Tag Archives: United Nations

The UN No Longer Defends Religious Liberty

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Religious liberty is not complicated. It does not require panels, frameworks, or warnings about artificial intelligence. It requires clarity.

The right to choose your faith.
The right to practice it as you see fit.
The right to pray openly, in your way, at your holy places.
The right to walk away from it—without fear, without punishment, without death.

This is not a modern reinterpretation. It is the original standard.

In 1948, in the aftermath of a world war that exposed the catastrophic consequences of state control over belief and identity, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At its core sat Article 18, crafted with precision that set religious freedom as a benchmark of human rights.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.” – UN Declaration of Human Rights, Article 18

Change it. Practice it. Live it.

That was the UN at its founding: defining principles meant to bind nations, not accommodate them.

That is not the UN on display today.

When the Secretary-General recently addressed a conference on religious liberty on March 24, 2026, the words sounded familiar. Religious freedom was a “cornerstone of human dignity.” And then the center shifted—toward global pressures, social cohesion, artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence?

If the speech had stayed anchored to Article 18, the omissions would have been impossible to ignore: apostasy treated as a crime, in some places a capital one; the right to convert denied in law; and access to holy sites restricted where it is most visible and most contested, to Jews on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.

These are not edge cases. They are direct contradictions of the standard set in 1948.

They went unmentioned.

The reason is not subtle. The United Nations that wrote Article 18 was asserting principle in the shadow of catastrophe. The United Nations that speaks today operates at the consent and behest of large voting blocs. Many of those blocs come from the Global South, including dozens of Muslim-majority states that reject the core of Article 18 where it matters most: the right to change religion and the expectation that religious access should be reciprocal.

Within that reality, the boundaries of acceptable language narrow.

No mention of apostasy laws.
No mention of capital punishment for conversion.
No mention of restricted prayer where it cuts closest to the principle.

So the language adapts. The sharp edges of Article 18 are rounded into generalities that everyone can endorse, including those who, in practice, deny them. The result is a version of “religious liberty” that survives as rhetoric while its substance is negotiated away.

This is not an evolution of human rights. It is a retreat from them.

The United Nations once set a standard that stood above politics. Today, it reflects the ugly politics of those who sit within it. And as the Pope will tell you, there can be no peace without religious liberty. Ergo, the UN has become one of the primary sources of discord and violence in the world today.

#IslamicSupremacy

The UN Has Wiped Raped Jewish Women From History

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The United Nations has released yet another report on violence against women. It reads like a catalogue of human depravity – Sudan, Congo, Haiti, Ukraine, Gaza – each documented, each calibrated to shock the conscience.

And it does but not for the reason the authors intend.

Because one of the most documented episodes of mass sexual violence in recent history is missing. Not debated. Not contextualized.

Absent.

On October 7, an estimated 6,000 Gazans invaded Israel and carried out atrocities that included the systematic rape and mutilation of women. This is not a matter of competing narratives. It has been documented by eyewitnesses, first responders, forensic teams, and subsequent investigations.

And yet, in a sweeping global report about violence against women, these victims disappear.

The report finds space for a child raped every half hour in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for the explosion of abuse in Haiti, for war deaths in Ukraine, and for casualty figures in Gaza. Horrific and worthy of attention.

But the omission is not accidental. It is instructive.

Because what the United Nations is quietly establishing is a hierarchy of victims. Some suffering is elevated. Some is ignored. And some – when it disrupts a preferred political narrative – is erased altogether.

Jewish women fall into that last category.

That is not human rights reporting. It is narrative management.

And that distortion does not stay confined to UN documents. It bleeds outward. When the international system refuses to clearly name and center atrocities committed against Jews, it creates a form of moral cover. The record itself becomes a kind of absolution.

So when figures in the West – like the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Rama Duwaji – publicly express approval for the October 7 massacre, the reaction is muted, rationalized, or ignored. The most grotesque elements of that day, including the sexual violence, have already been softened, blurred, or omitted by institutions that claim to stand for universal rights.

