LONDON
In May 2024, a furious Gilad Erdan, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, stood in front of the General Assembly in New York and proceeded to feed a facsimile of the UN Charter into a tiny electric shredder.
The assembly was poised to vote to adopt a resolution urging the Security Council to consider granting Palestinian full membership.
“So many of you are Jew-hating,” Erdan told the delegates, who regardless would go on to support the motion overwhelmingly, by 143 votes to 9.
“This is what you are doing,” he added, in case anyone had missed the heavy-handed symbolism of his performance.
“You are shredding the UN Charter.”
Erdan, a former ambassador to the US, quit his UN role shortly after his performance.
Since then, however, he has been a leading actor in a determined campaign by Israel not only to discredit the UN, but also to destroy it entirely, by persuading the US government to withdraw from the organisation completely.
Last week, an expose by an Israeli newspaper revealed that right-wing Israeli think-tank the Misgav Institute had hired a major US firm of lobbyists to promote a report damning the UN.
According to Haaretz, filings in Israel show that in 2024-2025 it received from than $2 million in funding from anonymous donors in the US.
The current head of Misgav is Meir Ben-Shabbat, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council and a 30-year veteran the Israel Security Agency (the Shin Bet.)
Misgav’s full name is The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy.
Co-authored by Erdan, the report was to be circulated among members of Congress, while meetings would be organized between Misgav personnel and with key officials in the Trump administration.
The Washington firm given the task of making this happen was Mercury Public Affairs, which in 2020 and 2021 worked on behalf of Israeli technology company NSO, maker of the controversial Pegasus spyware, designed to be secretly installed on cell phones.
The objective of the Misgav report is clear from the title, which transparently seeks to flatter the US government while denigrating the UN: “From UN Bureaucracy to American Global Leadership – A Strategy for Advancing American Interests by Disengaging from a Failed UN.”
The report, an extraordinary assault on the UN which attempts to align America’s concerns with Israel’s, is clearly designed to chime with many of the criticisms of the organisation that have been voiced repeatedly by US President Donald Trump.
The UN, it says, “repeatedly undermines American interests, advances the positions of China and other adversarial powers, fails to deliver international peace and security, and has become a caricature of bureaucratic waste and bloat.”
