and courts. UNRWA’s non-coordination removes the safety mechanisms coordination is meant to provide—for civilians, staff, students, and patients alike.

The Reckoning

UNRWA coordinated with Jordan when Jordan’s rule was unrecognized. It coordinates with Hamas despite terrorist designations. Yet it refuses to coordinate with Israel while Israel governs the city, extends legal status to its Arab residents, and has a network of service providers which can easily replace UNRWA in Jerusalem.

That is not humanitarian principle. It is selective politics.

Consistency is the minimum requirement of a mandate.
A mandate that works everywhere but Jerusalem is not a mandate—it is a message, and it is that UNRWA is not a humanitarian organization.

UNRWA remains a rusty tool of the 1947 Partition Plan which insists that holy sites in Jerusalem never fall under Jewish rule.

The Critical and Ignored Lessons From the Most Important Poll in the Middle East 

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The near-term ramifications of Hamas’s war against Israel are being crystalized. Hamas’s leadership is decimated and Gaza is in ruins. The political-terrorist group’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iran and Yemen have been dealt severe blows, perhaps fatal for some. Hamas’s cheerleaders in the Global North are the only ones to have gathered momentum, particularly in Australia and the United States where hunting season for Jews has a seemingly open permit.

To gain insight for the next tactical steps, world leaders are looking at the current situation and polls since October 7, 2023 and have drafted proposals and taken initial actions: The United Kingdom and Canada recognized a Palestinian State. The U.S.’s Trump administration put forward a plan for Gaza which would include a new governing entity. The West hopes that the targeted assaults and murder of Jews will peter out along with the end of war. And the United Nations keeps playing the same tune about supporting UNRWA.

These are bad decisions and conclusions, made on faulty assumptions.

There is an organization that has been polling Palestinian Arabs for decades, called the Palestinian Center for POLICY and SURVEY RESEARCH (PCPSR). It conducted a poll of Arabs in Gaza and the West Bank, just before the Hamas-led war, from September 28 to October 8, 2023. Because of the war, the results did not get published until June 26, 2024, and the world was too focused on the war to pay it any attention. It is deeply unfortunate, and it is required reading to help chart a better future for the region.

To start with the poll’s conclusions:

  • A large percentage of Palestinian Arabs have wanted to leave Gaza and the West Bank for years, not from the current destruction
  • Arabs are fed up with their own government – Hamas and the Palestinian Authority – much more than Israeli “occupation”
  • Canada is viewed much like Qatar for Gazans, a sympathetic haven

Palestinian Arabs Wanted to Emigrate Before the War

According to PCPSR, whether in October 2023 or November 2021, roughly 33% of Gazans and 20% of West Bank Arabs wanted to leave the region.

Men below age 30 make up the vast majority of those seeking to emigrate. As opposed to Gaza where both educated and uneducated people want to leave, it is the educated West Bank population that wants to move away. Among those wishing to leave, many would not vote in Palestinian elections, or if they would, they would sooner vote for third parties over Fatah or Hamas.

Palestinian Leadership is the Curse, More than Israel

The number one reason for wanting to leave was economic conditions by a far margin. Reasons two and three were political reasons and educational opportunities. “Security reasons” came in fourth, with only 7% of Gazans focused on security; 12% overall. Corruption, religious reasons and to reunite with family rounded out the poll.

Canada as a Beacon

Turkey and Germany were the two most favorite destinations, especially for Gazans. Very few Gazans (3%) considered the United States, while West Bank Arabs put it as the number one choice (17%), likely seeking advanced degrees at left-wing universities. What is remarkable, is more of the Stateless Arabs (SAPs) would prefer going to Canada (11%) than Qatar (9%), the wealthy Muslim Arab nation that is a main sponsor of Hamas.

Honest Takeaways

These pre-war results leads to some basic and critical conclusions.

  • Complete Overhaul of Palestinian leadership, not just in Gaza

The desire of Arabs to leave was evident across both Gaza and the West Bank for many years. This was not a reaction to bombing or siege; it was a verdict on governance.

Hamas in Gaza rules through repression, diversion of aid, and religious militarism. The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank offers corruption, authoritarianism, and political stagnation. Together they have produced a society with no credible economic horizon, no accountable leadership, and no peaceful mechanism for change.

While a new entity is needed to administer Gaza, that role should be akin to a Chief Operating Officer overseeing construction. The Palestinian Authority itself needs to be gutted and rebuilt as it is a corrupt, unpopular and ineffective entity.