If the crime is not fully acknowledged, then the celebration of it can be more easily excused.

That is the downstream consequence of selective memory and outrage.

The United Nations is not failing to see. It is choosing not to look and remind the world about violent antisemitism. And in doing so, it transforms a report about protecting women into something far more revealing: a document that tells us which victims matter and which ones are inconvenient.

In that calculus, the rape and murder of Jewish women is not denied. It is deemed unworthy of inclusion. Perhaps even harmful, lest it paint its forever wards, the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in an unfavorable light.

Such silence is not neutral. It is the story.

“Screams Before Silence” movie

The United Nations Prioritizes “Islamophobia” Over All Religious Persecution

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In 2022, the United Nations created the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, observed each year on March 15.

The date commemorates the victims of the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where worshippers were murdered during a terrorist attack in 2019.

Hatred directed at any religious community deserves condemnation. But the decision raises an uncomfortable question: why is Islam the only religion granted a dedicated global day to combat hatred?

Islam is hardly a marginal faith. With roughly two billion followers, it is one of the largest and fastest-growing religions in the world and the majority religion across dozens of countries stretching from North Africa through the Middle East and into Asia. Within the UN itself it is represented by a powerful diplomatic coalition, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 states that frequently coordinates its positions inside the General Assembly.

Yet Islam is the only religion singled out for a specific UN observance addressing prejudice against its followers.

Other religious communities facing persistent hatred receive no comparable recognition.

There is no UN day dedicated specifically to combating antisemitism today, despite the fact that Jews are the most frequently targeted religious minorities per capita in many countries. While the UN does observe International Holocaust Remembrance Day each January to commemorate the genocide of Jews during The Holocaust, that observance focuses on crimes committed eighty years ago. There is no equivalent UN day focused on antisemitism in the present.

Nor is there an observance addressing anti-Christian persecution, even though research by organizations such as Open Doors and studies by Pew Research Center consistently show that Christians face some of the largest levels of religious persecution globally in absolute numbers.

The UN does maintain a broader commemoration—the International Day Commemorating Victims of Acts of Violence Based on Religion or Belief—but that observance focuses on victims after violence occurs, not on confronting the ideologies that fuel it.

Except in one case: Islam.

The religion which dominates the countries where Christians are most persecuted, including: Somalia, Libya, Eritrea, Yemen, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and Iran.

Violence the UN Does Not Mark

The choice of March 15 highlights another inconsistency.

Deadly attacks on synagogues have occurred repeatedly in recent years.

In 2018, eleven Jews were murdered in the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. In Germany, a terrorist attempted to massacre Jews during Yom Kippur in the Halle synagogue shooting.

And in October 2025, a Jewish man was fatally stabbed outside a synagogue in Manchester, England, in an attack carried out on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, when Jews gather in synagogues around the world for prayer and reflection.

Synagogues across Europe and North America have repeatedly been targets of shootings, stabbings, and attempted massacres.

Yet no comparable United Nations observance exists dedicated specifically to combating antisemitism tied to those attacks.

If the UN can create a global day tied to violence against mosques, why has it never created one tied to attacks on synagogues?

Politics Behind the Principle

The explanation lies less in theology than in politics.

For decades the powerful Organization of Islamic Cooperation has used its diplomatic weight to advance religious protection initiatives inside the UN system. Beginning in the late 1990s, the bloc pushed resolutions condemning what it called the “defamation of religions,” efforts widely understood as attempts to restrict criticism of Islam.

Western democracies resisted those proposals on free-speech grounds, and by around 2010 the campaign stalled.

So the strategy evolved.

Instead of defending religion from criticism, the focus shifted toward defending believers from discrimination under the banner of Islamophobia.

Opposing the initiative could now be portrayed as defending prejudice against Muslims, even if the broader debate still involved questions of speech, ideology, and religious critique.

In 2022 the effort succeeded with the creation of the UN’s International Day to Combat Islamophobia.

When Institutions Reflect Power

The episode reveals something fundamental about how the modern UN operates.

The organization does not function as a neutral body weighing global injustices. It functions as a political arena shaped by large voting blocs.

