LONDON: In May 2024, a furious Gilad Erdan, then Israel’s ambassador to the UN, stood in front of the General Assembly in New York and proceeded to feed a facsimile of the UN Charter into a tiny electric shredder.
The assembly was poised to vote to adopt a resolution urging the Security Council to consider granting Palestinian full membership.
“So many of you are Jew-hating,” Erdan told the delegates, who regardless would go on to support the motion overwhelmingly, by 143 votes to 9.
“This is what you are doing,” he added, in case anyone had missed the heavy-handed symbolism of his performance.
“You are shredding the UN Charter.”
Erdan, a former ambassador to the US, quit his UN role shortly after his performance.
Since then, however, he has been a leading actor in a determined campaign by Israel not only to discredit the UN, but also to destroy it entirely, by persuading the US government to withdraw from the organisation completely.
US Presidential Adviser Jared Kushner (C), former US National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien (R) and former Head of Israel’s National Security Council Meir Ben-Shabbat (L). A 30-year Shin Bet veteran, Ben-Shabbat now heads the right-wing Israeli think-tank the Misgav Institute, which is seeking to persuade the US government to withdraw from the UN. (AFP/File)
Last week, an expose by an Israeli newspaper revealed that right-wing Israeli think-tank the Misgav Institute had hired a major US firm of lobbyists to promote a report damning the UN.
Misgav’s full name is The Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy. According to Haaretz, filings in Israel show that in 2024-2025 it received from than $2 million in funding from anonymous donors in the US.
The current head of Misgav is Meir Ben-Shabbat, a former head of Israel’s National Security Council and a 30-year veteran the Israel Security Agency (the Shin Bet.)
Co-authored by Erdan, the report was to be circulated among members of Congress, while meetings would be organized between Misgav personnel and with key officials in the Trump administration.
The Washington firm given the task of making this happen was Mercury Public Affairs, which in 2020 and 2021 worked on behalf of Israeli technology company NSO, maker of the controversial Pegasus spyware, designed to be secretly installed on cell phones.
The objective of the Misgav report is clear from the title, which transparently seeks to flatter the US government while denigrating the UN: “From UN Bureaucracy to American Global Leadership – A Strategy for Advancing American Interests by Disengaging from a Failed UN.”
The report, an extraordinary assault on the UN which attempts to align America’s concerns with Israel’s, is clearly designed to chime with many of the criticisms of the organisation that have been voiced repeatedly by US President Donald Trump.
The UN, it says, “repeatedly undermines American interests, advances the positions of China and other adversarial powers, fails to deliver international peace and security, and has become a caricature of bureaucratic waste and bloat.”
The cover of the report written by Gilad Erdan and Asher Fredman for the Misgav Institute.
The cover of the report also references China, albeit more obliquely: it features a photograph of a UN logo on “a cracked wall in Fujian, China.”
The UN, the report continues, “has become a platform for attacks on US sovereignty and national security, including efforts to delegitimize US sanctions, undermine nuclear deterrence, and advance migration norms over US objections.”
But then it gets to the point.
“Nowhere are the UN’s politicization and double standards clearer than in its treatment of Israel.”
The Middle East country alone, it adds, “faces a permanent, multi-layered machinery of condemnation across dozens of UN bodies, councils, special procedures, commissions, secretariat units, databases, and recurring annual resolutions.
“This directly harms American interests and creates tools that can be turned against America itself, including politicized reports, committees, special rapporteurs, blacklists, lawfare campaigns, and international criminal accusations detached from reality.”
One section of the document mounts an attack on UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, dismissed as “a massive bureaucracy that promotes radicalization, perpetuates conflict, and was thoroughly infiltrated by terrorists.”
In 2024 the Israeli parliament voted to ban UNRWA from operating in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, ending its ability to operate in Gaza, where an estimated 2 million people were dependent on its services.
The UN investigated Israel’s claims, which temporarily led to 16 countries suspending aid to the organization, and sacked nine employees.
Excavators demolish a structure inside the headquarters of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem on January 20, 2026. (AFP/File)
The Misgav document attacks UN80, the internal reform initiative launched in March 2025 by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, to mark the organization’s 80th anniversary. This, it said, merely “exposed absurd institutional sprawl.” Achieving “deeper and more substantive reforms, such as retiring mandates, closing bodies, and ending the operation of duplicative, politicized, or wasteful mechanisms,” it added, “would require the consent of the very states that benefit from their existence.”
It concluded that the US “should maximally disengage and withdraw from the UN, and replace it wherever possible with better alternatives.”
Daniel Forti, head of UN affairs for the International Crisis Group, believes there is "little chance that the US would completely withdraw from the UN. Every US administration understands the importance of protecting America’s veto power at the Security Council.”
