In the ashes of the Second World War, as the scale of human cruelty came fully into view, the world vowed that such devastation would never again be permitted to unfold unchecked. Cities lay in ruins. Tens of millions were dead. Entire nations had been consumed by ideologies that thrived on aggression and racial hatred. And among the victims were six million Jews—murdered not on battlefields, but in ghettos, forests, and industrial death camps.

It was in that shattered moral landscape that the United Nations was born.

The UN was not conceived merely as a diplomatic forum. It was envisioned as a safeguard against the very forces that had unleashed catastrophe: unrestrained nationalism, racial supremacism, and the indifference of nations to the suffering of others. Its Charter, signed in 1945, pledged to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and to reaffirm “faith in fundamental human rights.” For a Jewish people freshly scarred by genocide and centuries of stateless vulnerability, this promise carried profound meaning.

And in 1947, the United Nations appeared to act in accordance with that mission.

After decades of British rule in Mandatory Palestine, and following exhaustive international deliberations, the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 181—the Partition Plan. It recognized the right of both Jews and Arabs to self-determination in the land. For the first time in nearly two thousand years, the international community formally acknowledged Jewish political sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. Against the backdrop of the Holocaust, the vote was widely........

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