In the General Assembly—where every state has one vote regardless of size or political system—coordinated coalitions wield enormous influence. The 57 countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation represent a significant force in that system, often aligned with broader coalitions such as the Non-Aligned Movement.

Together these alliances can shape the symbolic agenda of the institution. They determine what the United Nations chooses to highlight and what it chooses not to see.

A Test of Moral Consistency

The United Nations was founded after World War II to defend universal human rights. But institutions derive legitimacy not only from their ideals, but from their consistency.

When some hatreds receive global recognition, others historical remembrance, and still others little acknowledgement at all, the institution begins to reflect political influence more than universal principle.

Combating religious hatred is a noble goal. But when that effort becomes selective, it reveals the farce and the forces controlling the United Nations.

The Exception That Keeps a War Alive

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Australia has drawn a line.

Citizens who left to fight for the Islamic State are not automatically welcomed home. Sovereignty allows a country to weigh allegiance, ideology, and risk. No global institution calls that immoral. No emergency sessions demand reversal.

“These are people who went overseas supporting Islamic State and went there to provide support for people who basically want a caliphate.” – Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese

That is how states function.

Family members of suspected Islamic State militants who are Australian nationals walk toward a van bound for the airport in Damascus during the first repatriation operation of the year at Roj Camp in eastern Syria, Monday, Feb. 16, 2026. Thirty-four Australian citizens from 11 families departed the camp. (AP Photo/Baderkhan Ahmad)

Then the rule changes.

The United Nations insists Israel must accept the DESCENDANTS of people who were NEVER ISRAELI CITIZENS, who NEVER LIVED IN ISRAEL, and whose political movement LAUNCHED A WAR TO DESTROY ISRAEL. Entry is framed as a permanent right. Citizenship becomes an instrument of conflict.

This is not mere hypocrisy. It is a flawed and fatal doctrine.

The standard for Australia preserves states. The other pressures a single state to absorb a demographic outcome tied directly to a war against its existence.

“They are terrible situations. But they have been brought on entirely by horrific decisions that their parents made.” – Australia Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, about banning the children of Australian “ISIS brides” from being allowed into Australia

The refugee framework applied to Palestinians is unique in modern history. It has its own bloated organization in which “refugee” (not even “internally displaced” for Arabs in Gaza and the “West Bank”) passes through generations indefinitely. International institutions reinforce it. Political leadership is incentivized to promise return rather than build final compromise.

That incentive has consequences.

If millions are told the conflict ends inside Israel rather than beside it, negotiations stall. If international bodies validate that expectation, maximalism becomes rational. If maximalism is rational, violence remains politically useful. Understood. Blessed.

This mindset has cost tens of thousands of lives because it keeps the central dispute unresolved. Each cycle of violence is fueled by the belief that time, pressure, and international legitimacy will deliver what negotiation has not.

States everywhere are allowed to defend sovereignty and security. Israel is told sovereignty and security is a matter for international bodies to determine.

Over-Policed: From Black Neighborhoods to the Jewish State

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Black Americans have long used a phrase that captures a structural grievance: over-policed and under-protected.

The complaint is that disproportionate scrutiny produces disproportionate outcomes. If people in one neighborhood are stopped more often, searched more often, cited more often, it will generate more arrests. Those arrests are then cited as proof that the scrutiny was justified. The cycle validates itself.

Pew Research on distrust of criminal justice systems, June 2024

Israel occupies a similar structural position in international institutions.

At the United Nations Human Rights Council, Israel is the only country assigned a permanent, standalone agenda item — Item 7: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” Every regular session includes debate under this item. No other state – not China, not Iran, not North Korea – is subject to a standing country-specific agenda item.

The numbers reinforce the asymmetry. Since its creation in 2006, the Council has adopted more condemnatory resolutions against Israel than against any other country. In multiple sessions, Israel alone has faced more resolutions than the rest of the world combined.

Volume creates narrative.

