Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
In the northern garden of the United Nations there is a sculpture named “Let Us Beat Swords into Plowshares” inspired by the Prophet Isaiah’s famous verse:
“They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”
These words, spoken 2,700 years ago in the Land of Israel, so captured humanity’s yearning for peace that even the godless Soviet Union was inspired to gift the statue. Donated in 1959, it depicts a muscular proletarian hammering a sword into a plowshare—heralding a world where nations will cultivate life rather than wage war.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists invaded southern Israel. They shot, burned alive, tortured, raped, and kidnapped Israeli soldiers and civilians, foreign workers, even fellow Arabs. No one was spared—not elderly Holocaust survivors, not infants who were brutally murdered before their parent’s eyes. Nationalities from across the globe were represented among the victims. The terrorists documented their atrocities with bodycams.
One video shows two terrorists attempting to behead a Thai man with a hoe—turning a garden tool into a weapon of sadistic brutality. His only crime was seeking honest work in Israel’s fields. As they struck him repeatedly, one screamed “Allahu Akbar.”
Palestinian terror had become the nihilistic inverse of Isaiah—turning ‘plowshares’ into ‘swords.’
It was a day reminiscent of the darkest, most brutal days in history—one that demanded condemnation by all civilized people. The United Nations, whose motto is “Peace, dignity, and equality on a healthy planet,” refused to do so.
In late October 2023, the General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the “immediate cessation of hostilities” but rejected an amendment that would have condemned Hamas’ massacre.
That moral surrender set the tone for what followed. Since October 7, the Security Council has debated at least fourteen draft resolutions on the Israel–Gaza war, adopting four, while the General Assembly has passed more resolutions on Israel than on any other country during the same period. Iran was called out—not for lighting the Middle East on fire through its proxies Hamas and Hezbollah—but for repressing its own people.
This was accompanied by immoral posturing from UN Secretary-General António Guterres. He declared, “The grievances of the Palestinian people cannot justify the appalling attacks by Hamas,” only to contradict himself moments later by adding that the attacks “did not happen in a vacuum,” implicitly blaming Israel for the ills of Palestinian society. This, despite the UN’s own statements recognizing Israel’s peace efforts—from the Oslo Accords of the 1990s to the 2005 unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which it hailed as a “watershed in the pursuit of peace.”
The United Nations Transgresses its Own Charter
The sins of the United Nations are not only against Israel—whose rebirth as a nation was approved by the world body in 1949—but against the principles of its own Charter.
Rewarding Evil
Article One of the UN Charter mandates “the suppression of acts of aggression and other breaches of the peace.” Yet following the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the United Nations rewarded its perpetrators’ cause. In May 2024, Palestine was elevated to near-member-state status. During the 2025 General Assembly, led by France and
Saudi Arabia, several European nations granted full recognition to a Palestinian state. In exchange, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—who has publicly praised the October 7 atrocities—pledged to end stipends to terrorists’ families. The payments continue.
Bearing False Witness
Despite Article 2(2) of the Charter, which requires Members to “fulfill in good faith the obligations assumed by them,” in September 2025 a UN commission declared Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Using twisted reasoning, Commissioner Chris Sidoti turned the victims into perpetrators, claiming Israelis were “betrayed” by their government’s “refusal” to rescue hostages and that the nation’s trauma after Oct. 7 was “ruthlessly manipulated” to justify a so-called “genocidal war.”
Equally deceptive were United Nations claims of an Israel-induced famine, propagated by senior humanitarian official Thomas Fletcher, who warned in May 2025 that “14,000 [Gazan] babies will die in the next 48 hours” — a famine the organization itself “repeatedly warned of,” yet one its own agencies are unable to confirm.
When Neighbors Plot Destruction
The Charter’s preamble calls for member states to act as “good neighbors,” practicing “tolerance”—a principle that stands in stark contrast to decades of Iranian genocidal rhetoric, from Ayatollah Khomeini’s exhortation to “destroy Israel” to Iran’s ongoing denial of Jewish history and refusal to recognize Israeli statehood. Such violations of the Charter’s core principles have faced little meaningful accountability. While Iran faces UN sanctions for its nuclear program, the organization has remained largely silent on its campaign to annihilate a member state by surrounding it with terrorist proxies—violating Article 1(1)’s call to suppress “acts of aggression.”
Treachery at the Gates of Israel
The iniquity of the United Nations does not end with statements, resolutions, and falsehoods. The Charter demands that “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means.” When this fails, Article 42 authorizes the use of armed force to “maintain or restore international peace and security.” UN missions have not merely failed in their mandate—they enabled the attacks of October 7, actively collaborating with those threatening Israel’s existence.
