Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has used decades of selective speeches at the United Nations to denounce this. In 2017, he said it was “the epicenter of global anti-Semitism” and that there were “no limits to the absurdities of the UN when it comes to Israel,” but that tensions between him and the body he vilified had never been reached such an extent.

Since the Hamas massacre on October 7, Israel has ignored four UN resolutions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and not only designated the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, Unrwa, as a terrorist state but also launched a campaign to bankrupt it. Arab envoys walked out as the Israeli ambassador began speaking.

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, which is now a near-full member of the United Nations, said in his speech to the General Assembly on Thursday that Israel no longer deserves to be a member because it has ignored its resolutions.

It is the historic role of the United Nations in the creation of the State of Israel alongside a state for Palestinians with the partition resolution of November 1947 that makes Israel such a central and difficult issue for the organization. After blessing the creation of Israel, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in 1975 that said Zionism was a form of racism and racial discrimination.

History catches up with both sides. When the United Nations’ highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled Israel’s extensive occupation of the Palestinian territories discriminatory in July, the UN’s role in the creation of the state of Israel formed the cornerstone of its broader ruling.

The UN General Assembly has called on Israel to leave the occupied territories within a year and for Secretary-General António Guterres to report within a month on progress towards that goal. In this final high-level week at the United Nations, world leaders have delivered speech after speech condemning Israel for violating international law and thereby damaging the authority of the United Nations. Many were crude, such as the Turkish president comparing Netanyahu to Hitler.

Israel has long referred to the UN Human Rights Council as the Terrorist Rights Council, but the conflict between the UN and Israel has now become deeply intensified. In his farewell speech in August, outgoing Israeli UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan said: “In this distorted place, I hope that one day you will also see the bias and perversion of morality here, and I pray that you will see the truth.” .”

Erdan’s often theatrical and impassioned defense of his country won him few friends at the United Nations but is passionately supported at home. A Pew study released earlier this month found that the share of those in Israel who had a positive opinion of the UN in Israel fell from 31% – already relatively low – to 21% over the past year. The median among 35 countries was 58%.

Erdan’s successor Danny Danon this week attacked the UN over its agency for Palestinian refugees. “It is difficult to find peace until the UN continues to come to terms with the ominous reality that one of its agencies, UNRWA in Gaza, has been overrun by Hamas terrorists,” he wrote in an article for Fox News. “For this reason and for the sake of peace for Israelis and Gazans, Unrwa must be disbanded.”

After a meeting on the sidelines of the UN in support of UNRWA, Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi said it was unacceptable for a UN agency to be labeled terrorist and subjected to a campaign of political assassination. “The attack undermines the entire UN system,” he said.

Unrwa chief Philippe Lazzarini said the Israeli attack was an attempt to strip Palestinians of refugee status and even their right to self-determination. But what will worry Netanyahu, himself a former Israeli envoy to the United Nations, in the short term is not the hostility of mainstream UN opinion. He has entered the lion’s den many times and ultimately escaped unscathed.

What will test Netanyahu is the apparent tension between him and the US government over his behavior before his eventual rejection of the US plan for a 21-day ceasefire in Lebanon. The deal was supposed to be the day diplomacy struck back, but Thursday looked like it would be the day it failed. The US clearly feels that he has broken an agreement, and not for the first time since October 7th.

A senior European diplomat who has long opposed the U.S. strategy was skeptical that the U.S. had not sought clearer guarantees from Netanyahu before making the 21-day ceasefire plan public.

John Kirby, US national security spokesman, expressed US anger and said clearly: “This statement that we worked on last night was not simply written in a vacuum. This was done after careful consultation, not only with the countries that signed it, but also with Israel itself.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, who was at the center of the talks in New York, said the proposal was “prepared by both the Americans and ourselves and negotiated with the (Israeli) prime minister and his teams.”

But it won’t be the first time that the West believes Netanyahu is making a strategic mistake but then proves unable or unwilling to force him to change his mind.