The United Nations and its officials have accused the Jewish state of many things, including “occupation,” “apartheid” and “genocide.” Earlier this month, one of its agencies added “hate speech” to the list of ostensible Israeli offenses.
“Using commercial advertisement including billboards in several cities around the world and paid Google ads on multiple websites, the government of Israel has stepped up its disinformation campaign against UNRWA,” the U.N. Relief and Works Agency stated on Dec. 4. “These ads are the latest in a series of a wider campaign against UNRWA by the government of Israel, which continues to publicly call for dismantling the agency.”
UNRWA added that “this latest global effort by a U.N. member state to label a U.N. agency as a terror organization may amount to hate speech using corporations that are supposed to promote commercial products.”
It also said that “this campaign is creating immense reputational damage to UNRWA, currently the largest humanitarian provider for people in Gaza living through an excruciating war,” and that “these ads can put the lives of UNRWA personnel at serious risk.”
Jonathan Fowler, senior communications manager at UNRWA, told JNS earlier this month that “any formal determination” of hate speech “would need to be made by a legal authority.”
The spokesman added that “UNRWA and its staff have been repeatedly misrepresented and labeled in a blanket fashion as a ‘terror organization.’” He added that Israel’s allegations that UNRWA staff members in Gaza have ties to Palestinian terror groups and that some participated in Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack are “unsubstantiated, pejorative, indiscriminate and inciteful.”
JNS asked Fowler how the Israeli government’s ad campaign is “hate speech.”
“This is an evolving field, and I speak from experience in entirely unrelated settings,” Fowler told JNS. “There are emerging forms of ‘othering’ and out-group mass labeling that have a range of negative impacts on groups that are subject to this.”
Fowler added that UNRWA qualified its statement by saying that Israel’s campaign “may” be hate speech, “precisely because these evolutions are leading to new trends in analysis and jurisprudence.”
“It is not for us to determine whether particular statements by officials about our agency and staff as a group fall under the classic definition,” he told JNS. “But the frequent blanket labeling and incitement is a matter of public record and is subject to ongoing analysis by various parties. Such statements have already had an impact on the safety of staff.”
JNS asked Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, if the accusation that Israel may have engaged in “hate speech” opened the global body up to criticism of doing the same, given that several U.N. officials, including Francesca Albanese, a special rapporteur, have been accused of widespread antisemitic statements.
‘I think we have been very clear’
“There’s been criticism of the U.N.’s work probably since the day after the charter went into effect. That’s nothing new,” he said. “I think what we don’t want to see is language that dehumanizes U.N. workers, that makes broad statements where U.N. workers are painted as terrorists like we saw on the ads that are up on the electronic billboards in New York that put our colleagues at risk.”
Dujarric told JNS of statements by so-called U.N. “independent experts” that “I think we have been very clear in saying we do not support those statements, I mean, from the secretary-general’s standpoint.”
Citing the “complexity, the diversity of this wonderful system we call the U.N.,” Dujarric said that he could speak only for Guterres.
“I think he’s been very clear in his messaging,” Dujarric said of his boss. “He’s not been demonizing any one individual or demonizing any member state, and we haven’t been supportive of statements that have gone in that direction.”
Guterres was widely denounced last year when he said before the U.N. Security Council in October 2023 that “it is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.”
The United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech defines “hate speech” as “any kind of communication in speech, writing or behavior, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, color, descent, gender or other identity factor.”
The strategy does not appear to recognize critical comments about the United Nations as hate speech against a protected class. (The hate-speech policy of the Facebook parent company Meta also does not appear to consider it “hate speech” to denounce a U.N. agency.)
The Israeli government advertisements, which UNRWA called potential “hate speech,” noted ties between the U.N. agency and the Hamas terror group. One ad, which was displayed in Times Square and near U.N. headquarters in Manhattan, showed a masked man holding a Hamas flag and sporting an UNRWA headband.