A UN Representative Refused to Toe the Line on Israel—and Lost Her Job

A native of Kenya, Alice Nderitu became the United Nations’ special adviser on the prevention of genocide in 2020. She traveled to conflict zones on four different continents, visited refugee camps, published statements, and found herself generally ignored. Then she unwittingly broke the UN’s rules about Israel. Johanna Berkman reports:

Nderitu’s first statement on “the situation in the Middle East,” issued on October 15, [2023], called for the return of the Israeli hostages as well as a cease-fire. “And then I spoke about Hamas,” she says, “what they did. I described it. . . . And of course, the key thing that made me the enemy was saying that the attacks happened on Israeli territory, which they did.” (Hamas does not recognize the existence of the state of Israel, which was founded in 1948 and admitted to the UN in 1949.)

That night, a UN Office of Human Rights civil servant sent her an e-mail on which he copied several top UN officials. . . . In his e-mail, the UN civil servant described Nderitu’s statement as “one-sided,” suggesting that it “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” For an institution as hierarchical as the UN, this kind of direct written critique of an undersecretary-general by a junior staffer was highly unusual.

But the criticism mounted, especially when she failed to accuse Israel of “genocide,” which, she says, would violate the institution’s normal procedures. She was the target of formal petitions as well as threatening emails, like the one that said “Filthy zionist rat, you will burn in hell forever.” Rather than defend her, Secretary-General António Guterres decided in November not to renew her contract. She told Berkham:

It’s too much, the focus on Israel. . . . I really don’t think people care about Africans. . . . I went to Chad, and I met the refugees from Sudan, and they were telling me, “Right now, nobody is paying attention to our country.” . . . The ICC, the ICJ: Where are you when it comes to Sudan? You are very efficient when it comes to Gaza.

But this is in fact how the system functions. Chad and Sudan—not to mention more powerful countries like China—are UN member states with allies and interests. But a condemnation of Israel gets almost automatic buy-in from a majority of the United Nations.

Read more at Airmail

More about: Africa, United Nations

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict