The year was 1984. Benjamin Netanyahu, then in his mid-thirties, had arrived in New York to serve as Israel’s seventh ambassador to the United Nations.
Settling down in Turtle Bay on the east side of midtown Manhattan, one of Netanyahu’s first meetings – with Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson – ended up being among his most memorable, not to mention prescient.
Meeting at 770 Eastern Parkway, the iconic headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, on the eve of Simchat Torah, the rebbe offered Netanyahu advice as he began his tenure. “You will go into a house of lies,” he presaged, referring to the UN. “Remember that in a hall of perfect darkness, if you light one small candle, its precious light will be seen from afar, by everyone. Your mission is to light a candle for truth and for the Jewish people.” The rebbe’s words are truer today than ever before.
Last year at the UN was replete with moments of darkness, of isolation and demonisation, from unfounded accusations of genocide against Israel in a war Israel did not start – a war triggered by an Iran-backed genocidal rampage by Hamas into southern Israel – to General Assembly resolutions lambasting Israel for alleged “violations of international law” while paying scant attention to the 100 Israeli hostages who marked their second Chanukah in Hamas terror tunnels.
There was inaction by the UN as evidence mounted showing Unrwa, the refugee agency operating in Gaza, being overrun by Hamas. The New York Times recently reported in detail how the UN failed to keep Hamas operatives off its premises and payrolls, with Unrwa employees found to be moonlighting for Hamas. Video footage captured on October 7 in southern Israel even showed the body of Yonatan Samerano, who was at the Nova music festival with his friends, being kidnapped to Gaza by Failsal Ali Mussalem al-Naami, an Unrwa employee.
In early December, Samerano’s family filed a landmark lawsuit against Unrwa, with Kobi, Yonatan’s father, saying, “Unrwa has no [diplomatic] immunity and must stand trial for the act of massacre and kidnapping of my son…This lawsuit will be another nail in Unrwa’s coffin, which must pay for its actions. Since October 7, our lives have not been lives. We are waiting to get our son back. We will continue to fight until we achieve true justice.”
The UN’s one-sided obsession with Israel didn’t end there. On November 20 last year a resolution advanced by the ten elected members of the Security Council demanded an immediate ceasefire in Gaza without making such an agreement unequivocally contingent on the release of the hostages still held by Hamas.
The resolution was vetoed by the US. “We could not support an unconditional ceasefire that failed to release the hostages, explained US Deputy Ambassador to the UN Robert A. Wood. “These two urgent goals are inextricably linked. This resolution abandoned that necessity.”
More recently, a large, month-long photo exhibition was put up in the main UN lobby where visitors, employees and diplomats enter the complex. Sponsored by the Palestinian Mission to the UN, in collaboration with the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, the graphic exhibit displays moving images of starving children, demolished buildings and displaced Gazans from late 2023 through to 2024. Hamas and the hostages held in Gaza went unmentioned. Nor was there any description of the mass slaughter that took place in southern Israel on October 7, triggering a regional war that is well into its second year.
Looking to 2025, the animosity directed at Israel inside the UN is unlikely to subside.
Israel will continue to stand strong on the global diplomatic stage and, in the words of the late Rabbi Sacks, use its light to dispel darkness and stand for what is right, even when the world is against you.
Jonathan Harounoff is Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations and author of Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt, out in August
