The ‘one standard’ test that awaits the next UN chief

A standard that only holds for the Jewish state was never a standard. It was a pretext wearing a standard’s clothing.

By Linda Sadacka

António Guterres’s second term as UN secretary-general ends this December.

A successor is already being chosen, and by January the world will have a new man or woman occupying the most consequential unelected office on earth.

Every profile of every candidate will ask the same predictable questions: temperament, diplomatic experience, regional bloc, whether it is finally a woman’s turn.

Almost none will ask the only question that actually matters. Will this person apply one standard, or two?

The UN’s own record answers what it has been doing so far.

Since 2015, the General Assembly has passed 173 resolutions condemning Israel and 80 condemning every other country on earth combined, according to UN Watch, which tracks every vote.

Since 2006, the Human Rights Council has passed 112 resolutions against Israel alone, compared with 45 against Syria, 16 against Iran, 11 against Russia, and 4 against Venezuela.

Israel is also the only country in the world with its own permanent agenda item at the Human Rights Council, a standing slot reserved for one nation while every other country’s record gets folded into the general debate.

Israeli officials estimate the UN spends roughly $100 million a year maintaining the infrastructure built around scrutinizing it.

These are not close calls, and they are not explainable by Israel’s conduct being worse than Syria’s civil war, Iran’s executions, Russia’s invasion of a neighbor, or Venezuela’s collapse into a police state. They are explainable by one fact only: the rules change depending on who the victim is.

A body that condemns the Jewish state more than it condemns the regimes that gas their own citizens, starve their own children, and jail their own journalists has not been practicing human rights. It has been practicing selective outrage and calling it principle.

That is the test worth applying to whoever takes Guterres’s chair. Not what they say about peace, which costs nothing, but whether the sentence they use to condemn a massacre survives being said about any other massacre, and whether the resolution they are willing to sponsor against one country is a resolution they would also sponsor against an ally.

A standard that only holds for the Jewish state was never a standard.

It was a pretext wearing a standard’s clothing, and every new secretary-general has the chance, for exactly one moment, to decide whether he intends to keep using it.

We should not wait until after the appointment to ask him. We should be asking now, publicly, loudly, and by name, because institutions rarely reform themselves after the fact.

They reform, if they reform at all, while someone is still watching and still has something to lose by getting the wrong answer on the record.

The rules should not change depending on who the victim is. Say it about Israel. Say it about Syria. Say it about Ukraine. If the sentence only survives for some of them, it was never a principle to begin with.