Hillel Neuer sat down with Winston Marshall, a renowned musician and public intellectual, to discuss UNRWA, the UN bias against Israel, the supposed rules-based world order, and if the UN can be saved.
Highlights:
Winston Marshall: What happened to the UN? Can it be saved?
Hillel Neuer: If you look at the UN, you know, its founders, many of them were noble idealists. Certainly Eleanor Roosevelt was and she was the founding chair of the Human Rights Commission in 1946. Her vice chair was René Cassin, French legal philosopher. They adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and they met in Geneva after World War II to reaffirm the principles of human dignity. So the founders were noble.
You fast forward to 2003, several decades later. It’s no longer a body made up of idealists, but of governments. And the chair was a representative, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the brutal Libyan dictator. So 1946 - Eleanor Roosevelt. 2003 - Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s representative. The rise and fall of human rights at the UN.
So we should be asking, what can be done with this body? So our group UN Watch, based in Geneva, with a special focus on the Human Rights Council, we’ve asked democracies do something. When China, Cuba, Qatar get nominated and Vladimir Putin many times was nominated and sat on the Human Rights Council and Chávez and Maduro from Venezuela, serial abusers of human rights, we said vote against them, lead a campaign to block them. And in most cases the democracies Britain, France, Germany said nothing.
And what they do at the UN is they go along to get along. So we’ve been asking them to take minimal steps for reform and they don’t do it. So you ask me today, is there hope for reform? To be honest, currently I don’t see it.
Winston Marshall: You have just released a new report on UNRWA. What can you share?
Hillel Neuer: We came to the conclusion after a decade of trying to work with them that UNRWA is a pathological agency. It is the inversion of an agency that’s supposed to promote peace and end conflict. It’s the opposite of that. It is the fuel of conflict. It is telling Palestinians, it’s not about a two-state solution, it’s not about rebuilding Gaza, it’s about destroying Israel, returning to Israel, and destroying Israel.
Our new report shows that in Gaza, the head of the UNRWA teachers’ union there was a gentleman named Suhail al-Hindi. Up until several years ago, he was a teacher, school principal, and head of the teachers’ union. He is also an elected member of the Hamas politburo. He’s one of the Hamas terror chiefs. He’s in pictures next to Yahya Sinwar, the terror mastermind.
We looked at Lebanon and we found the head of the UNRWA teachers’ union there was Fatah Sharif. Same story: He was a school principal for 30 years and head of the teachers’ union in UNRWA who oversaw 2000 teachers that we in the West paid for. And Fatah Sharif was also the head of Hamas in Lebanon. Now how do I know that? Well, in September 2024, Israel eliminated Fatah Sharif and Hamas said “you killed our leader.” Videos came out of him meeting with Ismail Haniyeh, who was the former head of Hamas and until he was eliminated as well in Iran.
And the director of UNRWA in Lebanon Claudio Cordone - one of the international guys - is pictured giving a certificate of appreciation to Fatah Sharif, the Hamas terror chief and head of the UNRWA teachers’ union. So, UNRWA is not part of the solution, it’s part of the problem.
Winston Marshall: Is the UN really biased against Israel? What does the data show?
Hillel Neuer: Our own website, the UN Watch database tracks the voting records across the UN bodies. If we look at the UN General Assembly over the past ten years, you’ll see that there has been about 170 resolutions against Israel and only about 80 on the rest of the world combined. Most countries never get criticized. There’s never been condemnation at the General Assembly of China, Cuba, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia. Most countries in the world - 185 countries - have zero.
A few countries get criticized each year. There’s one annual resolution on Iran, one on Syria, one on North Korea and about 17 on Israel. That’s a regular year.
Winston Marshall: The UN is riddled with issues. So, have we officially reached the end of the rules-based world order?
Hillel Neuer: My experience with the so-called rules-based international order is one of one that gives me reason for skepticism.
Many things happen at the United Nations where a UN decision is made and it’s done in a way that might be entirely inconsistent with the UN’s own rules. And we complain about it to proper Western democracies, whether it’s France, the UK, Germany, the Netherlands or other countries, and they say, “Oh no, no, the UN has decided and we respect UN decisions and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
The very countries who claim to be acting in the name of the rules-based order were complicit in a flagrant violation of the UN’s own rules on how to reappoint people on a very important issue. Someone who was condemned for racism and promoting terrorism-Francesca Albanese. She’s been condemned by several countries for antisemitism. They completely ignored their own rules and allowed for her renewal to go through.
So I’m very skeptical about the rules-based international order. That phrase sounds nice, but in practice, certainly at the United Nations, it is invoked by people who are sometimes doing it to justify and allow violation of rules.