Layer onto that the density of global media in Jerusalem – more permanent foreign correspondents than in most active war zones – and the scrutiny becomes constant. Every military action is instantly internationalized. Allegations become juridical language before investigations conclude. Terms like “war crimes” and “genocide” enter discourse early and stick.

The latest war began with an attack Israel did not initiate and repeatedly stated it did not seek. It conditioned an end to fighting simply on the return of hostages and disarmament, to which Gazans repeatedly refused. While urban combat against embedded fighters produces tragic civilian loss, the reported civilian-to-combatant ratios in this conflict fell well below ranges seen in other recent urban wars. That context rarely leads headlines.

Black Americans understand how presumption operates. When systems assume danger, data accumulates accordingly. When institutions assume guilt, findings follow.

“It’s the broader narrative of who belongs and who doesn’t, which allows certain groups to tap in the police department, to use the police department or weaponized the police department in ways that are conducive to violence against Black people” – Lallen T. Johnson, Department of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University

Similarly, the United Nations decided that Jews do not belong in Jerusalem – the holiest city in Judaism – or east of the 1949 Armistice Lines / the “West Bank”, so have developed a criminal system that specifically and persistently targets Jews. The mere presence of Jews is labelled “illegal” and an affront to international law.

“Condemning all measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, [presence of Jews] character and status of the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem,” – UN Security Council Resolution 2334

The United Nations made a law declaring Jewish presence at their holiest location to be illegal

When one minority community, whether it be racial or national, lives under permanent investigation, outcomes will look like confirmation of wrongdoing, even when standards are warped and unevenly applied.

Over-policing corrodes trust at home. Over-condemnation corrodes credibility abroad.

Justice requires symmetry. Blacks and Jews know it all too well.

First Comes the Word “Enemy”

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In November 1943, Heinrich Himmler sent a telegram to Haj Amin al-Husseini on the anniversary of the Balfour Declaration.

He wrote of a “shared recognition of the enemy” and “the joint fight against it.”

“The enemy” meant world Jewry.

That phrasing did real work. It turned a people into a threat. Once Jews were cast as a civilizational danger – “Jewish invaders” – their removal became a duty. Vocabulary cleared the ground and policy followed. Then came the machinery.

This is how collective persecution begins: define a group as the problem.

Eighty years later, the same grammar keeps resurfacing.

In Doha, Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, used the phrase “common enemy” to describe Israel. The target was the world’s only Jewish state. The effect was to cast Jewish sovereignty itself as something humanity must oppose.

That language strips legitimacy and treats existence as offense. It moves from argument to exclusion with the implied goal of eradication.

The pattern appears in American activism as well. Speaking at a conference hosted by American Muslims for Palestine, Zahra Billoo of the Council on American-Islamic Relations urged audiences to “oppose the polite Zionists too,” grouping mainstream Jewish institutions — synagogues, federations, Hillel chapters, civil-rights groups — into the camp of adversaries, “they are your enemies.”

The construction never changes.

Nazi Himmler: Jews are the common enemy.
CAIR Billoo: Zionists are the enemy.
UN Albanese: Israel is the common enemy.

Different decades. Different accents. Identical structure.

Demonization targets identity. Once identity becomes the indictment, anything feels justified and the line between debate and dehumanization disappears.

After World War II, the human-rights system was built to prevent precisely this logic — the idea that an entire people could be pushed outside the moral community. Yet the vocabulary has returned, polished and respectable, spoken from podiums that claim the language of justice.

When the Nazis called Jews “the enemy,” the world should have drawn the line right there. No conferences. No nuance. No excuses. Anyone who speaks that way disqualifies themselves.

That same rule applies now.

Human-rights officials who talk like antisemitic propagandists should lose their mandates. Activists who label Jews the enemy lose the claim to civil-rights leadership positions. Institutions that tolerate this language lose credibility.

The mob put a yellow Jewish Star on Jews 80 years ago and told everyone that they are the enemy. The mob is labelling Jews as Zionists today and doing the same. We shouldn’t pause to take action, if “never again” means anything.

The Only Place Jewish Murder In a Synagogue Isn’t Antisemitism

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When Jews are murdered in synagogues in Europe, the United Nations speaks plainly. The attacks are labeled antisemitic. The violence is called terrorism. Solidarity with the Jewish community is explicit, and justice is demanded.

UN Secretary-General calls killing of Jews in Germany “demonstration of antisemitism” in 2019
UN Secretary-General calls killing of Jews in United Kingdom in 2025 “antisemitism” and “stresses the urgent need to confront hatred and intolerance in all their forms.”

When Jews are murdered in synagogues in Jerusalem, that clarity vanishes.

The same act—killing Jews at prayer—suddenly requires “context.” Terrorism is softened into “violence.” Antisemitism dissolves into “tensions.” Victims are anonymized, motives left unexplored, ideology carefully avoided. Language that flows easily in Europe locks up entirely in Israel’s capital.

UN Secretary-General never calls killing of Jews in Jerusalem rooted in “antisemitism.”

This is not rhetorical drift. It is doctrine.

The UN has formally adopted the Palestinian demand that Jews should not live in Jerusalem. Through measures such as UN Security Council Resolution 2334, it asserts that Jews may not alter the city’s “demographic composition.” That position freezes Jerusalem at a moment immediately following the Jordanian army’s ethnic cleansing of all Jews from the eastern half of the city between 1948 and 1967. Jewish expulsion is accepted as a legitimate baseline. Jewish return is treated as a violation of international law.

This is not neutrality. It is the institutionalization of an antisemitic premise: that Jews, uniquely among peoples, have no right to live in their holiest city.

UN Secretary-General calls killing of Jews in United States “antisemitism” THREE TIMES.

Once that premise is accepted, Jewish life in Jerusalem becomes conditional. Jewish neighborhoods are labeled illegal. Jewish prayer is framed as provocation. Jewish presence itself is cast as destabilizing. Violence against Jews no longer reads as antisemitism but as political reaction to an allegedly illegitimate reality.

Under those conditions, motive cannot be named. Calling synagogue murders in Jerusalem “antisemitic terrorism” would require acknowledging that Jews are being targeted for who they are, in a city where the UN has already ruled they should not be. It would expose the connection between UN doctrine and the moral evasions that follow.

So the motive is omitted.

Aftermath of Jews slaughtered in synagogue

The UN does not merely tolerate the idea of Jews being removed from Jerusalem; it has encoded it. The language is bureaucratic—demographics, international law, peace—but the result is stark: a city where Jewish existence is treated as unlawful, and Jewish murder as a political complication.

The contrast with the rest of the world makes the pattern undeniable. The UN knows exactly how to speak about antisemitism. That moral vocabulary disappears only in Judaism’s holiest city, in the Jewish State’s capital, because the United Nations has endorsed the antisemitic wishes of radical jihadists.

Two Condemnations, One Moral Collapse

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By any ordinary moral standard, the murder of worshippers in a house of prayer should provoke the clearest possible response: name the crime, demand justice, stand with the people and the government under attack. No hedging. No balancing. No political caveats.

The United Nations does that, except when Israeli Jews are the victims.

Read the paired statements issued by António Guterres after two attacks on places of worship: one at a mosque in Pakistan, the other at a synagogue in Jerusalem. The contrast reveals a complete moral collapse at the heart of the global body.

This matters even more because the Jerusalem statement was issued before Israel responded to October 7, 2023. Before Gaza. Before counteroffensives. Before a single Israeli military action the UN would later cite as justification for its posture.

Restraint was not urged because of Israeli action. It was urged instead of justice itself.

Statement by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in February 2026 about the bombing of a mosque in Pakistan

In Pakistan, the Secretary-General “condemns in the strongest terms” the attack on worshippers. He demands that the perpetrators be “identified and brought to justice.” He affirms the “solidarity of the United Nations with the Government and people of Pakistan” and situates the crime squarely within the global fight against terrorism and violent extremism.

That is what moral clarity looks like.

