In March 2024, four United Nations employees told JNS that after Oct. 7, they have been “very uncomfortable” at work as Jews and that they had to listen silently to anti-Israel propaganda that is “completely organized and supported at the highest level.” About a year and a half later, two of the four talked again with JNS anonymously, and both said that the global body has done little to improve conditions for Jewish staffers.
“Things have continued to deteriorate in relation to anti-Israel bias,” one of the two told JNS anonymously. “It’s just that now it is both outspoken and indoors.”
The staffer was referring to a June 2026 conference of the International Labor Organization, a specialized U.N. agency, in Geneva, in Switzerland.
Israeli diplomat Waleed Gadban was forced to cut short his address, as government ministers, including Turkish ones, and trade union representatives and other delegates banged loudly on their desks. The president of the conference failed to restore order.
The first Jewish U.N. employee told JNS that “I prefer at this point not to share more and not to be identified in any way.”
The second Jewish employee, who works in the development sector and does not have an identifiable Jewish name, told JNS that from her perspective, things have not necessarily gotten worse at the global body for Jews.
That’s mainly because “we have a new conflict, and it has a little bit shadowed the situation in the Middle East, which is in a way good,” she said.
The Iran war, which has been consequential for the United Nations, “has a little bit pulled aside the issue of Jews,” the staffer said.
It’s become clear over the last couple of years exactly which U.N. staff members emphasize the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and which go about their business, according to the staffer.
“Half of the people I work with are from Latin America, Asia or Africa. These people really, seriously—they don’t give a damn,” she told JNS, of what her coworkers think about Israel or the conflict.
She thinks that is the way it is for “more than 60% of 70% of the staff of the U.N.”
The staffer recalled a recent conversation with a coworker from Southeast Asia about the Jewish High Holidays, during which the coworker asked to come next time to the Jewish staffer’s synagogue.
“It’s not even the Arabs that are the problem,” the staffer said. “Besides the Palestinians, the problem is the Europeans and the leftists, promoted by NGOs. They are the most dangerous.”
Leaders of the local U.N. staff union, from where many antisemitic problems arise, are British, the staffer said.
The U.N. Action Plan to Enhance Monitoring and Response to Antisemitism has not had an impact one way or another, according to the U.N. staffer who works in development.
Miguel Ángel Moratinos, U.N. under-secretary-general and high representative for the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, leads that plan, which was announced in January 2025 and was rolled out officially three months later.
“We still have the same kinds of guidelines about communication, about participation in demonstrations or activities beyond the U.N., where we have to be very careful to keep our neutrality and objectivity,” the staffer told JNS.
That has been the case even as a group called U.N. Staff for Gaza has taken part in partisan activities and hosted a guest, who bragged about deliberately disguising her organization’s work with radical and U.S.-sanctioned anti-Israel groups to fool European diplomats into offering support, JNS has reported.
The employee said that she wasn’t aware of other new initiatives. She said that management has clamped down on partisanship in the workplace.
She recalled that last year, a Palestinian staffer stood up at a town hall at the organization for which they work and urged attendees to remember Gazan victims.
“Somebody said in response that we are in a town hall meeting for the agency, and this isn’t the place, but we take note of your point,” the employee said. “Full stop. That’s all.”
Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, created an antisemitism task force of his own, bringing together representatives from dozens of countries.
“You know what the problem is? They try to dilute antisemitism, and they call it global hate, and they added issues,” Danon told JNS. “But when you look at the numbers, the Jewish population in the U.S., it’s 2% of the population. When you look at the number of hate crimes, 66% of them are against Jews.”
“So the problem with antisemitism, you cannot dilute it, and that’s what they’re trying to do at the U.N.,” he said.
Danon told JNS that under António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, the global body “has become a hostile work environment for Israelis and Jews.”
“In the past, antisemitism at the U.N. was primarily reflected in the policies of individual member states,” he said. “Today, the organization itself has become a breeding ground for institutionalized antisemitism.”
Marina Rosenberg, a former Israeli diplomat who is now senior vice president of international affairs at the Anti-Defamation League, told JNS that she worked with Moratinos and his team on his plan.
“We gave our input just like other Jewish communities, but to be honest, I have not seen any real progress on the ground and any impact at all,” she said.
“It’s true that it’s a new program, but we are concerned that when you have a program, but you don’t have the funds or the serious team that can implement it, or the partners to do it with, then what’s the point of having a program in the first place?” she told JNS.
Rosenberg wants to be the next U.N. secretary-general to take the issue more seriously and ensure that there are resources in place for it.
David Michaels, director of U.N. and intercommunal affairs at B’nai B’rith International, told JNS that “we continue to have concerns about practical U.N. engagement in efforts against antisemitism—limited resources and direction, insufficient coordination with the Jewish community and its experts and serious internal political constraints.”
“Commemorating the Holocaust isn’t enough,” Michaels said.
It’s difficult to tackle antisemitism at the global body “without a clear-eyed view of its dominant contemporary forms, and a basic definition of antisemitism that reflects these,” he told JNS.
The global body has declined to adopt the widely used International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred or any one standard.
“There can’t be U.N. credibility in fighting anti-Jewish bias when there isn’t readiness to address it within the U.N. system itself,” Michaels told JNS. “We hope that the next U.N. secretary-general will display more leadership in modeling this, and that key Security Council members—not only the U.S. but also Britain and France, whose Jewish populations have been besieged by antisemitism—will make this a condition for approving any candidate.”
Nihal Saad, director of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, told JNS that Moratinos’s office has “taken a first step toward implementing the United Nations Action Plan to Enhance Monitoring and Response to Antisemitism through the launch of an online learning module on understanding antisemitism and which is available to all UN staff.”
“We are also working on a few modifications in the module, elaborating a few segments,” Saad said. “The objective is to strengthen awareness across the workplace and promote a culture of dignity, respect, inclusion and accountability.”
The office is also studying the “modalities and terms of reference of establishing a working group on antisemitism before the end of this year,” Saad told JNS.
The United Nations does not maintain employment statistics on the basis of religious identity. Of 1,065 staff within the U.N. secretariat at the end of 2021, there were 12 Israelis. That was below the “desirable range” of 13 to 22 that the United Nations sets as a baseline according to a country’s population and other factors.
The 164 Israelis of 125,436 total U.N. employees in 2022 represented about 0.13% of the entire U.N. staff, which is about the same percentage that Israelis represent globally.
Some have been heartened to see that U.N. executive Rebeca Grynspan, who is Jewish and a former Costa Rican vice president, has been leading the race for the next secretary-general. But questions about the viability of her candidacy remain.
The Jewish U.N. staffer who works in development told JNS that she isn’t enthralled.
“She’s good, but she’s also a politician at the end of the day,” the staffer said. “We don’t expect some kind of revolution thanks to Grynspan.”
Grynspan has the “guts” and good relations with both the United States and Russia but won’t do much to help Jews in the U.N. system, according to the U.N. staffer.
“She has never done anything good for Jews,” she said.
The staffer thinks that Grynspan kept her Jewish heritage under the radar until “she realized that the winds were turning” with U.S. President Donald Trump returning to office. She “became close” to Daniel Meron, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, according to the staffer.
“Before that, she was really keeping some distance, not to be accused of any kind of bias towards Israel,” the staffer said. “Even for Oct. 7, she did not send any message or anything to the ambassador.”
Grynspan was “really ignoring her Jewish roots, and then she became a candidate, and she turned her origin into some kind of asset and marketing tool, so she’s getting closer to the Jewish community,” the staffer told JNS. “But if ever she is elected, I don’t think that she will do any kind of change in the region.”
