135: Why don’t Israelis trust the UN?

The UN has passed more condemnation resolutions against Israel than against the rest of the world combined, year after year, decade after decade. In 2025, the General Assembly adopted 15 resolutions on Israel and 11 on every other country on earth. Between 2015 and 2024, the tally was 173 against Israel and 80 against everyone else. At the Human Rights Council, Israel has been the target of 112 country-specific resolutions since 2006—more than double the next highest, Syria at 45. This is not a matter of interpretation. The data is unambiguous, and it forms the bedrock of the Israeli distrust that Haviv walks through in this episode.

The structural problem: majority rule without a block

The core Israeli argument is not that the UN is biased in some vague, fixable way. It is that the UN is structurally incapable of fairness toward Israel. The institution operates on a majority-rules block system. Regional blocs vote for each other, members from those blocs fill committees, and autocracies cover for each other. There are 57 member states in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and one Jewish state. Israel has no regional bloc to defend it. It has no automatic allies in the voting system. It is perpetually isolated, and the data shows the result: ritual condemnation that has nothing to do with Israel's actual conduct in any given year. As Haviv puts it, "The condemnatio