Fifty Years of Gaslighting Israel at the U.N.

By David May & Ben Cohen

Monday, November 10, 2025

 

Francesca Albanese is a fervent anti-Zionist. Not coincidentally, she’s also the U.N. special rapporteur dedicated to advancing false allegations against Israel.

 

Albanese recently delivered a speech that would have been rapturously received by the Columbia University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. Her defamatory statements about Israel were uttered at an October 30 event blessed by the United Nations and officially convened by a little-known body at the U.N. — the “Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People” (CEIRPP).

 

Albanese, who is sanctioned by the United States for pushing false war crimes charges against American and Israeli citizens, told CEIRPP that Hamas’s actions in Gaza constitute “Palestinian self-defense.” She accused Israel of practicing “apartheid” and waging a “genocide.” She stressed her conviction that “the Palestinians, like South Africans, were and are the victims of European settler colonialism,” with Palestinians serving as “guinea pigs in an experiment that keeps on going.”

 

She complained that Arab states “from Iraq to Libya to Lebanon to Syria are on their knees” and insisted that we are witnessing “the realization of Greater Israel on our watch” — a nod to the long-discredited belief in the Arab world that Israel aims to conquer all the territory “from the Nile to the Euphrates” rivers.

 

This gaslighting of Israel — in which no contention is too wild if it contributes to the depiction of the Jewish state as the world’s worst human rights abuser — has been CEIRPP’s sole purpose since it was created by the U.N. General Assembly exactly 50 years ago.

 

The resolution authorizing CEIRPP was passed on the same day — November 10, 1975 — that the General Assembly approved perhaps the most infamous resolution in its history: Resolution 3379, which equated Zionism, the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, with “racism.”

 

Chaim Herzog, the late Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, demonstratively tore up the resolution while standing at the General Assembly podium in New York. The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., charged that “a great evil has been loosed upon the world . . . the abomination of antisemitism has been given the appearance of international sanction.”

 

Nevertheless, thanks to pressure from the Soviet Union, whose “anti-Zionist” foreign policy was matched by its domestic persecution of Jews, the resolution passed. Then, in 1991, thanks this time to the United States’ unrivaled international influence at the end of the Cold War, it was rescinded with a grudging, one-line resolution.

 

But the United Nations still behaves as though the “Zionism is racism” resolution remains on the books. The continued existence of CEIRPP, designed to institutionalize that shameful resolution and give it teeth, is proof of that.

 

The United Nations provides CEIRPP with an annual budget of more than $3 million. In turn, CEIRPP enables U.N. member states to pile on Israel with the authorization of the world body. CEIRPP was instrumental in launching the “Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions” (BDS) campaign, which targets Israel exclusively. Since Hamas’s atrocities in southern Israel on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza, CEIRPP has provided a U.N. platform for figures like Albanese who ignore, downplay, or even deny the extent of the horrors committed on that dark day.

 

Fifty years after its creation, it is long past time for the United States and its allies to shut down CEIRPP. This can be done by persuading member states to resign from its ranks — following the examples of Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, all of whom quit — and by blocking approval of the U.N.’s budget until CEIRPP is no more.

 

Such an outcome would help end the U.N.’s discrimination against Israel, as well as against the many stateless, persecuted peoples, from Kurdistan to Tibet, who are not deemed worthy enough to have a U.N. committee advocating their “inalienable rights.”

 

It would help eliminate the United Nations’ parallel universe in which Israeli guilt and Palestinian rights are limitless.

 

And it would underline that any vision of the Middle East that doesn’t include a secure Israel living in peace with its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinians, belongs in the trash can of history.