Anti-Semitism at heart of the UN

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’s “purge” of a senior official who refused to smear Israel’s war against Hamas as “genocide” is a disgrace that leaves no doubt about the gross anti-Semitism at the heart of the world body. The official, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, a Kenyan whose UN biography describes her as a “recognised voice in the field of peace building and violence prevention”, has, since 2020, been the UN’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. She has carefully studied humanity’s worst imaginable crimes.

In 2022, her office issued guidance on “when to refer to a situation as ‘genocide’ ”. It cautioned UN officials to “adhere to the correct usage” of the term because of legal and political sensitivities that surround it and “its frequent misuse when referring to large-scale, grave crimes committed against particular populations”. A massacre was not genocide unless there was a deliberate intent to eliminate an ethnic group. In that context, Ms Nderitu’s conclusion about Israel’s war against Hamas was that it did not fall into that category because Israel Defence Forces’ operations in Gaza had gone to great lengths to minimise civilian casualties, even as Hamas misused civilians as human shields.

Such common sense and truth was too much, however, for those at the UN such as the Austrian Volker Turk, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who has spent the past year refusing to call Hamas a terrorist organisation. He has the ear of Mr Guterres, a former left-wing socialist prime minister of Portugal. So Ms Nderitu’s contract was allowed to lapse, clearing the way, according to US reports, for the UN to “hire a ‘genocide’ expert who’ll play along”.

Mr Guterres’s spokesman, Farhan Haq, insisted on Tuesday that there was nothing unusual about Ms Nderitu’s contract not being renewed and she was not penalised for refusing to call Israel genocidal. But it would be hard to disagree with Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, who warned that her fate “reflects the growing anti-Semitism and moral decay within the UN system”.

Ms Nderitu’s refusal to lie in the service of a political agenda, The Wall Street Journal noted, has been a profile in courage that should be remembered when the Trump administration reviews US funding of the UN. Australia is unlikely to consider the same issue while the Albanese government maintains its malign oversight of our longstanding relationship with Israel.

Government ministers would benefit from reading the books on the Middle East conflict, and Israel’s perspective, that all 227 federal MPs are being sent on the initiative of former The Age editor Michael Gawenda.