LONDON
\nIn May 2024, a furious Gilad Erdan, then Israel\u2019s 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.
\nThe assembly was poised to vote to adopt a resolution urging the Security Council to consider granting Palestinian full membership.
\n\u201cSo many of you are Jew-hating,\u201d Erdan told the delegates, who regardless would go on to support the motion overwhelmingly, by 143 votes to 9.
\n\u201cThis is what you are doing,\u201d he added, in case anyone had missed the heavy-handed symbolism of his performance.
\n\u201cYou are shredding the UN Charter.\u201d
\nErdan, a former ambassador to the US, quit his UN role shortly after his performance.
\nSince 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.
\nLast 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.
\nAccording to Haaretz, filings in Israel show that in 2024-2025 it received from than $2 million in funding from anonymous donors in the US.
\nThe current head of Misgav is Meir Ben-Shabbat, a former head of Israel\u2019s National Security Council and a 30-year veteran the Israel Security Agency (the Shin Bet.)<\/p>\n
Misgav\u2019s full name is The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. <\/p>\n
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.
\nThe 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.
\nThe objective of the Misgav report is clear from the title, which transparently seeks to flatter the US government while denigrating the UN: \u201cFrom UN Bureaucracy to American Global Leadership \u2013 A Strategy for Advancing American Interests by Disengaging from a Failed UN.\u201d
\nThe report, an extraordinary assault on the UN which attempts to align America\u2019s concerns with Israel\u2019s, is clearly designed to chime with many of the criticisms of the organisation that have been voiced repeatedly by US President Donald Trump.
\nThe UN, it says, \u201crepeatedly 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
LONDON In May 2024, a furious Gilad Erdan, then Israel\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":562917,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-world"],"yoast_head":"\n