The modern human-rights order was built in the shadow of the Holocaust. The United Nations itself acknowledges that the murder of six million Jews left a profound mark on the foundational legal documents adopted in 1948. And yet the single Jewish state on earth has become the most persistently and exceptionally scrutinised subject across large parts of the UN system. That contradiction is not an accident of recent headlines. It is structural, and it is old.

The tension was present at the creation. On 29 November 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, recommending a Jewish state and an Arab state, with Jerusalem under international administration. The Jewish leadership accepted the UN’s framework. Palestinian Arab leaders and the surrounding Arab states rejected it; fighting broke out; and when Israel declared independence, five Arab armies invaded. The institution that once helped midwife Jewish self-determination would, over the following decades, become a central forum for reopening its very legitimacy.

Let me be clear about what I am and am not arguing. Criticism of Israeli governments is legitimate — necessary, even — exactly as it is for any state. The question is not whether Israel may be criticised. It is whether Israel is treated as one country among many, or as a uniquely suspect project whose right to exist is endlessly relitigated. On the evidence, important parts of the UN have chosen the second path.

Architecture, not rhetoric

The clearest proof is not in any one speech. It is in the machinery. The UN Human Rights Council still convenes under Agenda Item 7, a permanent fixture devoted solely to Israel and the territories connected to it. Every other situation on earth — Syria, Sudan, North Korea, Iran — is handled under a general item. A Brookings analysis observed that Israel and Palestine form the only file granted a standing place on the Council’s agenda. Earlier this year, even the United Kingdom told the Council in formal remarks that Item 7 represents a disproportionate focus on Israel, and that no comparable country is subjected to anything like it.

The numbers behind the architecture tell the same story. That same Brookings study found that between 2006 and 2015, seven of the Council’s sixteen commissions of inquiry concerned Israel and Palestine, as did twelve of the thirty-five reports those inquiries produced. Item 7 resolutions have averaged roughly five a year. At the General Assembly, the United States’ own voting-practices report counted sixteen Israel-related plenary votes in 2024 alone. The monitoring group UN Watch — an advocacy body, and worth citing as such — tallied seventeen General Assembly resolutions against Israel that year, against a handful for the entire rest of the world combined. Even discounting for the conflict’s visibility and........

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