Nevertheless, "the current trajectory of the US-UN relationship – a piecemeal approach where Washington only supports the parts of the UN system that it likes and disregards the rest – looks set to continue."
The Trump administration’s attacks on the UN, he added, "have already taken a heavy toll on the organisation’s day-to-day work. By withholding nearly all the obligatory funding it owes, the US has pushed the organisation into a financial tailspin from which it has yet to recover.”
The Misgav report seeks to exploit the Trump administration’s dismissive attitude toward the UN. But an examination of the individuals and organizations related to it offers an insight into the extraordinary network of influence being exercised in Washington in the interests of Israel and, ultimately, to the detriment of hopes for Palestinian sovereignty.
Co-author Erdan began his political career in vehement opposition to the Oslo Accords, a stance that saw him elected chair of the youth wing of the Likud party, a role he held for six years.
Elected to the Knesset on the Likud ticket in 2003, he was a vocal critic of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 decision to unilaterally withdrawal Israeli settlers and soldiers from the Gaza strip, a historic bid for peace that is still regarded by Israel’s right-wing as a catastrophe for the Zionist project.
Erdan’s act with the shredder was not his first UN stunt. Following the October 2023 attack on Israel by Hamas he accused the Security Council of remaining “silent” and in protest began wearing a large yellow Star of David badge, overwritten with the words “Never Again.”
Even Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial institution, condemned the adoption of the symbol foisted on Jews by the Nazis during the Second World War as a “disgrace.”
A yellow Star of David with the words “Never Again” is worn by former Israel United Nations Ambassador Gilad Erdan as he speaks during a Security Council meeting on the Israel-Hamas war at UN headquarters on October 30, 2023 in New York City. (AFP/File)
Erdan has held several roles in the governments of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but earlier this month launched a new right-wing party, Unity, with Yuli Edelstein, a senior former senior member of Likud.
As leader of the new party, Erdan made his aims clear.
“My entire life, I have been a right-winger,” he said at the party’s launch on Aug. 6.
“I never zig-zagged. I believe in the land of Israel, in settlement, and in governance, and I fiercely oppose the creation of a Palestinian state.”
Erdan’s co-author of the Misgav document is Asher Fredman, a former research fellow at the Kohelet Policy Forum, which shares an address in Jerusalem with Misgav.
Kohelet says it works “to secure Israel’s future as the nation-state of the Jewish people” and “to defend Israel against distortions of international law and discriminatory treatment in the international arena.”
Fredman is also the director for Israel at the Abraham Accords Peace Institute and a visiting fellow in the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation, a powerful right-wing US public policy research group.
One of the foundation’s programs is Project Esther, which seeks to label any criticism of Israel in the US as antisemitism.
The Heritage Foundation has had a major influence on President Donald Trump’s second term in office. Its Project 2025 manifesto has been credited with inspiring the administration’s divisive crackdown on migrants, cutting funding for public media and slashing federal jobs.
Many members of the US Congress and the current administration have also received funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main US lobbying arm of the state of Israel, and a raft of other pro-Israel groups.
Israel’s aims are supported in America by numerous lobby groups, including the Jewish Federations of North America, the Zionist Organization of America, and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
For theological reasons, Israel also attracts widespread support among fundamentalist Christian groups in America.
With more than 10 million members, Christians United for Israel is the largest pro-Israel organization in the US. In a document explaining “the Biblical foundation of Christian Zionism,” it says that “Every man and nation will be judged in part on how they have treated the Jewish people and the nation of Israel.”
Christian evangelists in the US, including CUFI’s leader, Pastor John Hagee, believe that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was the fulfilment of a biblical prophecy and “an unmistakable milestone on the prophetic timetable leading to the return of Christ.”
As Hagee has said, for millions of Americans, “supporting Israel is not a political issue: it’s a Bible issue.”
For now, believes Forti, the UN still serves a purpose for the US government.
“In the short run, the combined political and financial pressure will continue to strain the UN’s capacities to protect civilians and deliver life-saving aid – tasks for which the Administration says it still wants the UN’s help.
“But In the longer term, the damage could run deeper. UN leaders will have to mount an even stronger defense of multilateral cooperation at a moment when Washington itself is willing to flout core principles of the UN Charter.
“The Trump administration’s à la carte approach to the UN could also encourage other powers to follow suit, further eroding the organisation’s authority and standing.”
Despite these pressures, he added, “the UN remains an indispensable, if imperfect, forum for multilateral cooperation. States still turn to it to reduce the risks of armed conflict and uphold long-standing rules and norms.
“Washington’s retreat may weaken the UN, but it is unlikely to hollow it out entirely.”
