Welcome to António Guterres' UN

Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, announced Thursday that his country was suspending all relations with Secretary-General António Guterres until the end of his mandate on December 31, 2026. 

The trigger: a yet-unpublished UN report set to place Israel on a blacklist of parties suspected of using sexual violence as a weapon of war.

"We are done with this Secretary-General," Danon said in a video posted on X. The move represents one of the most dramatic ruptures between Israel and the UN in recent memory, and one of the most justified.

Let us be clear about what this blacklist is. It is a document compiled by an organisation that has spent decades treating Israel as a unique category of international wrongdoing, singling it out for condemnation at a rate that dwarfs its treatment of any other nation on earth, including those that have committed mass atrocities without consequence.

Israel is now to be placed on a list alongside Hamas, the organisation that systematically used rape as a weapon on October 7, 2023, filming its crimes with pride and broadcasting them to the world. The idea that these two entities belong on the same document, under the same heading, represents a moral collapse so complete that it is difficult to know where to begin.

"The decision to blacklist Israel and accuse us of using sexual violence as a weapon of war is outrageous," Danon said. He is right. It is not merely outrageous, it is a deliberate act of institutional delegitimisation dressed up as human rights reporting.

Guterres: loud on Israel, silent on dictators

António Guterres was declared persona non grata by Israel in 2024. He has earned that distinction.

Since taking office, Guterres has maintained a remarkably consistent pattern: severe, repeated, high-profile criticism of Israel, combined with studied silence, or at most mild diplomatic murmuring,  on the behaviour of the dictatorships that sit comfortably within the organisation he leads.

China's treatment of the Uyghurs. Russia's systematic targeting of Ukrainian civilians. Iran's execution of protesters. Syria's use of chemical weapons. Saudi Arabia's conduct in Yemen. These are matters on which Guterres has been, at best, cautious. At worst, complicit through silence.

Israel, by contrast, receives a level of sustained institutional attention that no other democracy on earth faces for the conduct of military operations. The UN Human Rights Council, whose members include some of the world's most repressive regimes, has dedicated more emergency sessions to Israel than to any other country in its history.

This is not balance. It is not impartiality. It has not been either of those things for a very long time.

Israel invited UN inspectors to examine the facilities where sexual violence is alleged to have occurred. The inspectors declined to go. They then proceeded to include the allegations in the report anyway.

"They chose not to come," Danon noted. "They chose to continue the campaign against Israel." That is the only honest description of what occurred. A decision was made, not to investigate, but to prosecute. The report is not the product of an inspection. It is the product of a predetermined conclusion in search of supporting language.

What the UN has become

The United Nations was founded in the aftermath of the Holocaust,  the genocide of the Jewish people, with the explicit promise that such horrors would never be allowed to happen again. 

It has since allowed itself to become a platform where Israel, the state established as a refuge for Jewish survivors, is subjected to a level of institutional hostility that its founders would find unrecognisable and obscene.

Guterres will leave office at the end of 2026. His legacy on Israel will be that of a Secretary-General who presided over the most aggressive period of UN anti-Israel activism in the organisation's history, while finding few words of similar force for the world's actual dictatorships.

Israel is right to be done with him. The question is whether the organisation he leads will ever be done with its obsession.