The U.N.'s Longstanding Antisemitism Problem

The United Nations is no friend to the Jews

The United Nations and its affiliate organizations are no strangers to Jew hatred.

With the recent allegations that UNRWA (The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees) workers took part in Hamas’s bloody pogrom against Israel on October 7th, 2023, the U.N is yet again plagued by accusations of Antisemitism. As the Wall Street Journal reported last week, “Intelligence estimates shared with the U.S. conclude that around 1,200 of UNRWA’s roughly 12,000 employees in Gaza have links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and about half have close relatives who belong to the Islamist militant groups.”

As a result, the Biden Administration, as well as several other UNRWA donor nations, announced they were temporarily pausing funding to the group. The Biden White House also said it was reviewing the “steps the United Nations is taking to address them.”

Originally established in 1949 by the U.N. General Assembly to provide food, health care, education and other humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and elsewhere, the revelations that UNRWA employees participated in the atrocities committed against Israel shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the historically sordid relationship between Israel and the U.N.

By all means, to better understand the UNRWA’s dalliance with terrorists, and the UN’s long standing hostility to Israel, one must recall the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s support for Yasser Arafat and the PLO, and the dangerous riptide of anti-Semitism associated with UN Resolution 3379 which ignobly equated Zionism to racism.

The U.N. General Assembly formally adopted Resolution 3379 in November 1975, with 72 countries in favor and 35 against, as well as 32 abstentions. Since the creation of Israel in 1948( via a UN land partition in 1947, lest we forget,) the Soviet Union had sought to target Israel given its close alliance with the United States. But it wasn’t until 1965 that the Soviets would first push for a U.N. resolution which would malign Israel as Zionist colonizers, thereby marrying anti-Americanism to Anti-Zionism. Much to its delight, the USSR would find a more than receptive audience at the UN for its Communist propaganda, and thus threw its considerable international clout (and money) behind the many Third World Leftist U.N. member states eager to help realize the passage of Resolution 3379 smearing Zionism as racism.

While Hamas, Islamic Jihad and others have been the chief perpetrators of Middle-East terrorism in our own era, Yasser Arafat, the founder of the Fatah party, and later the longtime head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), was in many ways these groups’ progenitor. Similar to the leaders of Hamas, Arafat was a prolific terrorist whose life’s mission was the destruction of the state of Israel. And though a consortium of 13 Arab nations ostensibly dedicated themselves to the “liberation of Palestine” at the first Arab summit in Cairo in 1964, the PLO was very much the brainchild of Soviet operatives who identified Islamic resistance movements as replete with useful idiots which could be fertile ground for their own anti-American and anti-Jewish animus. As Yuri Andropov, a former KGB chairman explained it:

“The Islamic world was a waiting petri dish in which we could nurture a virulent strain of America-hatred, grown from the bacterium of Marxist-Leninist thought. Islamic anti-Semitism ran deep... We had only to keep repeating our themes -- that the United States and Israel were 'fascist, imperial-Zionist countries' bankrolled by rich Jews."

As it happened, the United Nations was already something of a safe haven for Soviet sycophants and Third World anti-Semites by the early 1970’s. Like today, Israel’s UN antagonists are numerous and vocal, and they readily lecture the Jewish state on human rights. It’s rich, and more than a bit Orwellian to hear the Islamic Republic of Iran, recently appointed to the UN Human Rights Council, mind you, extolling the virtues of democracy and equality. Notoriously, President Idi Amin of Uganda, who butchered thousands of his own people and expelled the majority of Uganda’s South Asian community, spoke at the UN in October 1975 and admonished the American people “to rid their society of the Zionists,” and not only called for the ejection of Israel from the UN, but Amin also made public appeals for the “extinction of Israel as a state.”

Immediately following the Israeli victory over an Arab coalition led by Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War, Egypt broke off its relationship with its Russian backers, who up until that point had been Israel’s most ardent foes. (Israel and Egypt would eventually make peace in 1978 with the Camp David Accords.) This left an opening for the Kremlin to court a new and fervent anti-Israel ally, an opportunity upon which Arafat eagerly seized. In 1974, Arafat went before the U.N. General Assembly where he illogically exclaimed, “I have come bearing an olive branch and freedom fighter’s gun.” By 1975, the groundwork for a robust anti-Israel resolution such as Resolution 3379 likening Zionism to racism has been laid. Correspondingly, the U.N. General Assembly established the deceptively named Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, which the Soviets fashioned as an Arafat led, anti-Israel beachhead embedded within the U.N.

Notable Soviet bloc defectors like Ion Mihai Pacepa, a personal advisor to Romanian Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, revealed much of the KGB’s inner workings once he arrived in America in the late 70’s. Pacepa was especially enlightening on the KGB’s handiwork with the PLO. With regard to the USSR’s creation of Arafat, Pacepa told the Wall Street Journal in 2004:

“He was an Egyptian bourgeois turned into a devoted Marxist by KGB foreign intelligence. The KGB had trained him at its Balashikha special-operations school east of Moscow and in the mid-1960s decided to groom him as the future PLO leader. First, the KGB destroyed the official records of Arafat's birth in Cairo, and replaced them with fictitious documents saying that he had been born in Jerusalem and was therefore a Palestinian by birth.”

The end of the Cold War of course culminated in the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and its Communist sphere of influence, but Arafat’s PLO and the many Leftist autocratic regimes dedicated to Israel’s demise within the U.N. remained undeterred. To be sure, Resolution 3379 was finally repealed in 1991, thanks to the efforts of the George H.W. Bush Administration, but not without the entire Arab world voting against it.

Even since Arafat’s death in 2004, and the Israeli government’s full and total evacuation from Gaza in 2005, the United Nations continues to make a mockery of its original mission for collective security and the words advanced in the preamble of its charter which assert that the U.N. seeks “to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another as good neighbors.” In an ironic twist of fate, for many in the U.N., Israel is necessarily guilty by virtue of its existence.

The news that roughly 10% of UNRWA’s employees took part in the October 7th massacre is unfathomably sickening, yet, tragically on point. The world’s oldest hatred is terrifyingly back in vogue, on our streets, and epidemically rampant on elite university campuses worldwide. The U.N. helped create Israel in the wake of Nazi genocide to ensure that Jews would live in safety, and never go en masse to their deaths again. It’s nothing less than sobering to realize that UN workers themselves took part in the largest mass slaughter of Jews since Hitler took his final breath in the Führerbunker.