Panelists at a discussion during the Israeli-American Council Summit largely agreed that the United Nations is deeply flawed, but differed on whether it is worthwhile for the United States and Israel to retain their membership in the global body.
Gilad Erdan, global president of Magen David Adom and Israel’s U.N. ambassador from 2020 to 2024, told JNS that, while it’s possible, it doesn’t matter much if anti-Israel U.N. member states and officials were starting to get the message that the Trump administration is sending by its repeated U.N. funding withdrawals and cuts.
“The U.N. is a broken system that cannot be repaired because out of the 193 countries, the majority of them are not democracies—almost one-third of them are Muslim countries that tend to vote as a bloc together—so the U.N. cannot serve anymore the purpose it was meant to serve,” Erdan said.
Towards the end of his tenure as ambassador, the former Israeli government minister became an outspoken advocate of a complete Israeli withdrawal from the United Nations and its eventual dismantling.
Erdan addressed the IAC Summit on Jan. 16 in a session titled “When the World Turns: Exposing the UN’s Double Standards on Israel,” moderated by JNS CEO Alex Traiman. The panel explored the U.N.’s double standards when it comes to Israel and the impact of that bias on global policy and public perception.
The United Nations has failed at its most core mission: preventing wide-scale death and destruction through conflict and oppression, Erdan told JNS.
“It cannot defend human rights. It cannot prevent wars or genocide, as we’ve seen so many times,” Erdan said.
The former Israeli diplomat also harshly criticized U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, calling him “despicable.”
Guterres “used to condemn Israel every other day—sometimes every day. Now, it took him 15 days before he said anything about the massacre of Iranian protesters. Crickets,” Erdan told JNS, dismissing Guterres’ eventual statement on the regime’s crackdown as “hollow, empty words.”
‘Israel must remain on the inside’
Another panelist, Ayelet Samerano, spoke from personal tragedy as her son, Yonatan, was murdered during the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. His body was taken to Gaza by an employee of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, more commonly known as UNRWA.
That incident, along with other evidence of UNRWA employees’ participation in the Oct. 7 massacre, triggered a domino effect of countries and entities cutting off funding for UNRWA, as ties between the organization and Hamas and other terror groups became more widely known.
Despite her criticism of the United Nations, Samerano told JNS that as long as the global body exists, Israel must remain on the inside.
“I think when you want to fight someone, you cannot leave the area,” she said. “We can go out. But then what will happen?” She added that the United States currently shields the Jewish state from many U.N. decisions, and that an Israeli withdrawal could prompt a broader U.S. pullback, thus removing that protection.
She and Erdan agreed, however, that financial pressure can be the most powerful agent of change, with an impact well beyond diplomatic maneuvering.
“If a lot of countries will stop paying or funding the U.N., that’s the real effect,” Samerano said. “I discovered since Oct. 7 that the biggest case to close the U.N. isn’t diplomatic or political. It’s money.”
Erdan referred to the effect as the “Trump doctrine,” which is to avoid throwing good money after bad.
“I believe the new doctrine that we are seeing will lead to the destruction of the U.N., because it’s a waste of money. $75 billion a year for nothing,” Erdan said. “On the contrary, the U.N. today is a weapon in the hands of dictators or terror supporters who use it to whitewash their crimes.”
He added that Trump concluded the foundations of modern international law are “based on the twisted political makeup” of the International Criminal Court and the justices that are being elected by the U.N. General Assembly.
“So he decided—not for himself, but for the free world—that since he cannot rely on international law or international institutions, he needs to defend the future of the free democratic world,” Erdan said.
While Erdan endorsed the late Sen. John McCain’s proposal to form a League of Democracies to replace the U.N.’s current structure, Samerano told JNS that the existing system, especially UNRWA, even in a weakened state, remains operational and must continue to be challenged.
“I met with a lot of ambassadors that finance UNRWA. They stopped the money, and then UNRWA felt like Israel attacked it, and they called for a big assembly and talked about the fact that UNRWA is under attack,” Samerano said, referring to emergency sessions called by the U.N. General Assembly to deal with UNRWA’s funding losses and Israel’s actions against the agency.
Samerano said those meetings reinforced her belief that sustained pressure can make a difference.
“I’m not a politician. I’m not a diplomat. I’m not in the army. I’m just a mother,” she said. “But I think more people will join this fight to make sure that money will not arrive to UNRWA, and we must continue talking with all those countries to stop financing it.”
