Too much of one thing often has a counterproductive effect. This is the case with the UN resolutions against Israel: there are simply too many of them to be taken seriously. Recently, the General Assembly condemned Israel again with a broad majority, which has now become routine. Meanwhile, there are around two hundred resolutions concerning Israel from the General Assembly and a further 229 from the UN Security Council. “The UN organizations pass more resolutions every year that are directed against the small state of Israel than those against all other states in the world combined,” writes Swiss politician Marianne Binder-Keller. “In 2018, for example, there were 21 out of 26. A good 80 percent of all UN condemnations for human rights violations are therefore directed against the only democracy in the Middle East.”
In 2022, there were 15 condemnations of Israel by the Security Council, while North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, and Syria were only condemned once each. Between 2006 and 2024, there were also 108 further condemnations by the UN Human Rights Council between 2006 and 2024, but in the same period only 17 against North Korea and only 15 against Iran, the country with the world’s highest rate of executions and torture. No regime in the world, however bloody, is pilloried with such mercilessness as Israel. According to the UN votes, Israel appears to be by far the most reprehensible, inhumane, and belligerent state in the world.
Is it worth reading all these resolutions, several hundred in total, all these recommendations and conditions, these obligations and admonitions? One finds patterns and leitmotifs, material for several doctoral theses and for lawyers who want to deal with the absurdities of international law. The resolutions are not consistent in themselves; they reflect different international law and the changes it has undergone over the decades. International law is less a question of codification than of agreement, and therefore of the respective majorities. In November 1947, with the famous Resolution 181 (II), the United Nations recommended a division of the remaining British Mandate territory into an Arab and a Jewish part, thus paving the way for the founding of the State of Israel—but at that time it was a completely different organization than it is today. At that time—with only 51 members—Western countries and countries cooperating with the West predominated, the majority of which were interested in the creation of a Jewish state after the shock of the Holocaust.
Today, UN voting behavior is dictated by the most powerful group of states in the General Assembly, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), to which 56 Islamic states belong and which thus largely dominates the group of non-aligned states (120 in total), which have a majority among the 193 UN member states. This means that resolutions proposed by the Islamic group of states against Israel automatically have a majority in the General Assembly. In the UN Security Council it is different; here any resolution can be overturned by the veto of the permanent members. Thus explicit condemnations of Israel by the Security Council are rarer than by the UN General Assembly.
When the United Nations was founded, a decision also had to be made on how to deal with the mandates granted by its predecessor institution, the League of Nations (including the British “Palestine Mandate”) in the future. And the majority decided to retain the legal status of the mandates, i. e. to essentially retain what had been established by the League of Nations. This meant in case of the “Palestine Mandate,” the actual purpose of the mandate, “the establishment of a Jewish national home” and the “close settlement by Jews on the land,” remained valid international law in the entire Mandate territory. The regulation did not apply to those parts of the Mandate territory in which the League of Nations mandate expired due to the founding of a new state, i.e. initially the area of the Mandate that was arbitrarily separated to found the Kingdom of Jordan (in order to satisfy their ally in the First World War, Abdallah ibn Hussain), and later, in 1948, the territory of the State of Israel. However, in the West Bank and Gaza, where no state has yet been established, the continuation of the legal situation of the Mandate territory decided by the United Nations in 1947 still applies. In other words, the continued settlement of this area by Jews.
For this reason, the claim that the construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank violates international law is fundamentally false. On the other hand, the new majorities in the UN have de facto created a kind of new international law, a customary law that is supported by the majority of UN member states, through more and more resolutions that gradually shifted the 1947 provisions in favour of the Islamic group of states. In order to remain committed to its constitutional documents, the UN has never revoked the international legal regulations for the mandates. The Israeli settlers therefore do not recognize the new customary law and continue to build new settlements in the mandated territory of the West Bank—albeit repeatedly obstructed by their own government and international pressure—with reference to the international law of the League of Nations, which was recognized by the United Nations in 1947 as still valid and never officially changed. Many of the UN resolutions condemn the construction of settlements, but their validity is fundamentally questionable due to the dilemma of international law that exists here.
