Denouncing anti-Israel views ‘at the highest level’ would risk our jobs, Jewish U.N. staffers say

"...Since Hamas’s terror attack, the current U.N. employees said, the United Nations has become a very uncomfortable place for Jews to work.

A longtime U.N. staffer, who works in development and does not have a last name that would typically be considered Jewish, told JNS that ‘you forget your nationality’ when you join the world body. ‘If my name was, I don’t know, Goldstein or Rosenberg, they would maybe be different,’ the employee said.

‘You work as civil servants, which means that you are not here to defend the interests of your country,’ the staffer said. ‘It’s the same for religion. When you join, they will never ask you which religion you are. It’s completely, completely secular.’

The employee, whose close network at work is aware of the person’s Jewish faith and familial connections to Israel, estimates that 10 other Jews also work in that particular U.N. agency. After the Hamas attacks, the United Nations issued ‘a lot of reminders’ telling employees to avoid taking sides or making statements on social media amid conflict, ‘particularly the conflict in Gaza,’ the staffer said. ‘We are supposed to follow the values of the U.N.’

The staffer subsequently noticed colleagues posting about the plight of Gazans on social media, including on X and LinkedIn, with nary a word about the Israeli victims.

‘We are in a situation where we have to stay quiet. Not to say anything. Be good civil servants. And to listen to the propaganda that is completely organized and supported at the highest level by the U.N.,’ the staffer said.

‘I was thinking that at some point I should speak out. But it’s also very difficult. We risk our jobs,’ the person said, adding that the United Nations ‘is being instrumentalized by Hamas’ and that Guterres fell ‘into that trap of propaganda.’

Presented with some of what the Jewish U.N. staffers said, Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and president of Human Rights Voices, told JNS that the United Nations ‘is a cesspool of antisemitism.’

‘The environment is incredibly hurtful, stressful and dangerous for any Jew or Israeli who cares deeply about the well-being of the state of Israel,’ she added. ‘One can only imagine how difficult it is to actually work for such an organization and be dependent on its bureaucracy for one’s welfare.’

‘Right to be the victim’

The four Jewish U.N. employees who spoke to JNS described the U.N. environment for Jews as isolated, scary and typified by political advocacy gone off the rails after Oct. 7..."