Yet in Jerusalem, when Jews are murdered outside a synagogue in 2023—on International Holocaust Remembrance Day- a whisper. The Secretary-General “strongly condemns” the attack. He offers condolences. He notes that it is abhorrent to attack a place of worship. And then he pivots—not to justice, not to accountability, not to solidarity with the state charged with protecting its citizens.

He pivots to restraint.

Statement by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in January 2023 about murder of Jews outside Jerusalem synagogue

The synagogue becomes a geographic detail. The murders are folded into “the current escalation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.” There is no demand that the killers be found. No insistence on prosecution. No solidarity with the Government of Israel. No recognition that deterrence requires consequence.

This is not diplomatic caution. It is moral abdication.

This did not begin with Guterres

If this were merely the idiosyncrasy of one Secretary-General nearing the end of his ten year tenure, it might be dismissed as tone or temperament. It is not.

In 2014, after Arab terrorists entered a synagogue in Jerusalem wielding meat cleavers and hacked Jewish worshippers to death, Ban Ki-moon issued a statement that follows the exact same structure.

Statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon in January 2014 about murder of Jews inside Jerusalem synagogue

He “strongly condemns” the attack. He offers condolences. And then—almost immediately—he moves “beyond today’s reprehensible incident” to discuss “clashes between Palestinian youths and Israeli security forces.” The massacre is submerged into “the situation.” The killers disappear into context.

There is no call to bring the perpetrators to justice.
No solidarity with the Israeli government.
No affirmation of Israel’s duty to eradicate the threat.

Instead, Ban Ki-moon calls for leadership on “both sides”, urges all parties to avoid “provocative rhetoric,” and frames the slaughter of Jews in a synagogue as a destabilizing dimension of the conflict—not as terrorism demanding elimination.

Different Secretary-General. Same choreography.

The explanation is not mysterious because the United Nations does not conceptualize Palestinian violence as extremism.

Extremism, in UN doctrine, is something that happens elsewhere—to states battling jihadists, insurgents, or transnational terror networks. Palestinian murder, by contrast, is treated as political expression: contextualized by grievance, softened by narrative, absorbed into a permanent dispute. It is violence to be managed, not defeated.

That is why justice is demanded in Pakistan and restraint is demanded in Jerusalem. One fits the UN’s extremism framework. The other does not.

“Restraint” here is not a plea for peace. It is a veto on justice.

When Jews are murdered, the UN permits mourning but denies agency. Condolences are extended to families, while the legitimacy of Jewish self-defense and Jewish sovereignty is quietly withheld. Sympathy is offered—but solidarity with the state is conspicuously absent.

The global body created in the shadow of the Holocaust cannot bring itself to say, plainly, that Jews murdered in synagogues deserve the same moral response as anyone else. It cannot say that Jewish sovereignty is legitimate. It cannot say that justice must follow Jewish bloodshed.

And the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs), its perennial wards, must be granted absolution.

Israel should draw the only conclusion that matters: the United Nations is not a moral compass or humanitarian organization. It is purely a political instrument.

#terrorismnotterrorism

The UN Says It Must Change. Gaza Is Where It Refuses To.

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António Guterres keeps saying the United Nations is no longer the institution it was 80 years ago. Power must be rebalanced he claims. The Security Council must reflect today’s world he urges. Post–World War II structures must evolve.

Fine. But if that claim is serious, the UN’s most glaring failure to modernize is Gaza.

The system built never to end

One UN body remains frozen in 1948: UNRWA. One vision for a state is lost to contours proposed in 1947: Palestine.

“The world of 2026 is not the world of 1946.” – UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, January 17, 2026

UNRWA administers a refugee regime found nowhere else:

  • Refugee status is inherited indefinitely
  • It never expires through citizenship or resettlement
  • It is tied to a “right of return” not to Gaza or a future Palestinian state, but to Israel itself

No other refugee population is treated this way.
Bosnians were not. Syrians are not. Ukrainians are not.

Every other refugee crisis is handled by UNHCR, where refugee status is temporary and meant to end. Only Palestinians are placed in a system designed to remain permanent.

Ending inherited refugee status would not end humanitarian aid.
It would end the political weaponization of refugeehood.

