The Media Line: How Experts Bolster Israel as UN Challenges Its Existence 

How Experts Bolster Israel as UN Challenges Its Existence 

Legal experts and Israel advocates say UN bodies and international courts are no longer only judging the war, but helping shape the political battlefield around it 

By Gabriel Colodro/The Media Line 

For Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch, the problem begins before a vote is taken, before a report is published, and before another accusation against Israel becomes a headline. It begins, he says, with the world inside the United Nations itself. 

“I remind myself every time I walk in the UN that I’m entering a dystopian universe, not unlike 1984, as described by George Orwell, where there’s doublethink and doublespeak, and the truth is often erased and rewritten,” Neuer told The Media Line in Jerusalem. 

More than two and a half years after the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, Israeli officials, legal advocates, policy researchers, former military figures, and Christian supporters of Israel are increasingly describing Israel’s diplomatic and legal exposure as a front of its own. At the JNS International Policy Summit held in Jerusalem this week, speakers returned repeatedly to a common theme: Israel’s military struggle is now inseparable from a parallel fight in the UN, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Western campuses, and social media over the language of legitimacy. 

The claim, as speakers across the summit framed it, is not simply that Israel faces criticism. It is that international institutions, legal forums, and public narratives can reinforce one another, turning reports into headlines, headlines into political pressure, and political pressure into mandates, court filings, and boycotts. 

At the Misgav Institute of National Security, that line of thinking led executive director Asher Fredman to ask what was driving what he called “this campaign of accusations against Israel, claims against Israel, legal steps against Israel.” His answer was blunt: “The United Nations is a central engine and catalyst of this campaign,” Fredman told The Media Line. In his view, too many policymakers still treat the UN as a stage for symbolic resolutions rather than as a system that shapes budgets, mandates, commissions, elections, and legitimacy itself. 

That diagnosis underpins a Misgav Institute report co-authored by Fredman and former Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan, which urges the United States to move from trying to reform the UN to a strategy of “Disengage, Withdraw, and Replace.”  

Fredman said Washington should stop presuming automatic funding and support only those UN functions that clearly serve American interests. He argued that Israel has made a parallel mistake by focusing heavily on bilateral ties while treating UN votes as diplomatic theater. “People don’t understand that the UN is actually really important, because the UN often gets to the very core legitimacy of a country, and that leads to legal proceedings, that leads to boycotts, that leads to blacklists.” 

That same concern surfaced most sharply in the summit’s legal discussions, where the central strategic question was whether Israel should keep fighting within international institutions or devote more effort to weakening their authority from the outside. The debate has only intensified since the ICC issued arrest warrants in November 2024 for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, while Israel has continued to challenge the court’s jurisdiction. 

For Ron Soffer, an international lawyer, the danger is practical as well as symbolic. He described the ICC as “a strategic threat to the State of Israel” because, unlike UN bodies that issue condemnations, it can pursue arrest warrants. Alan Baker, a former Israeli ambassador to Canada who took part in the Rome Statute negotiations, said Israel’s decision not to join the court had been vindicated. “We didn’t make a mistake,” he said. 

Others argued that Israel and its allies should stop expecting legal arguments alone to prevail. “The ICC is not a court, it does not function as a court, and we can have the cleverest legal arguments. It will not help,” said Eugene Kontorovich, professor of law and director of the Center for the Middle East and International Law at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. In his view, pressure and sanctions would be more effective than persuasion alone. 

Not everyone at the summit agreed. Representing hundreds of direct victims of the October 7 atrocities before courts, including the ICC, Yael Vias Gvirsman, founder and CEO of October 7 Justice Without Borders, argued that the legal arena should not be ceded to Israel’s adversaries. The issue, she said, is not whether the ICC is good or bad in the abstract, but “what place we choose to fill in this space.” 

That divide carried over to the International Court of Justice, where South Africa’s genocide case against Israel remains in the written phase; in May 2026, the court set November 22, 2027, as the deadline for South Africa’s reply to Israel’s written pleading. 

Kontorovich called the case “a legal October 7th” and argued that, because Israel accepted ICJ jurisdiction under the Genocide Convention, the court now has a platform that could be invoked in every future Israeli war. Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel Charitable Trust, countered that disengagement cannot be the only answer. “We can say, until we’re blue in the face, that its advisory opinions are not binding,” Turner said. But unless Israel and its allies put facts before the court, he argued, the world will not hear the rebuttal. 

Vias Gvirsman took the same position there, arguing that Israel should use precedent and evidence to challenge South Africa’s case. “If we want to respect ourselves, we have a good case; let’s bring it to the court,” she said. 

Nowhere did the debate become more concrete than in the discussion of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). In the United States, that strategy has already met a legal obstacle: a federal district court in New York ruled in 2025 that UNRWA, as a subsidiary organ of the United Nations, has immunity in US courts and dismissed the case against it, even as Israel has separately moved through domestic legislation to strip the agency of immunity in Israel. 

In that litigation, Joseph H. Tipograph of Heideman Nudelman & Kalik argued that UNRWA is “not a refugee agency” in the ordinary sense because, in his view, it perpetuates refugee status across generations. “If UNRWA is immune, it can do what it wants,” Tipograph said. 

A similar approach has been pursued in Israel. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat HaDin, said her organization pressed for legislation stripping UNRWA of immunity in Israel after representing the family of a victim whose body, she said, was taken into Gaza by UNRWA officials in a UNRWA vehicle. When the attorney general later filed her position in court, Darshan-Leitner said, the new Israeli law had already limited the room for argument. The attorney general’s position, as Darshan-Leitner described it, was that her “hands are tied” because Israeli law no longer recognizes UNRWA’s immunity in that case. 

