The U.N.’s Double Standard on Israel

By Zlatko Zigic

Saturday, September 12, 2026

 

Having worked for more than 20 years in senior management positions at the United Nations, I learned to navigate the complex realities of international diplomacy. Yet even for a seasoned insider, the U.N.’s treatment of Yahav Lichner is a damning display of targeting and selective enforcement.

 

Lichner, a respected senior international civil servant at UNICEF, is the target of a setup. He has been placed on administrative leave following the publication of allegations based on decade-old emails obtained through an Iranian state-backed cyber operation. His alleged “crime”? Sharing routine organizational context and deliberation notes with Israeli diplomats, dating back to 2014–15.

 

Earlier this month, Drop Site — a publication frequently hostile toward Israel — ran an article titled “Israel’s Mole,” emphasizing Lichner’s Israeli background and drawing from an Iranian-linked hack that fit a narrative aimed at discrediting Israel.

 

The article itself acknowledges that there is no evidence that the conduct described continued after 2015. Yet a decade of subsequent humanitarian and diplomatic service, including in support of the Palestinian people, is being overshadowed by hacked and manipulated emails.

 

The author of the piece, Murtaza Hussain, and elements within the U.N. are using common informal information-sharing practices to advance a broader anti-Israel narrative, blowing them out of proportion to set up Lichner and, indirectly, target and tarnish the reputation of Israelis and Jews working at the U.N.

 

The speed of Lichner’s placement on leave stands in stark contrast to the U.N.’s handling of terror within its ranks. When United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) staff participated in the October 7 massacres, the U.N. defaulted to bureaucratic paralysis, claiming it could not “independently authenticate” battlefield evidence captured from Hamas. By setting an impossible evidentiary bar, the U.N. shielded terror-linked operatives from accountability.

 

Where terror-linked personnel received every procedural benefit of the doubt, a highly respected senior Israeli civil servant faced instant condemnation over unverified, decade-old materials weaponized by an enemy cyber-warfare unit.

 

This hypocrisy also ignores a basic reality of U.N. culture: International civil servants routinely maintain robust and informal channels with many governments, including their own. Informal reporting is far more widespread throughout the U.N. than most people realize. This is simply how the organization functions. Senior directors and officials routinely brief even the main donors of major projects and programs on an off-the-record basis. Donors, for example, often expect and require this kind of ongoing informal reporting, and it happens constantly on complex programs, quite apart from the formal reports and analysis.

 

Lichner, with a track record of leadership on humanitarian causes, disclosed no operational security data; he engaged in the kind of routine networking and diplomacy that hundreds of U.N. officials perform daily. Yet merely because of his nationality, he was targeted and his alleged communications were weaponized into a scandal.

 

This double standard thrives in an environment notoriously hostile to Israelis and Jewish people working at the U.N. Many even hide their identity when they go to work. Israelis represent a tiny fraction of the U.N. workforce, and the organization has never appointed an Israeli as an assistant or undersecretary-general. For some, it now appears, even one senior Israeli within the U.N. system is one too many.

 

When the U.N. ignores mountains of evidence regarding actual terrorists on its payroll while dropping the hammer on an Israeli civil servant over decade-old, doubtful hacked emails, its moral authority is shattered. True international civil service requires impartial integrity, not selective prosecution to appease political blocs.