Numerous UN resolutions apply to the military occupation of the West Bank by Israeli troops. The military occupation is not justified by international law, thus seemingly illegal, but the Israeli state justifies its military presence in the so-called Palestinian territories with the security of Jewish settlements, which is a requirement of international law according to the UN resolution 181 of 1947. This resolution demanded that Jews settling in the yet-to-be-founded Arab state should live there in security. Since October 7, 2023 at the latest, we and the whole world have been aware of the necessity of this precaution. After all, defenseless Jewish settlements would be ravaged by massacres and looting like the kibbutzim on the Gaza border on that October morning. The experience of October 7 has strengthened Israel’s conviction that the demands of most UN resolutions addressed to Israel are practically impossible to implement. That their implementation would in many cases pose an existential threat to Israel.
If the State of Israel had attempted to comply with the UN resolutions concerning it, it would no longer exist. In the meantime, some of the convictions have simply lost their meaning. Between 1967 and 1989 alone, the UN Security Council passed a record 131 resolutions dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. However, the “Israeli-Arab conflict” no longer exists. Most Arab states are, openly or covertly, standing by Israel in the current war. The minority of Arabs still fighting against Israel, be they Palestinians, Shiites in Lebanon, or Houtis in Yemen, are now in the pay of the Persian Shiite mullah regime in Tehran, a non-Arab power. It is as much at enmity with the Arab states in the region as it is with Israel. This is the real line of conflict these days: between Iran and its militias on the one hand and Israel and the Sunni Arab states on the other.
These 131 resolutions could therefore be shelved: they are of interest to historians, but irrelevant to the current political situation. The numerous resolutions calling for the withdrawal of Israeli occupation forces from the West Bank are also obsolete: such a withdrawal cannot and will not happen any time soon, unless Israel suddenly develops suicidal tendencies. So far, there has been no sign of this; the will to survive of most Israelis is unbroken. They see the UN as an instrument of the poorer, backward countries to exert pressure on the rich West, among other things with a constant Palestine hype, a hysteria fanned again and again by the Organization for Islamic Cooperation. It works quite well: Western countries pay billions every year to the corrupt regimes and failed states that benefit from the UN. But most Israelis think past the UN. They don’t see why they should risk the existence of their country for the sake of this organization.
After decades of unfair treatment by the UN, this organization understandably enjoys virtually no respect among Israelis. Escalating tensions between their own government and this body, even with the kinds of measures that seem excessive from a Western perspective, such as declaring the current UN Secretary-General Guterres persona non grata and banning him from entering the country, are largely popular in Israel. Guterres has a long history of hating Israel, even before his UN career, as president of the Socialist International. For many Israelis, he has become a symbol of this organization’s persistent anti-Israel stance.
Just how little UN resolutions are worth can be seen in Resolution 1701 of 2006, which has recently been brought back to the fore: it calls for the disarmament of the Islamic militia Hezbollah in Lebanon and its withdrawal beyond the Litani River. Today, 18 years later, none of this has happened. The so-called “peacekeeping force” of the UN organization UNIFIL has failed: in the immediate vicinity of its checkpoints, Hezbollah has been able to dig tunnels, smuggle weapons on an excessive scale, and set up base camps, allegedly unnoticed by the “blue helmets.” Obviously, the UN peacekeeping force limits itself to monitoring and denouncing Israel’s activities while leaving Hezbollah to its own devices.
The new international law is that of the dominant Islamic states. The ‘world order’ that the Western founders of the UN dreamed of has long since been overturned—much to their detriment. We know the pattern from Gaza: the corrupt UN organization UNRWA, infiltrated by Hamas operatives, as a protective shield and cover for Islamic terror. In this way, the UN, paid for by Western states, openly acts as a helper to its most dangerous enemies, Islamic militias like Hezbollah and Hamas. Later generations will be amazed at so much carelessness and perversion.
