UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer sat down with Aish and Rabbi Rowe for a powerful conversation about the UN’s obsession with Israel, the moral inversion inside international institutions, and the courage it takes to confront lies in the room where they are repeated most.
Conversation Highlights:
Rabbi Rowe: What’s it actually like working within the United Nations?
Hillel Neuer: Well, it’s a very odd place. And I tell my interns and our associates who are beginning at the United Nations to remind themselves that they’re entering an Orwellian upside down world. It’s a dystopian universe. If you live in Canada or the UK or Switzerland, you live in a democracy. It’s a place that has the rule of law. It’s not perfect, but has a rule of law. It has independent courts, it has free elections, majority rule, basic respect for individual rights.
When you enter the United Nations, you have none of those things. You’re entering a place where the powers include China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela - yes, the U.S. and the others have some Influence. But it’s a place where many of the leading figures at the Human Rights Council, for example, are China, Qatar, Cuba, Pakistan. Of the Women’s Rights Commission, the Islamic Republic of Iran was elected a few years ago. And they have influence.
And so what is instructive is that you get a bit of a taste of what it’s like to live under those regimes. Obviously only a bit of a taste - they’re not machine gunning you in Geneva at the Human Rights Council. And when I speak, and often they interrupt to shut me down, then I get just a tiny bit of a taste of the totalitarianism and the oppression that those who live under those regimes have to put up with.
Rabbi Rowe: What drives the UN’s obsession with Israel?
Hillel Neuer: Well, it’s a profound question, and we don’t have the complete answer. We know we have part of the answer. Today, in a given year, you will have at the UN General Assembly - which is the parliament of the UN, all 193 countries have one vote in that assembly - you have each year one resolution on Iran, one resolution on Syria, one resolution on North Korea, and at least 15 on Israel. And in a given year, there are more resolutions on Israel than the rest of the world combined. It is an obsession. It is not rational.
But we can point to some of the direct causes. The resolutions are introduced by the Arab and Islamic states. There are 56 Islamic states. They hold enormous influence in the African group, in the Asian group, and so many other countries join them. They have at their disposal significant levers of influence.
They have, first, vote trading: you vote for me, I vote for you. There are 56 Islamic states. If you may not have a dog in this fight, you may not hate Jews or Israel, but you want those 56 votes in the Islamic group. How many votes in the Jewish group? One. 56 to one, it’s a no-brainer.
Number two, oil and gas. Israel has found a bit of gas offshore, but still vast quantities of oil and gas are by the Islamic world. You don’t vote for us, you don’t get oil, you don’t get gas. Every country needs that sovereignty. Then sovereign wealth funds - Saudi, Qatar, for example - billions of dollars. You vote the way we like, you behave the way we like, you get investments; you don’t, you don’t.
And I should mention that the Europeans. Typically, if there’s 15 condemnations of Israel at the General Assembly, they vote for two-thirds of them and abstain on the other third. So the EU is complicit in many of these things and when I see these Western diplomats voting this way, I don’t necessarily see them compelled or coerced by vote trading, by financial issues, by petrol, by fear of terrorism. Many of them seem very content to go along and demonize Israel.
Rabbi Rowe: You must be the most hated man at the UN. Are you like persona non grata?
Hillel Neuer: I am the most hated man at the UN, and when I walk in from the stairs, I’m reminded of that all the time. And it’s not only from the usual suspects. The usual suspects would be the dictatorships. UN Watch does not only speak out against antisemitism and anti-Israeli prejudice - we speak out against tyrannies. We bring victims of the world’s worst dictatorships to testify to the United Nations, heroes who were in prison, just got out of prison from China, Iran, Zimbabwe, Cuba, Pakistan. So because we speak out for human rights and democracy, the tyrannies hate me.
But in the room there are other people, there are other constituencies. There’s the UN officials, the UN employees. The UN has thousands of employees. When I walk into the room at the Human Rights Council, there’s dozens of UN employees. They don’t like me either, as a rule, because they like to go to work saying, “Today I’m going to work at the UN Human Rights Council, the great protector of human rights.”
But then I’m this annoying guy who’s lifting a mirror to the Human Rights Council and reminding them that they’ve been silent on violations taking place around the world while having an anti-Israel bias. We also speak out against anti-Americanism - not that America can’t be criticized, but the obsessive anti-Americanism, we speak out against it. We’re also not anti-capitalist and they hate us for that.
Finally, the room has the NGO activists at the Human Rights Council in Geneva. Those human rights activists are able to be accredited as non-governmental observers, to be an NGO, which we have that status as well. And sadly, many subscribe to a very radical left-wing ideology which is anti-Israel, anti-American, anti-Western, anti-colonial, anti-capitalism. And so the NGO activists, among whom I sit, many of them hate me as well.