Why Bosnia exposes the category error

After the Balkan wars, the Dayton Accords included a right of return—but it was finite, individual, and intra-state. It applied to homes lost in the same war for the same people, and aimed to undo ethnic cleansing, not undo borders.

Gaza’s claimed “right of return” is fundamentally different: intergenerational, extra-territorial, and demographic—designed to reopen 1948 and negate another UN member state.

Guterres’ contradiction

Guterres calls for reform everywhere except where reform would actually make peace possible.

As long as the UN maintains an inherited right of return into Israel and the proposed borders which have long since past their expiry:

  • Maximalism is rewarded
  • Compromise is delegitimized
  • Negotiations become theater
  • Gaza remains permanently “temporary”

This is not neutrality; it is an institutional choice to preserve claims that prevent settlement.

Reform that applies everywhere except where it matters most is not reform.
It is avoidance.

The unavoidable conclusion

Until the UN ends the one system designed never to end, Gaza will not be governed toward peace—but toward the permanence of conflict.

And no amount of rhetoric about modernization can disguise that refusal.

The Plagues Were for Egypt. The Sea Was for the Jews.

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The Exodus is often told as a single story of liberation, but Parshat B’shalach insists on a sharper distinction. The plagues and the splitting of the sea were aimed at different audiences, and they served different purposes. Confusing them obscures the Torah’s deepest lesson about real freedom.

The plagues were for Egypt. They dismantled Pharaoh’s authority, exposed the limits of imperial power, and forced the expulsion of a people the system refused to release voluntarily. Their purpose was external and coercive. Egypt had to be broken in order to let go.

But expulsion is not freedom. Being pushed out does not mean having moved on.

That is what the splitting of the sea achieved.

The splitting of the sea was for the Jews. At that moment, the message shifted inward. The people needed to see that the world they had left could no longer be reentered. When the waters closed, the route back to slavery closed with them. The drowning of the Egyptians was not vengeance; it was finality. History sealed behind them.

This distinction explains why the Exodus alone was incomplete. Egypt released the Jews, but the Jews had not yet released Egypt. As long as return remained imaginable, fear and discomfort could always make bondage sound reasonable again. Freedom cannot take root while the past remains accessible.

Only after that closure does the Song at the Sea emerge. The song is not merely celebration; it is internalization. A people sings when it understands that a threshold has been crossed and that what lies behind is no longer an option. Memory, at that moment, stabilizes rather than seduces. The song teaches that freedom requires acceptance of permanence.

That lesson extends beyond the biblical moment. Systems and institutions can serve as tools of liberation in one era and become obstacles to maturity in another. They remain attractive precisely because they feel moral, familiar, and legitimizing long after their original purpose has passed.

The United Nations increasingly functions as a structure that keeps the road backwards open. Born from catastrophe, it was meant to prevent a return to unconstrained power and mass violence. Over time, however, it has become a place where history is managed rather than concluded.

Consider the 1947 Partition Plan which would create a Jewish State and an Arab State in the region of Palestine. It was the logical vision of the moment and Jews accepted it and built a state. The Arabs rejected it for decades and to this date, many still believe that an Arab state will be the only reality in the region. They see a past as achievable, a Muslim-majority holy land.

Worse, the United Nations itself tells Arabs that descendants of people who lived in what is now Israel will get to move back to towns and homes. The UN continues to pass laws and resolutions to this effect, making the past the direction of time, not a future of two states living in coexistence.

The splitting of the sea teaches that freedom demands the courage to let certain paths disappear. Growth requires recognizing when a framework has completed its historical role and must be left behind. Without that willingness, societies drift endlessly between liberation and dependence, mistaking motion for progress.

The plagues ended Egypt’s control while the sea ended the possibility of return. That is the difference between being released and being free. Today, the United Nations is preventing the Israelis and the Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) from transitioning to the other side of the sea, moving on to freedom for all.

Every generation must choose which comforting and destructive structures it is finally prepared to leave in the past. Today, the United Nations may be the choice before us.