  • The United Nations Must Withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank

In its desire to create a Palestinian state, the U.N. has stripped the titular heads of Palestine of any responsibility. The UN protects Hamas despite its savagery. It props up the Palestinian Authority despite its rampant corruption. Palestinian leadership is a bed of paper scorpions.

The UN must withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank and allow local authorities to build a functioning leadership team.

  • The West Should Rescind Recognition of Palestine

There is no functioning Palestinian government and therefore no basic standard to recognize a Palestinian State. The United Kingdom, Australia and others should withdraw their recognition and make it conditional on building governing institutions that can lead and make peace with the Jewish State next door.

  • Reeducation in the West

The massacre did not arise from a sudden spike in pressure. It emerged from long-standing internal failure. Hamas chose atrocity because it couldn’t commit a complete genocide of Jews so exploited its own population to be fodder for Israel.

Western audiences were then handed a familiar script, complete with pictures. But the data taken just before the massacre tells a different story—one far more consequential. What is being taught in western public schools is divorced from reality and feeds global and local antisemitism.

  • Oh No, Canada

While the fears of antisemitism are focused on the United States and Australia because of recent attacks on Jews, Canada is in the hearts and minds of Palestinian Arabs seeking a warm diaspora community. Perhaps it started a decade ago under Justin Trudeau who followed U.S.’s President Barack Obama to embrace the Palestinian cause and Iranian regime over Israel. Perhaps it is because of the welcome mat for extremists groups like Samidoun. Or perhaps it is the perception that the heckler’s veto is fair game, and can run Jewish families off Canadian streets.

Whatever the inspiration, Canada is widely perceived as permissive, ideologically indulgent, and administratively porous—an attractive environment for “political activism” untethered from civic responsibility. It is a ticking time bomb.

The poll of Palestinian Arabs on the eve of the October 7 war reveals deeper truths than surface shots of leveled homes. The PCPSR findings point to a single truth: the Palestinian problem is fundamentally internal.

Ending Israeli control over territory without dismantling corrupt and extremist institutions will not deliver prosperity or peace. Statehood layered on top of dysfunction will harden it. And exporting populations shaped by jihadist rule into permissive Western societies without serious screening and integration, risks importing instability rather than relieving it.

It’s Not You, It’s UN

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Of the many classic lines from the TV sitcom Seinfeld, “it’s not you, it’s me,” is a great one, used as an excuse to get out of a relationship. It’s a phrase familiar to anyone who has ever been in a relationship which one party simply does not enjoy and wants to terminate gently.

There is no relationship so poorly constructed and toxic today as between Israel and the United Nations, harmonious at the start but broken bit by bit since that time. In an effort to complete it’s desire of completing the creation of two states, a Jewish one and Arab one as conceived in the General Assembly vote of partition in November 1947, the institution has fabricated lies and noxious resolutions against Israel and Jewish dignity everywhere.

Follow what the UN does, and what it says, and a stark pattern emerges: Palestinian Arabs are granted surplus political rights across the entire map, while Israel is denied the basic attributes of sovereignty. This is not mediation. It is architecture, scaffolding producing a permanent conflict.

1) Start with the most basic injustice: where Jews may live and pray

Begin where ideology becomes lived reality.

Across territory, the UN labels Palestinian Arab non-Jewish residence as inherently legitimate everywhere, while Jewish residence is declared subject in advance, legal where a Jewish State was once allotted but illegal everywhere else. Through instruments like United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334, Jewish civilians are criminalized simply for living beyond armistice lines—before borders are agreed, before negotiations conclude, before sovereignty is determined.

This is unprecedented. In every other territorial dispute on earth, civilian life is separated from sovereignty. Here, it is collapsed—selectively.

Then comes the religious core.

At Judaism’s holiest site—the Temple Mount / Al-Haram al-Sharif—the UN endorses a so-called “status quo” that allows Muslim prayer as a matter of course while forbidding Jewish prayer outright. Jews may visit in finite numbers. They may not worship.

No neutral body sanctifies a regime where one faith’s prayer is normal and another’s is treated as provocation. That is not stability. It is hierarchy—polished with diplomatic language.

2) Escalate to sovereignty itself: borders without control

Every sovereign state controls who enters and who becomes a citizen. Israel is uniquely told this right is negotiable.

