The Most Hated Man at the UN

When Hillel Neuer walks into the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, he is not warmly received. He knows it. He feels it. The stares follow him from the moment he comes up the stairs.

"I am the most hated man at the UN," he told me. He said it without drama, as a simple statement of fact.

Neuer is the Executive Director of UN Watch, the Geneva-based organization that has spent more than two decades doing something nobody else at the UN bothers to do: telling the truth.

An Orwellian Universe

Neuer grew up in Montreal, studied liberal arts and political science, practiced law at a major New York firm, and spent time at the Shalem Center think tank in Israel. By the time the position at UN Watch opened up, it felt, he said, like the natural next step. He moved to Geneva.

What he found there took some adjustment, not just to the French-speaking city, but to the institution itself.

The UN is an Orwellian, upside-down world.

"I tell my interns to remind themselves that they're entering an Orwellian, upside-down world," he said. "It's a dystopian universe."

In a democracy, you have the rule of law, independent courts, free elections, and basic respect for individual rights. Walk into the UN and you have none of that. The powers that shape the Human Rights Council include China, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Qatar. The Islamic Republic of Iran was elected to the Women's Rights Commission. Pakistan sits on the Human Rights Council. These are not aberrations. This is how the institution operates.

When Neuer speaks, the representatives of those regimes interrupt him and try to shut him down. "I get just a tiny taste," he said, "of the totalitarianism and oppression that people living under those regimes deal with every day."

The Numbers That Say Everything

Here is the statistic that stops people cold. In any given year at the UN General Assembly, where all 193 member states each get one vote, there is one resolution on Iran, one on Syria, one on North Korea, and at least 15 on Israel.

More resolutions on Israel than the rest of the world combined. Most countries get zero.

China, with 1.5 billion people living under a regime that has destroyed thousands of Buddhist temples, imprisoned Christians, and eliminated freedom of speech, assembly, and religion? Zero resolutions. A woman in Shanghai was arrested within minutes of standing on a street holding a blank piece of paper. Zero resolutions.

As I put it to Neuer: if an alien landed and used the UN to understand planet Earth, it would conclude that the greatest crisis facing humanity was a liberal democracy of ten million people in the Middle East.

So what drives the obsession?

Neuer identified several concrete factors. The 56 Islamic states vote as a bloc and bring relentless pressure on everyone else. Vote trading is endemic; he found a leaked letter in which Saudi Arabia and Russia, ostensibly geopolitical rivals, agreed to vote for each other's seats on the Human Rights Council. Oil and gas give the Arab and Islamic states enormous economic leverage. After the 1973 war, African countries were told explicitly: break with Israel or lose your oil supply. And beneath all of it sits the fear of terrorism. The handful of countries that consistently vote with Israel know they may be targeted.

All of that is real politics and it explains a lot. But Neuer was honest that it doesn't explain everything.

"When I see European diplomats going along with the demonization of Israel," he said, "I don't always see people compelled by vote trading or petrol or fear of terrorism. Many of them seem quite content to do it."

He quoted the historian Jacob Talmon: Israel has become the Jew among the nations. The pattern -- the ritualistic gathering of world authority, the formal charges, the solemn condemnation -- echoes something older than the UN. In medieval Europe, Jews were blamed for the Black Death, for killing Christ, for poisoning wells. The charge has been updated. Deicide has become genocide. The ritual is the same.

Where Are Your Jews?

The speech that put UN Watch on the map globally was delivered in 2017, during a debate in which Arab states were accusing Israel of apartheid, citing a UN report commissioned out of Beirut.

Neuer sat and listened as one Arab country after another leveled the charge. And he thought about the Jewish communities that had lived across the Arab world for thousands of years, in many cases, longer than the Arab conquest itself. Then he stood up.

"Israel has 1.5 million Arab citizens," he said. "Whatever challenges they face, they enjoy full rights to vote and to be elected to the Knesset. They work as doctors and lawyers. They serve on the Supreme Court."

Then he turned to the accusers.

