Hillel Neuer was interviewed by Ben Chertoff of HonestReporting to discuss his firsthand experience inside the UN, the politicization he observed early on, and how structural dynamics and voting blocs shape repeated condemnations of Israel.
Conversation Highlights:
Ben Chertoff: You have spent decades inside the UN-documenting it, fighting it, and refusing to let the world look away. You’ve confronted dictators directly. What does that feel like? I must imagine it feels hostile.
Hillel Neuer: It’s not pleasant, I’ll say that. It’s not pleasant to walk into a room where you look around and it’s being run by dictators and state sponsors of terrorism, or those who are complicit-those who may be democracies but, in one form or another, are complicit. It’s not a pleasant feeling. And then you have the UN officials, who are ostensibly neutral but, you know, sometimes can be themselves unfriendly, to put it mildly.
So you’re walking into a hostile arena. It’s not pleasant. I know I have my 90 seconds to speak, and you try to make it count. So you kind of buckle up, you suck it up, you go in there, you stand tall, and you speak words of truth.
And, you know, to be fair to the UN-when it works and we are allowed to speak-it’s a tremendous opportunity. It’s a global podium. Whether people watch it live at the UN or see it later on video, words that are said at the United Nations-at that world tribune-are given great attention. So we see an opportunity to tell the truth, and we seize it.
Ben Chertoff: Was there a moment where you realized that the UN human rights system is not what we thought it was?
Hillel Neuer: Yes and pretty quickly. One of the first things that I witnessed when I arrived here in Geneva was a special sitting of what was then called the Human Rights Commission - which later became the UN Human Rights Council we have today. Israel had assassinated the founder of Hamas, Ahmed Yassin, who was a top terrorist, and they basically held an emergency session to pay tribute to him.
This was maybe a couple of days after I arrived. So, you know, the Orwellian nature of the body was manifest right from the beginning. The moment you walked in, you saw who the members were, whether it was China, Cuba or Sudan. Gaddafi’s representative had been chair of the Commission a year before I came. So everyone kind of knew that it was a joke.
Ben Chertoff: When people say the UN condemned Israel, who is actually saying that?
Hillel Neuer: I’d say that the main distinction to keep in mind at the UN is between the agencies or bodies that are run by member states-where the UN, you could say, acts as a forum-and the UN employees.
There are thousands of UN employees, with Secretary-General António Guterres at the top. There are also heads of UN agencies such as UNRWA. These are all salaried UN people, and they are also actors. They can also condemn the U.S. and Israel, and have been since the Iran war began.
And then you have the legislative bodies made up of member states. Whether it’s the UN General Assembly in New York or the 47-member Human Rights Council in Geneva, for example. There, someone has to introduce a resolution. Typically, the resolutions on Israel are introduced by the Arab and Islamic states, led by the Palestinians.
Keep in mind there are a total of 56 Muslim states out of the 193 UN members, so that gets you more than 25% of the way there. And then all the dictatorships vote with the Palestinians-North Korea, Cuba, Belarus, etc. So very quickly you get what we call the “automatic majority.” And I would say it’s worse than that, because sadly many of the West European democracies vote for about two-thirds of these resolutions. They go along to get along.
So when the UN condemns Israel, usually it’s the General Assembly or the Human Rights Council, but it can also be Guterres and other UN employees.
