The United Nations was established Oct. 24, 1945. At the time, Palestine was administered under the League of Nations’ British Mandate. In February 1947, Britain decided to terminate its presence in the Mandate and turned the issue of Palestine over to the United Nations. In April 1947, the U.N. set up the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine to recommend proposals for Palestine’s future. In a failed effort to block UNSCOP’s work before it started and thus prevent a possible proposal for a Jewish state, five Arab countries (Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria) called for an immediate U.N. vote for “the termination of the Mandate over Palestine and the declaration of its independence.”
Instead, on Nov. 29, 1947, the U.N. General Assembly voted 33-13 in favor of Resolution 181, the UNSCOP proposal “to create Arab and Jewish states no later than October 1948 with an economic union and a special regime for Jerusalem to be administered by the United Nations Trusteeship Council.” Arab and Muslim states voted against the proposal. The United States and the Soviet Union voted in favor, while Britain abstained. The first Arab/Palestinian-Israeli war unfolded almost immediately.
On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, read Israel’s Declaration of Independence in Tel Aviv, and the surrounding Arab states attack within hours. Israel’s War of Independence, which the Arab world came to define as the “nakbah,” or disaster, lasted until the spring of 1949, when Israel and four states (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria) signed armistice agreements.
The U.N. General Assembly passed Resolution 194 in December 1948, saying, “Refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so, and compensation be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” The key phrase was “wishing to live in peace with their neighbors.” The resolution set up a Conciliation Commission for Palestine aimed at helping the parties achieve a final settlement.
Refugees did not return, however, and the international regime suggested for Jerusalem in the 1947 partition resolution was not established. The status and well-being of some 700,000 Palestinian refugees were managed by a new organization, UNRWA (the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East).
In May 1949, Israel was accepted as a member of the United Nations.
For the next two decades, efforts to moderate, mediate and monitor the conflict with peacekeepers played out mostly at the United Nations and with U.N.-appointed personnel. After the 1956 Suez War, the United Nations placed troops, UNEF (U.N. Emergency Force), in the Sinai to act as a buffer between Egypt and Israel and mediate against a future Arab-Israeli war. In May 1967, however, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser ordered UNEF removed, and U.N. Secretary-General U Thant failed to prevent the peacekeepers’ removal, clearing the way for war in June 1967.
After the 1967 war and a prolonged debate about the wording of a resolution that might form the framework for ending the Israeli-Arab conflict, the U.N. Security Council unanimously passed Resolution 242. It called for an Israeli withdrawal from unspecified territories occupied in the war in exchange for “the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and independence of all the states in the region.” When U.N.-sponsored mediation based on this resolution failed to gain traction at the end of the 1960s, the United States took the reins of the peace process, eventually to the exclusion of other great powers and the United Nations. When Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the Nixon and Ford administrations and Carter administration officials pushed for agreements between Israel and its neighbors in the 1970s, UNSC Resolution 242 was the foundational centerpiece around which progress unfolded.
During the Carter administration, the U.N. Security Council passed four resolutions (446, 452, 465 and 478) condemning Israeli settlement building and naming Jerusalem as “occupied”; the administration voted for or abstained on all four. No other administration has used the U.N. Security Council to criticize Israel so frequently, although UNSC Resolution 2334 late in the Obama administration in December 2016 was perhaps the most strongly worded criticism of Israel.
When the Oslo Accords (1993) and the Jordanian-Israeli peace treaty (1994) were signed, UNSC Resolution 242 remained the centerpiece for achieving a negotiated settlement.
For nearly eight decades, the United Nations has convened conferences, passed resolutions, dispatched peacekeepers, and provided the Palestinians and Arab states a frequent podium for vilifying Israel and condemning its policies. Palestinian representatives can count on the support of 22 Arab League members and 57 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference to vote in favor of anti-Israeli resolutions. During the Cold War, the Palestinians also counted on support from the Soviet Union, its allies and many Third World countries. Each September when the U.N. General Assembly opens, speeches on behalf of the Palestinians have historically criticized Israeli politicians and policies. Likewise, the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council regularly launches verbal attacks on Israel that support boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel.
In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly easily passed Resolution 3379, sponsored by the U.S.S.R., Eastern Bloc states, and Muslim and Arab countries, to declare that Zionism is racism. This measure was part of an ongoing, collective effort to delegitimize Israel as a state and Jews as a people. After the Cold War, that resolution was revoked.
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1397 in March 2002 called for the establishment of a Palestinian state and for Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories. Since Israel’s establishment in May 1948, the United Nations has stationed peacekeepers on all of Israel’s borders, changing their numbers and rules of engagement depending upon location and the severity of cross-border violence. In 1949, to aid the Palestinians, the United Nations established UNRWA to provide education, food and often anti-Israeli rhetoric for the populations it encountered.
On almost all matters concerning Israel, the U.N. has been heavily condemnatory of Israel and her actions. Up to 2021, 40 percent of the United Nations’ 237 resolutions (95 vs. 142) condemned Israeli actions. Arab states and the Palestinians have regularly used the U.N. as a political tool to berate Israel and its main Western supporters, primarily the United States. Israel has always tried to avoid the United Nations and international conferences as venues for substantive Arab-Israeli negotiations. When Arab-Israeli wars have occurred — 1948, 1967 and 1973 with multiple states, 1956 with Egypt, 1982 with the PLO in Lebanon, 2006 with Hezbollah in Lebanon, short wars with Hamas in 2008-2009, 2012, 2014 and 2021, and the multiyear war with Hamas from 2023 forward — the U.N. has sought cease-fires on almost every occasion. Subsequent to those wars, and throughout the post-October 7 Hamas-Israel war, Israel found itself on the defensive as the United Nations pushed for Israeli withdrawals, sought to impose solutions and often established commissions of inquiry that condemned Israeli actions. After October 7, 2023, it took the United Nations 171 days and the onset of Ramadan to pass Security Council Resolution 2728 in March 2024, calling for an immediate cease-fire and the immediate and unconditional release of (Israeli) hostages and expressing the urgent need to expand the flow of humanitarian assistance. The U.S. abstained from that 14-0 vote. Actual mediation of the conflict almost from its beginning has rested on the shoulders of the United States.
The Palestinian Authority, created out of the 1993 Oslo Accords, has used the diplomatic weight of the U.N. as a forum to diminish Israel’s stature internationally. The absence of anti-Israeli Arab military options and the unwillingness of Arab states to create a multinational force to challenge Israel make the United Nations a most useful venue for sharp exchange against Israel. Equally important, given the ideological and political fragmentation of the Palestinian political community, the U.N. apparatus provides a common location for internal Palestinian disagreements to be shelved, even if temporarily, while Israel is the common focus of antagonism.
Given the heavy U.N. imbalance against Israel, it is highly unlikely that the United Nations will take on a valued and serious negotiating role to find a pathway toward trust between the parties to move to nonwar footings. Historically, Israel has always sought a U.S. lead for any mediation to aspects of the conflict. It has welcomed the United States as bridge-builder, negotiator, engineer and guarantor of agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors, thereby bypassing U.N. participation in limiting the conflict’s periodic hostilities.
— Ken Stein, April 14, 2025