Employees of UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, participated directly in the October 7 massacre, with one worker stealing a murdered Israeli’s body. This was no aberration—for years, UNRWA facilities stored weapons and concealed tunnel infrastructure, activities the organization’s leadership could not have missed, while its schools indoctrinated children in antisemitic violence.
UNIFIL, mandated to prevent Hezbollah’s rearmament in Lebanon, largely turned a blind eye to the terrorist organization’s activities, with documented instances of active collaboration. This enabled Hezbollah to amass an estimated 150,000 missiles along Israel’s northern border.
The UN’s Founding Purpose and Its Abandonment
The United Nations was born of the devastation of two world wars. Its Charter pledges “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” The Second World War claimed tens of millions of lives; the systematic, industrial killing of six million Jews—murdered for their ethnicity—marked a new depth of premeditated evil and gave rise to a new word: genocide. The term was coined by Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, whose concern with ethnically targeted murder began with the Armenian massacre during the First World War and was deepened by the loss of 49 relatives in the Holocaust. Yet since the October 7 massacre, the UN has turned Lemkin’s concept into a weapon against Israel for defending itself against annihilation.
In 2004, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan—one of the few regarded as broadly sympathetic toward Israel—acknowledged: “Our organization came into being when the world had just learnt the full horror of the concentration and extermination camps. It is therefore rightly said that the United Nations emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust.”
Every year on January 27, the Secretary-General speaks on Holocaust Remembrance Day. In 2022, Guterres echoed Annan’s words: “The Holocaust defined the United Nations.” His January 2025 remarks were no less forceful: “Eighty years since the Holocaust’s end, antisemitism is still with us – fueled by the same lies and loathing that made the Nazi genocide possible. And it is rising… Hate is being whipped up the world over… Indisputable historical facts are being distorted, diminished, and denied.” Yet after more than a year of the UN’s anti-Israel obsession, those words rang hollow.
Since October 7, under his leadership, the UN has become the very engine of the hatred Guterres decries—distorting facts about Israel, amplifying the lies that fuel global antisemitism, and transforming an organization born from the Holocaust’s ashes into the Jewish state’s most relentless persecutor.
Ironically, Article 2(4) of the UN Charter—requiring all members to refrain from ‘the threat or use of force’ in international relations—parallels both the substance and the numerical designation of Isaiah 2:4, where the prophet envisions nations “beating their swords into plowshares.” There is no doubt about Isaiah’s influence on the modern world’s concept of peace. Until Isaiah, peace was, at best, the absence of war attained by the exhaustion of battle, victory or defeat—perhaps a treaty. The universal concept of a just and lasting world peace, not just for the Jewish people, but for all mankind, was announced with those prophetic words.
A Shared Humanity Betrayed
On October 27, 2023—the day the UN called for a ceasefire but declined to condemn the massacre—one of Thailand’s leading newspapers, Khaosod, told of a four-year-old girl weeping as her father’s body returned home. Apichat Kusaram, 29, and his brother Pongthep, 26, were among the Thai, Nepali, Filipino, Tanzanian, Sri Lankan, Cambodian, and Chinese victims—a United Nations of migrant workers and agricultural students whom the real UN scarcely acknowledged. At the time, Thailand’s Foreign Ministry reported 33 dead and 18 wounded, while Israeli officials said up to 54 Thais were held captive. Two years later, the remains of another Thai worker, Sonthaya Oakkharasr, were repatriated; he had spent eight years in Israel, saving to open a small farm back home with Israeli know-how.
In total, foreign nationals from at least 35 countries were killed, wounded, or taken hostage on October 7. The UN’s film marking its 80th anniversary asserts that the world organization was “born of hope—and of the idea of a shared humanity.” Whether Israeli or not, Jewish or non-Jewish, these victims embodied that very humanity. The official slogan is “Building our future together.” Together? The UN’s moral destruction since October 7 has rendered that slogan meaningless—one small member state, Israel, stands alone and excluded, along with all who associate with it, including those guest workers butchered and kidnapped on that day.
Eighty years after its charter, containing lofty ideals, came into effect, has the United Nations become a false prophet of peace? If Isaiah were alive today to witness the world organization dedicated to his vision, perhaps he would declare:
Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; Who present darkness as light and light as darkness.
Eli Kenin is an independent writer, researcher, and translator living in Jerusalem.