For Neuer, UNRWA sits at the center of the broader UN problem. He argued that the agency has become an institution that perpetuates the conflict through education, employment, and a political narrative of return. UN Watch reports released over the past two years allege deep Hamas infiltration of UNRWA staff unions and schools. UNRWA has rejected the broader charge that it knowingly enables terrorism and says it acts on neutrality violations when evidence is presented. “If we want to have peace in this region, de-radicalization begins and ends with UNRWA,” Neuer said. 

The same institutional critique shapes his view of the UN’s future leadership. While arguing that the next secretary-general will matter only within limits, because what he sees as anti-Israel machinery is embedded in mandates, bureaucratic culture, and member-state politics, Neuer singled out former UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet. “She already was the UN Human Rights Chief, and she had a very poor record,” he said, arguing that she gave China, Russia, and other dictatorships too much room. More broadly, he argued that the UN should operate more like triage in an emergency room, saying, “We don’t need a UN if all they’re going to do is appease dictatorships. We need someone, we think, to speak out for victims, especially in non-democracies.” 

That larger struggle was echoed by Israeli leaders. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar framed the issue in diplomatic terms, saying Israel must push back against language that turns accusations into accepted political categories while also building new alliances. Referring to a European commissioner who had called Israel an apartheid state, Sa’ar said Israel could not treat such language as ordinary criticism. “We also, as a country, must draw red lines,” he said. At the same time, he argued that Israel cannot spend all its energy “blocking initiatives against Israel.” Diplomacy, he said, must also be proactive, pointing to new Israeli embassies, a push to increase the number of embassies in Jerusalem, and what he called his ministry’s “Latin America year” in 2026. 

President Isaac Herzog said Israel must “employ truth to counter the bias, distortions, and double standards spread constantly in the media, online, and across the halls of the United Nations.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framed it as another theater in a long war, calling the battle against delegitimization and antisemitism the “Eighth Front,” and saying, “We will fight on the Eighth Front as well.” 

From Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, the message came in the language of faith and history. After outlining President Donald Trump’s position on Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, Huckabee described the US-Israel alliance as rooted in something older than contemporary politics. America, he said, is tied “more to Mount Sinai than it is to Athens or Rome.” 

At a separate Christian-Israel Alliance Forum chaired by Josh Reinstein, president of the Israel Allies Foundation, the emphasis shifted from courts and UN agencies to faith networks, media, and public advocacy. For Troy Miller, president and CEO of the National Religious Broadcasters, the issue is “not just about a battle that’s anti-Semitic or anti-Zionism,” but part of a wider struggle over Western civilization, Christian persecution, and the worldview that will shape the international order. “If we end up divided and fighting this separately, we’re going to fail,” he said. 

That point was echoed in more strategic language by Sagiv Asulin, a former senior Mossad officer and expert on influence operations and strategic perception at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs. Israel, he said, is winning militarily on many fronts but “losing terribly” on the front of public perception and propaganda. After October 7, he said, he found himself thinking not only about that day’s paradigm, but about “the paradigm of October 8th,” and how anti-Israel demonstrations and narratives appeared so quickly on Western campuses and streets. 

The media dimension came through most directly in Katie Huch’s remarks. The creative director at New Beginnings Church and Larry Huch Ministries said younger audiences are being shaped by platforms where anti-Israel content far outnumbers pro-Israel content. “Social media is a problem, but it’s also a tool, and we can use it to our advantage,” she said, arguing for both digital engagement and bringing young Christians to Israel. 

David Parsons, senior vice president and spokesman for the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, made the same case through tourism and public diplomacy. “Christians come and leave as goodwill ambassadors of this country,” he said. 

Military and political figures pushed the argument further. Col. Richard Kemp said Israel cannot expect to win without being blamed by audiences that begin from the assumption that it is illegitimate. Jonathan Conricus, a former Israel Defense Forces international spokesman, said Israel has done too little in the information arena. “If you leave a vacuum for your enemy, he will populate it,” Conricus said. 

No one put the failure more sharply than former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. Israel, he said, has allowed its public image to collapse in the United States and cannot rely indefinitely on the personal sympathy of any one president. “If Israel were a PR firm, I definitely would not hire us,” Bennett said. 

Even Neuer, one of the summit’s harshest critics of the UN, argued that Israel can damage its own case. While he said UN bias persists regardless of the government in power, he singled out inflammatory rhetoric by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir as self-defeating. When Israeli ministers use language that appears to celebrate suffering, he said, “you lose almost all of your friends.” 

For Fredman, that points to a practical agenda: tie bilateral relationships to multilateral conduct, condition UN funding, expose hostile networks, and invest far more in strategic communications. “Israel for years has not only been greatly under-investing in its strategic communications and public diplomacy, but on the level of creating people-to-people ties and cooperation with civil society, it has not received resources,” he said. 

For Vias Gvirsman, the answer must also preserve moral limits. In her closing remarks, she described law as power, but power that must reflect “sanctity of life” and “human dignity.” The question, she said, is “how do we fight a battle we cannot lose” without losing identity and values along the way. 

That tension may define Israel’s next phase. Its leaders insist the country has changed the military equation against Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. Its lawyers, advocates, and supporters argue that the institutional equation remains far more difficult. In the UN, the ICC, the ICJ, and the court of public opinion, Israel is trying not only to defeat specific accusations but to prevent those accusations from becoming the language by which governments, courts, and media judge it.  

Captions:  The Christian-Israel Alliance Forum at JNS Summit, June 2026. (Gabriel Colodro/The Media Line) 

 

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