Through endless reaffirmations of a mass “right of return,” the UN demands that Israel absorb millions of Palestinian Arabs who never lived there—descendants of a war launched to destroy the state—thereby erasing Jewish self-determination by arithmetic rather than war.

No other UN member is ordered to commit demographic self-nullification as a condition of legitimacy. Only Israel is told that survival itself is subject to international approval. International demand.

A state that cannot control entry is not sovereign. A state treated this way is not being mediated in a peace process—it is being managed.

3) Why this only happens here: permanent UN wardship

The cause is clear.

The UN did not simply sympathize with Palestinian Arabs; it adopted them as permanent wards, institutionalized most clearly through UNRWA—a bespoke agency unlike anything else in the world.

Refugee status became hereditary. Dependency became intergenerational. There is no sunset, no graduation, no expectation of resolution. Failure carries no cost because accountability is externalized.

A guardian cannot be an honest broker. An institution whose relevance depends on a client’s grievance cannot afford peace. This isn’t humanitarianism anymore. It’s custodianship—and custodianship is the enemy of compromise.

4) The doctrinal rupture: inventing a “right to a state”

Only after the machinery is in place does the UN supply its legal fiction.

International law recognizes self-determination, not an inherent entitlement to sovereign statehood. Statehood is an outcome—earned through borders, reciprocity, and mutual recognition.

The UN rewrote this rule only and specifically for Palestinian Arabs, treating sovereignty as a pre-awarded verdict because of a partition plan it voted upon in 1947 that the party refused to accept. Once the destination is guaranteed, compromise becomes optional. Negotiations become theater. Pressure flows in only one direction.

No other people receive this upgrade. Only here does the UN convert aspiration into entitlement—and then insist it is merely being neutral.

5) The smoking gun: December 1990 recasting the conflict and the legitimation of violence

Then the mask slips.

In December 1990, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 45/130, reaffirming “the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples … for liberation from colonial and foreign domination by all available means.” The resolution was designed to close the chapter of apartheid in South Africa, but took a heavy detour into the Israel-Palestine conflict, recasting the entire partition plan of 1947. It referenced “colonial” entities fifteen times, “Palestinians” twenty-five times, and made the establishment of an Arab state a matter of freedom from racist and external oppression, not a discussion about self-determination.

In UN practice, this language cast Israel as a colonial entity and Palestinian Arabs as a people entitled to armed struggle to dismantle it.

From that moment on, terror could be reframed as resistance, and compromise as collaboration. The UN crossed the line from mediator to moral endorser of one side’s maximalist narrative.

6) The arithmetic of the fraud

Add it up and the numbers don’t lie.

Under the UN framework, Palestinian Arabs receive:

  • A guaranteed future state
  • Political rights inside Israel
  • A trans-sovereign right of return into Israel
  • Permanent UN patronage and advocacy
  • International legitimation of “armed struggle” against Israel

Israel, meanwhile, is left with:

  • Provisional borders
  • Conditional legitimacy
  • Criminalized civilian residence in disputed territory
  • Restricted religious freedom
  • Denied control over immigration
  • Violence against it rhetorically excused

In this jaundiced framework, Jerusalem, which was NEVER designated to be a Palestinian city even under the 1947 partition plan, can be called “occupied Palestinian territory,” a complete fabrication even according to the  UN itself.

This is not a formula for two states. It is one-and-a-half states for Arabs and half a state for Israel—and the imbalance is enforced, not accidental.

The conclusion the UN avoids

The United Nations is not an honest broker; it is an interested architect whose rules ensure the conflict cannot end, and Jewish dignity remains conditional around the world.

By sanctifying exclusion, denying sovereignty, adopting one side as a permanent ward, inventing rights it had no authority to grant, and legitimizing violence as “anti-colonial,” the UN has guaranteed perpetual war—then blamed one of the parties for refusing peace.

In Seinfeld, one party is afforded the opportunity to end the relationship; one party has the option of providing a face-saving excuse to part ways quickly and smoothly. Not so for Israel and the United Nations, where the UN continues to manufacture obstacles and then gaslight the Jewish State that it is the root of the problem.

The UN speaks as if it is a “moral compass” in an “age of chaos.” Perhaps it once was, at least directionally. It is definitely not in the Middle East today, where its votes and actions have led to the death and misery of millions.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York in September 2025

When the UN Handed the Gavel to Failure

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A funny thing happened as Somalia assumed the rotating presidency of the United Nations Security Council in January 2026: Israel recognized a breakaway republic, Somaliland. The timing was rich.