“Algeria had 140,000 Jews. Where are your Jews? Egypt had 75,000 Jews. Where are your Jews? Syria, tens of thousands. Iraq, 135,000. Where are your Jews? Mr. President, where is the real apartheid?”

Those Jewish communities had not left voluntarily. They were expelled, or made to flee, after the Arab states launched a war to destroy Israel and lost. Over 800,000 Jewish refugees were displaced from Arab lands. They moved on. They rebuilt their lives in Israel and in the West. Nobody talks about them.

The room went silent. "You could hear the silence," he told me. "It was a rare moment of truth."

The Machinery of Harassment

UN Watch has faced years of systematic interference. A senior UN bureaucrat at the Human Rights Council, Neuer told me, would quietly remove his name from the speakers list, relegating him to the bottom until he couldn't speak at all. In one session, UN Watch signed up for 31 speeches and was given zero. The situation required intervention from the US Congress before it changed.

When Neuer filmed himself outside the Human Rights Council, exposing an Iranian propaganda display promoting women's fashion, put on by one of the world's worst regimes for women, a country where women can be beaten to death for not wearing a hijab properly, he received a formal reprimand from the UN threatening to revoke his badge. Meanwhile, when a Chinese spy was caught photographing a dissident who had come to testify for UN Watch, an NGO he was affiliated with was shown by the New York Times to have its registered address at the Chinese Pentagon. Nothing happened to him.

That asymmetry is the institution in miniature.

What UN Watch Has Won

It would be easy to read all of this as one long exercise in futility. It isn't.

After a two-year campaign, Iran was formally removed from the UN Women's Rights Commission, the first time in UN history a member state had been removed from a commission.

UN Watch mobilized 820,000 signatures to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur who has openly supported Hamas. She has said the sanctions are ruining her life; she can't get a hotel room, an air ticket, or access to her Washington condominium. UN Watch got the US to defund UNRWA by $400 million. Sweden and the Netherlands followed. Most significantly, after a two-year campaign, Iran was formally removed from the UN Women's Rights Commission, the first time in UN history a member state had been removed from a commission. It started because UN Watch exposed it.

"In many cases," Neuer said, "we're the only ones in the world exposing certain lies or certain injustices."

Seeds of Civilization

I asked Neuer whether he is optimistic.

"I'm a pessimist," he said. "We have no choice."

He meant it as a kind of defiant humor, but underneath it was something more serious. When he looks at the Colossus of China, Russia, and their allied dictatorships, he sees something massive and genuinely evil. He doesn't pretend otherwise. But he also doesn't conclude that the work is pointless.

He invoked Orwell, writing during World War Two about the importance of keeping even half a loaf -- preserving the seeds of civilization when everything around it is hostile. "We are protecting the seeds of democracy, of human rights, of truth, even in the face of tyranny."

I pushed him further. I think the story of Jewish history carries something important here. Ideas that once seemed impossibly marginal -- that every child deserves an education, that the weak deserve protection, that peace is better than war -- entered the world through a tiny people that most of the powerful civilizations of their time wanted to destroy. The prophets spoke. Nobody listened. Thousands of years later, their words shaped the world.

Neuer agreed. His organization was founded by Maurice Abraham, a civil rights leader who marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King. King, the day before he was assassinated, said: "I've been to the mountaintop. I may not get there with you, but I've seen the promised land." He was drawing directly on the biblical vision of the Exodus -- the story of the liberation of slaves from Egypt -- and his vision did prevail, however imperfectly.

"The arc of justice may be long," Neuer said, "but it does arrive."

That's not naive optimism. It's a refusal to concede the future to the people who are trying to steal it.

The UN is not going away. The tyrannies that have captured it are not going away. The ritualistic condemnation of the Jewish state will continue. But truth has a stubborn way of outlasting the institutions that try to suppress it. Hillel Neuer's job, and it turns out to be a Jewish job in the deepest sense, is to make sure it gets recorded.

Watch Rabbi Rowe’s conversation with Hillel Neuer: