Here’s a question Israel advocates hear time and time again: Why is Israel getting clobbered in the war for global public opinion?
Why, despite Israel’s learned arguments, a rock-solid case, and a prime minister who is the country’s most articulate spokesman since Abba Eban, do the accusations just get louder and louder?
Why do accusations once confined to pro-Palestinian activist fringes – genocide, apartheid, ethnic cleansing – now surface in courtrooms, parliaments, and diplomatic communiqués?
There are numerous reasons for this, and many of them must be placed at Israel’s doorstep: a lack of a coordinated public-diplomacy policy across the board, including the IDF, Mossad, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), Prime Minister’s Office, and Foreign Ministry; a failure to adapt fast or nimbly enough to the new social-media environment; not placing the issue high enough on the agenda or allocating enough money for it.
Yet one reason doesn’t have to do with Israeli failures, but rather with a sprawling, well-funded, bureaucratic international ecosystem that has spent years normalizing a singular narrative about the Jewish state. It’s called the United Nations.
One hundred million dollars a year against Israel
According to an analysis put together by Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations, the UN spends roughly $100 million every year on bodies, mechanisms, reports, and debates that focus almost exclusively on Israel.
This money is neither for humanitarian aid nor peacekeeping. Rather, it is for conferences, rapporteurs, committees, commissions of inquiry, and UN media efforts that cast Israel in the role of a serial violator of international law and, increasingly, as a criminal state.
This is not a one-off. It is structural, funneled through numerous organizations that launch investigations, hold hearings, organize conferences, issue reports, create exhibits, and publish an enormous amount of material.
Here is just a partial list: UNRWA, UN Division for Palestinian Rights, Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, UN Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices, UN Register of Damage Caused by the Construction of the Wall, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories, and UN Department of Global Communications Palestine Program.
And the impact of all these organizations and committees is cumulative.
Each year, there are endless hours of debates in dozens of meetings, and at least a hundred reports – overwhelmingly repetitive, politically driven, and one-sided – that are produced, translated, circulated, cited, and archived under the imprimatur of the UN.
Each report costs tens of thousands of dollars. Each debate costs thousands more. Add travel, staffing, and overhead, and the total climbs steadily.
“Instead of obsessively dealing with Israel, I would suggest that the UN invest the money where it is really needed, like humanitarian crises or in the global fight against terrorism,” Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon wrote in a post on X/Twitter.
The language that comes out of these committees and appears in these reports is toxic. Little attention is paid to this UN-generated material inside Israel, where it is dismissed as one-sided nonsense.
But here is the hard truth: Outside Israel, that dismissal doesn’t carry the same weight, and in much of the world, UN documents are not seen as one-sided advocacy, but instead they carry an aura of authority.
This UN-generated material creates a vicious, anti-Israel cycle: The reports are cited by diplomats, journalists, NGOs, and legal scholars. They inform parliamentary debates. They appear as unassailable evidence in reports by international organizations and activist groups alike, as well as in countless newspaper articles. Over time, they create a paper trail that gives accusations against Israel the appearance of settled fact.
Belgium joins genocide case against Israel
Which brings us to The Hague.
Belgium’s decision this week to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice did not emerge in a vacuum. It, too, is propelled in part by the environment created by these UN organizations.
It is telling to look at the company Belgium has chosen to keep by joining the case. The list of countries that have officially joined the ICJ case reads like a roll call of some of the most anti-Israel countries on the map, such as Nicaragua, Colombia, Ireland, Spain, Turkey, Libya, Brazil, and Cuba.
Belgium is stepping into a political arena already crowded with governments that have, in different ways and degrees, embraced the narrative of Israel as an international outlaw.
And again, the UN connection matters.
The ICJ does not operate in a vacuum. Judges do not rule in isolation from the broader international discourse. The language of genocide accusations, the framing of intent, the selective presentation of facts – all of this has been percolating for years within UN forums dedicated solely to the Palestinian cause.
A closed, self-reinforcing ecosystem has emerged: Special rapporteurs advance claims that migrate into NGO reports, which are then cited in UN documents, which are then referenced in legal filings, which are then endlessly reported in the media.
This is why Israel’s ongoing debate over public diplomacy, budgets, and messaging risks missing the larger point.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of the need to significantly increase funding for the Foreign Ministry’s public-diplomacy efforts by hundreds of millions of shekels to combat rising antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment. That is all well and good, and it definitely needs to be done.
But everyone must have realistic expectations. No amount of slick messaging and social-media wizardry can fully counteract an institutionalized campaign that has been churning out “authoritative” anti-Israel material year after year, under the banner of the UN itself.
The public-relations dilemma needs to be redefined, because the Palestinian side is being assisted by a deeply entrenched bureaucracy inside the UN that essentially presents the Palestinian narrative to the world as fact.
That Israel’s mission at the UN is spotlighting this now, on the eve of the UN approving its 2026 budgets, is a step in the right direction. Whether it leads to change, however, will depend less on exposure than on whether donor states – most notably the United States – are prepared to insist that this one-sided situation not be allowed to continue, and that funding be accompanied by greater balance and accountability.