Somalia’s presidency of the most powerful UN body exposed rank hypocrisy: formal recognition divorced from reality. Somalia is treated as a sovereign authority – one given prestige – while it has spent nearly twenty years losing a war to Al-Shabab, an Al-Qaeda–aligned movement that taxes civilians, runs courts, controls territory, and carries out mass-casualty attacks with impunity. International troops prop the state up while Somalia’s sovereignty is tenuous.

The failure is not abstract. Somalia’s collapse has repeatedly spilled beyond its borders—most visibly through maritime piracy in the Gulf of Aden, which for years threatened global shipping lanes, energy supply chains, and food security. Still, a state unable to police its own coastline now presides over the world’s security council. That alone tells you how hollow the United Nations has become.

Somaliland, by contrast, has done the unglamorous work of statehood since 1991: defined borders, elections, peaceful transfers of power, its own currency, police, and a monopoly on force. It meets the Montevideo criteria in substance, not just in name. Yet it remains unrecognized—because recognition at the UN is political, not factual.

Now layer “Palestine” onto this picture—and the farce deepens.

Somalia is a failed state struggling against jihadists. Gaza is a jihadist state in its own right. Since 2007, Hamas has governed Gaza fully and openly. Hamas controls schools, mosques, courts, welfare, media, police, and an army fused into one ideological machine. International aid does not shore up weakness; it subsidizes jihadist rule—tunnels instead of homes, rockets instead of infrastructure, civilians embedded into military doctrine.

Here is the moral inversion the UN refuses to confront:

  • Somalia fails to defeat Al-Shabab and is pitied. Gaza chooses Hamas and is excused.
  • Somaliland governs itself responsibly and is ignored. Israel defends itself against a jihadist regime and is condemned.

The recognition asymmetry makes this starker still. In September 2025, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia moved decisively toward recognizing “Palestine”—despite the absence of defined borders, unified governance, or a monopoly on violence, and despite Gaza being ruled by a designated terrorist organization. Meanwhile, Somaliland—stable, democratic, and self-policing for more than three decades—remains outside the diplomatic club. The message is unmistakable: symbolism is rewarded; governance is not.

When that contradiction became too visible to ignore, the talking points shift. Accusations – by Somalia, amplified by Qatar (Hamas’s principle sponsor) – are being made that Israel intends to “relocate Gazans to Somaliland.” The claim is complete fabrication, an attempt at damage control—a smear designed to redirect attention away from the exposed hypocrisy. By turning Somaliland into a prop in an imaginary Israeli scheme, critics attempt to avoid the harder question: why a functioning African democracy is denied recognition while jihadist-run entities are indulged.

That reality was never lost on U.S. President Donald Trump. His view of Somalia is blunt: a failed state exporting instability, relevant to the United States only as a counter-terrorism battlefield. His administration treats Somalia as territory unable to govern itself or suppress Al-Shabab. In that sense, Trump is more honest than the UN: he acknowledges failure, while the UN performs credibility rituals by handing Somalia the gavel of global security.

No one claims Al-Shabab represents Somali aspirations. Yet Hamas—whose antisemitic charter sanctifies genocide and whose strategy relies on civilian death—is routinely separated from the consequences of its rule and reframed as “resistance.” Somalia’s inability to secure a monopoly on violence is acknowledged as a defect. Gaza’s total jihadist capture is rebranded as national self-determination.

This is why Israel’s recognition of Somaliland at this time matters. It is not merely diplomatic; it is diagnostic. It forces a comparison the UN would rather avoid:

  • What actually constitutes a state?
  • Who governs responsibly?
  • Who controls violence—and who glorifies it?

The Security Council gavel in Somalia’s hand reveals the emptiness of UN moral authority. Gaza’s treatment—shielded from accountability despite being run by a designated terrorist organization—exposes complicity. Somaliland’s exclusion, despite three decades of stability, exposes cowardice.

Israel’s move did not break international norms. It exposed the rot.

Recognition, the episode made clear, is not about peace, governance, or security. It is about politics—and the willingness to look away when jihadist rule is useful to the narrative.

A Less Anti-Israel UN Security Council in 2026?

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The United Nations rarely changes. But sometimes the composition changes just enough that the temperature drops—even if the structure stays broken.

That is what January 1, 2026 quietly delivered at the United Nations Security Council.

Five countries rotated off. Five rotated on. No grand reform. No moral awakening. Just personnel. And yet, for Israel, the difference matters.

The Council Israel Had to Endure

For much of 2024–2025, the Security Council was not merely critical of Israel. It was performative. Ideological. Repetitive. Certain members treated the Council less as a forum for conflict resolution and more as a theater for delegitimization.
None more so than Algeria.

Algeria did not argue policy. Israel, it insisted—again and again—was an illegitimate colonial outpost of Europe, no different from French rule in North Africa. History, geography, and Jewish continuity were irrelevant. This framing was injected into draft resolutions, press statements, and emergency sessions with missionary zeal. The goal was not peace. It was erasure.

Then there was Guyana, a country which bonded with the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization in the 1970s, which spoke with confidence and without knowledge—accusing Israel, rather than Arab states, of rejecting partition since 1948. One did not need to agree with Israel to recognize the historical absurdity. But the UN often rewards certainty over accuracy.

And Slovenia—a country with no meaningful role in the conflict—seemed to relish its moment on the moral stage. During Israel’s defensive war, it never called out Hamas. Slovenia repeatedly accused Israel of genocide. The charge was not legal analysis; it was rhetoric. And rhetoric, once introduced, metastasizes.

These countries rotated off quietly. No ceremony. No reckoning. Just gone.

The Council Israel Is Getting Instead

Their replacements are not “pro-Israel.” That bar is too high. But they are something rarer: less ideological.

Bahrain now occupies Algeria’s Arab Muslim chair. Bahrain is a signatory to the Abraham Accords and has diplomatic relations with Israel. It understands that shouting “colonialism” does not feed people, build ports, or stabilize regions. Bahrain may not defend Israel loudly—but it will not poison the well reflexively.

Colombia replaces Guyana in South America. Colombia is a serious country with a serious economy. It trades. It fights insurgencies. It understands security dilemmas. Domestic politics fluctuate, but Colombia does not need Israel as a symbolic enemy to feel virtuous on the world stage.

Latvia replaces Slovenia. Latvia knows what occupation actually looks like. It is cautious with language. It aligns more naturally with Western security frameworks and is unlikely to indulge in genocide rhetoric as a form of diplomatic performance art.

Liberia and Democratic Republic of the Congo round out the new entrants. Neither is a champion of Israel. But neither is an ideological crusader. Silence, at the UN, is often an upgrade.

This is not a transformed Security Council. The structural bias remains intact. Russia and China still exploit Israel as a pressure point. France still oscillates. The General Assembly still manufactures moral majorities untethered from reality.

But something important does change: the agenda-setters.

Algeria’s absence means fewer resolutions laced with colonial mythology. Slovenia’s departure means fewer genocide accusations casually flung like slogans. Guyana’s exit means fewer history-free lectures delivered with confidence.

In their place are countries – hopefully – that calculate before they accuse. That lowers the volume. It slows the cycle and gives diplomacy—especially American diplomacy—more room to maneuver.

Conclusion

Israel does not need the UN to love it. It needs the UN to stop lying about it.
The 2026 Security Council will not be fair. But it may be less dishonest. Less theatrical. Less obsessed with turning a regional war into a morality play with a prewritten villain.

Sometimes history doesn’t turn with a speech or a vote—but with who quietly leaves the room.

The Jewish Golden Years, 1991-2016

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People tend to both forget and exaggerate. Today, many Americans speak as if antisemitism vanished for decades and only resurfaced after the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israelis by the Arabs of Gaza. The narrative goes: everything was fine, and then suddenly the world turned against Jews.

That is simply false.

Jews have always been the most targeted group for hate crimes in the United States on a per-capita basis. Jews were assaulted, synagogues were attacked, and Jewish centers were bombed long before social media existed to broadcast the hate. The 1970s alone saw a litany of terror: Jewish places targeted, flights to Israel hijacked, hostages separated by religion, and Jewish children born into a world where the UN itself declared Zionism—a core component of Jewish identity—to be racism. That infamous 1975 UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 did not merely insult Jews; it institutionalized antisemitism on a global stage.

