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(October 8, 2024 / JNS) UN Secretary-General António Guterres is a top contender for the Nobel Peace Prize, scheduled to be announced on Friday. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) and the International Court of Justice are also being considered. Awarding the prize to any of them would be a travesty. The secretary-general’s moral equivalence between terrorists and victims, his false statistics and his distortions of international humanitarian law raise serious questions regarding his neutrality, commitment to justice, and ability to uphold the principles enshrined in the UN Charter.
For the past year—since the barbaric Oct. 7 assault by Hamas operatives who slaughtered, raped, tortured and burned individuals in Israel’s south; Hezbollah’s unremitting 8,000-plus missile attacks on civilian populations in Israel’s north, which UN Resolution 1701 was mandated to prevent; and two attacks by Iran, including the most recent launching of 180 ballistic missiles at millions of Israelis in civilian population centers across Israel—Guterres has been disproportionately focused on condemning Israel’s legally justified actions to defend its citizens and ensure that all 135,000 people who have been displaced of them can safely return to their homes. Israel has been facing an existential threat from Iran and its terrorist proxies on multiple fronts.
Those of us with institutional memory recognize a troubling recrudescence of the era of Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary-general with a hidden Nazi past who presided over the world body for a decade, during which the General Assembly passed its infamous resolution declaring “Zionism is racism.” Waldheim’s tenure was mired in accusations of antisemitism. Eventually, he was barred in disgrace from entering countries in Europe and the United States.
Similar political theater was on full display last month at the UN General Assembly when an automatic majority of anti-Israel member states were similarly elated at the passage of the Palestinian-drafted UN General Assembly resolution calling for an arms embargo against Israel. Volker Türk, the secretary-general’s Austrian protégé and high commissioner for human rights, was one of the measure’s advocates. Subsequently, Guterres stated before the UN General Assembly meeting that he was prepared to back the implementation of the adopted resolution.
In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre and repeated thereafter, Guterres has averred that the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust “did not happen in a vacuum” but should be understood in the “context” of Palestinian oppression. Equally tendentious and false is his repeated statement that during his time in office, he has not seen any conflict anywhere in the world with the scale and speed of killing inflicted by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. The secretary-general has accepted without question the exaggerated casualty figures supplied by the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza, and even after the United Nations cut the death figures in half, he continued to use his voice to influence UN member states, ignoring casualties in other conflicts such as those in Ukraine and Sudan.
When Francesca Albanese, a UN official who is part of the United Nations’ human-rights apparatus, wrongly and astonishingly accused Israel of apartheid and genocide—and called for Israel to be expelled from the United Nations—Guterres’s office offered nothing more than a weak deflection, noting that UN rapporteurs are “independent.”
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