But something remarkable happened in 1991. U.S. Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s crusade finally came to fruition, and the UN revoked its poisonous declaration. For the first time in modern history, the Jewish story—people, land, and identity—was not officially stigmatized by the world’s central diplomatic body. Israel was no longer framed as a racist project; Zionism was permitted to exist as a normal national movement. With that reversal, Jews in the diaspora experienced something astonishing: a geopolitical tailwind.

Begin Center hosts event in Jerusalem about 50th anniversary of UNGA Resolution 3379, in December 2025 – a condemnation of the United Nations

The Jewish Golden Years had begun.

From 1991 through 2016, Jewish life flourished across the West. Israel integrated into global markets, made peace with former enemies, and became a hub of innovation admired even by countries without diplomatic ties. Antisemitic incidents did not disappear, but they lost their ideological legitimacy. The world’s leading institutions were no longer branding Jewish self-determination as a crime. Jews could breathe—never fully secure, but broadly accepted.

That period ended with a vote.

In December 2016, the Obama administration allowed UN Security Council Resolution 2334 to pass—a measure far more extreme than the 1975 resolution it resembled. The 1975 General Assembly resolution slandered Zionism; UNSC 2334 criminalized Jewish presence. It declared that Jews living anywhere east of the 1949 Armistice Lines—including the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, the holiest ground in Judaism—are in violation of international law. Jewish prayer at the Western Wall was, according to the world’s most powerful diplomatic forum, an offense.

Hasidic Jews at the Kotel in Jerusalem’s Old City, learning, praying, and inserting wishes into cracks in the wall (photo: First One Through)

It was not merely a political resolution. It was the legalization of antisemitism.

Once the UN stamped Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places as illicit, the global tide shifted quickly. The Jewish Golden Years began to collapse.

By 2018, Jews were being murdered in Pittsburgh and Poway. On college campuses, BDS campaigns metastasized into doctrinal dogma. In public schools, students were taught that Jews are not indigenous to the Land of Israel but “white Europeans” with no ancestral claim—a complete inversion of historical fact. Jews were physically beaten in the streets of New York and Los Angeles during the May 2021 Gaza conflict, years before the post–October 7 mobs marched with chants to “globalize the intifada.”

By the time American cities filled with crowds celebrating Hamas’s massacre, the unraveling was already underway.

The Golden Years—the 25 years of relative acceptance—were gone.

For generations, Jews believed that Israel’s existence itself guaranteed Jewish safety. The 1970s proved that was untrue. The present moment proves it again. A Jewish state cannot protect its people if the world delegitimizes it, demonizes it, or criminalizes Jewish presence in Judaism’s holiest places.

The real guarantor of Jewish safety is not Israel’s strength, but the world’s willingness to accept the basic history and human rights of Jews. That legitimacy existed only in a narrow window: from the UN’s repudiation of its Zionism-is-racism libel in 1991 to Obama’s decision to let UNSC Resolution 2334 pass in final days of 2016.

Those twenty-five years were an intermission in a much longer historical pattern. A rare pause in which Jews were not told by the world that their existence—national, historical, spiritual—was a crime.

Since 2016, the message has returned with force: Jews may live, but not there. Jews may pray, but not here. Jews may exist, but only on someone else’s terms.

The Golden Years did not end because Israel faltered, but because the world revoked its permission. Without it, the old hatreds rushed back as if they had never left.

Jews are not witnessing a sudden outbreak of antisemitism. They are living through the collapse of the only era in modern history when the world briefly pretended to accept the Jewish story.

The Little Drummer Boys of Terror

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President Obama once derided those who warned of Iran’s nuclear ambitions as promoting a “drumbeat of war.” It was a curious charge, especially as his negotiated JCPOA deal paved Iran’s legal pathway to nuclear weapons within a decade—despite Tehran’s unabashed calls to utterly destroy an American ally, and referred to the United States as “Satan.”

The phrase “drumbeat of war” is worth pausing over, because its imagery is meant to point a damning finger at generals and war profiteers, when in fact it refers to a beating passion that comes from a variety of sources.

Music itself teaches us the power of the drumbeat. Maurice Ravel’s “Bolero” begins as a whisper—a single snare tapping a faint rhythm—but its relentless pattern swells, layer by layer, into a rapturous explosion. Nothing changes except the intensity. It is a master class in how a simple beat, repeated without interruption, can inflame emotion, tighten resolve, and propel an entire orchestra toward an inevitable climax. Passion grows not from complexity but from persistence.

Cinema took that lesson to the battlefield. Ennio Morricone’s “L’Arena,” born from spaghetti-western duels and later carried into modern war films, shows how percussion can elevate tension into confrontation. Its pounding drums accompanied by trumpets push characters toward conflict; the beat does not merely accompany battle—it summons it. Morricone understood that rhythm can be a weapon, a psychological drumroll that makes violence feel fated long before the first shot is fired.

In American history, drummers were not symbolic ornaments—they were battlefield communicators. The famous “Spirit of ’76” painting captures a young boy and an old man beating time through the fog of revolution. In both the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, the drummer corps relayed commands, kept formation, and lifted morale. Soldiers needed to be adults to enlist, but drummer boys could be barely in their teens. They were not the policymakers of war; they were the ones whose youthful energy pushed men forward into battle.

“The Spirit of ’76” (1875) by Archibald Willard (1836-1918)

It is an uncomfortable truth: the drumbeat of war is often carried not by governments or generals but by the young.

We like to imagine youth as the innocent bystanders of conflict—swept up, exploited, or victimized by forces beyond their control. That is often tragically correct. But not always. In the Middle East, teenage Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been at the center of anti-Jewish violence. During the knife intifada of 2015–2016, most of the attackers were adolescents. Arabic media even gave them a romanticized nickname: Ashbāl al-Quds—the lion cubs of Jerusalem.

On October 12, 2015, two Palestinian boys, 15-year-old Hassan Khalid Manasra and his cousin 13-year-old Ahmad Manasra, stabbed two Israeli civilians in Jerusalem

They were not pawns in someone else’s narrative. They were active participants in it.

While they were stabbing Israelis in the streets, new legions of drummer boys was forming. The Lions’ Den was inaugurated in the West Bank to unleash dozens of attacks. The United Arab Emirates named a school for children for these young murderers. In the United States, a group calling itself the Palestinian Youth Movement openly glorifies the murderers of October 7 and calls for an intifada on American soil. They harass Jews at universities, shut down bridges, disrupt traffic, and chant for “uprisings”—all under the pretext of activism, and often shielded by tax-exempt organizations like WESPAC.

In the immediate aftermath of the October 7, 2023 massacre by Gazans of Israelis, Cornel West marches with PYM calling for an “Intifada revolution”. West has taught at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, indoctrinating the next generation of American leaders on intifada.

The drumbeat is steady. It is disciplined. And it is aimed squarely at Jews.

Where does this beat begin? It is not in the Israeli cabinet rooms the media delights in blaming. It begins at UNRWA schools, where generations of children are taught that Jews are colonial invaders with no history in their homeland. It echoes through activist teacher unions in the United States, where “decolonization” rhetoric is repackaged into lesson plans that erase Jewish indigeneity. It thunders at the United Nations, where Muslim-majority blocs and their allies advance resolutions asserting that Jews must be removed from Judea, Samaria, and even parts of Jerusalem “by any means necessary.” The young Palestinian Arab terrorist are then shielded from blame and prosecution by the poorly named “UN Coordinator for Middle East Peace.” Laughable if not such a tragedy.

The young listen. And they march.

At Christmastime, the world hears “The Little Drummer Boy”—a melody of humility. A child with nothing to give but a simple rhythm of devotion for a newborn Jewish baby in Bethlehem. A beat based on innocence and purity.

But the modern Middle East and its Western echo chambers have perverted that image.

Today’s little drummer boys are not offering gentle hymns. They are being raised, trained, and celebrated for a beat of hatred—an indoctrinated cadence that valorizes “martyrs,” delegitimizes Jews, romanticizes violence, and promises glory for those who shed blood.

The world should hear the drumbeat. And it should finally ask: Who handed these children the drums? Who taught them that murder is heroism, that Jews are prey, that violence is virtue?

These teenagers did not invent the rhythm—they are marching to a score composed by UN agencies, radicalized teachers, political opportunists, and ideological arsonists who hide behind the language of “justice” while grooming minors for war.

UN Watch’s Hillel Neuer presents new report, “Schools in the Grip of Terror: How UNRWA Allowed Hamas Chiefs to Control its Education System,” to the Italian Senate in September 2025

At Christmas, we think of a young drummer offering a humble gift to a Jewish child in Bethlehem. Alas, today too many young drummers are taught to offer not devotion, but destruction—and the world nods along as if the rhythm were unavoidable. It isn’t.

The beat continues only because we refuse to silence the conductors who train the next generation of drummers to hate.