Israel's Outgoing UN Ambassador Worries Palestinians Are Winning Narrative

As support for Palestinian statehood continues to gain international ground, Israel's outgoing ambassador to the United Nations warned that Israel was losing the fight for the narrative over a decades-long conflict that has erupted into a bloody, high-stakes war.

"It always concerns us when our approach is not being accepted, like every normal country," Israeli Permanent Ambassador to the U.N. Gilad Erdan said in response to Newsweek's question during a small gathering of journalists last week at the Israeli Mission to the U.N. "So, we have to do more to convince the world."

Erdan, who announced just hours prior to the meeting on Friday that he had declined an ambassadorship to the United States and would leave his post this summer to continue his career in foreign service in another capacity, has established himself as a fiery presence at the U.N., especially since the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, attacks that sparked the longest and deadliest-ever war in the Gaza Strip.

When the U.N. General Assembly just weeks ago overwhelming voted in support of recognizing Palestinian statehood in the wake of a U.S.-vetoed motion at the U.N. Security Council, Erdan fed a copy of the U.N. Charter to a mini-shredding machine at the podium to suggest that supportive nations were defying the U.N.'s founding protocols and held up a picture of Hamas' Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar, alleging he was "sponsored by the UN."

These were only the latest props the Israeli diplomat has brought to the iconic stage after wearing a yellow star to symbolize Holocaust victims last October and brandishing a photo of Nazi German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler meeting with Grand Mufti Amin el-Husseini of U.K.-colonized Mandatory Palestine in 1947. Throughout, Erdan has sought to capitalize on his theatrics in order to draw attention to what he said were serious issues undermining the U.N. from within.

But as he counts down his final weeks in his post amid worries of Israel's diplomatic isolation, Erdan told reporters: "Now, I'm out of gimmicks."

Erdan, who previously served as Israel's envoy to the U.S. and in a number of ministerial positions before being appointed as ambassador to the U.N. in July 2020, has made no secret of his disdain for the U.N. as it exists today.

"Today, the U.N. is being exploited and weaponized against Israel to delegitimize the whole notion of a Jewish state," Erdan said, "to delegitimize our existence during times of war to try to stop us from implementing our right to defend ourselves and the implementation of defending ourselves is eliminating Hamas' terror capabilities because otherwise they are going to repeat October 7 again and again."

Still, he felt that staying better served Israel's interest than pulling out.

"If I'm not here and lies are being spread against Israel," Erdan said, "no one is going to help the British ambassador to share with them the facts or the intelligence that I share with [U.S.] Ambassador Woodward or with Linda Thomas-Greenfield because I'm trying to help our allies to continue supporting us.

"So, I think that our presence here is still important. It's more important to convince democracies to defund the UN and to demand thorough fundamental changes here."

He blamed the trend partially on the emergence of geopolitical voting blocs, particularly after the eruption of Russia's war in Ukraine in February 2022, as well as the influence that "non-democratic" nations enjoy in the U.N.

"The main reason why the U.N. was founded was to prevent atrocities, wars and defend human rights," Erdan said. "And one has to ask himself whether the U.N. today, with this political makeup, can truly fulfill its mission—and I believe regardless of Israel, we can do it—the answer is clearly, no."

In recent interviews with Newsweek, senior U.N. officials argued the case for the lasting importance of the international body as a mechanism for resolving the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was one of the earliest major issues taken on by the newly formed U.N. in 1947.

Erdan also noted the number of Muslim-majority countries at the U.N. and their tendency to align with one another as opposed to Jews, whom he said were more prone to criticism of official policies.

"You can see Jews that can criticize severely the government policy, and they will—in Israel and outside of Israel," Erdan said. "The Muslim world is quite different. They will speak the same thing as I described to you, even when privately they will tell me other things. Publicly, they will align themselves with the most radical parts against Israel."

Erdan declined to offer the names of the Muslim leaders and nations who privately disagree with their public stance but argued that "behind closed doors, they will tell me, 'Finish the job.'"

"They know that Hamas poses a threat against them," Erdan said, "because Hamas is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Muslim Brotherhood endangers [President Abdel-Fattah] el-Sissi in Egypt, or [President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, also known as] MBZ in the UAE, and others, and in Bahrain.

"But publicly, because they are a member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation that has 56 votes here," he added, "they will always align themselves with the most radical parts in their group, because these Muslim countries, most of them are not democracies, they don't really know what's their political situation, so to be on the safe side, and prevent internal uprisings, they will align themselves with [such radical positions]."

Newsweek has reached out to the embassies to the U.S. and missions to the U.N. of Bahrain, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates for comment.

But the latest pro-Palestinian shifts have emerged from fellow democracies in Europe, with Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia announcing bids to recognize Palestinian statehood in recent weeks despite Israeli protests.

Today, seven years after winning U.N. non-member observer state status, the Palestinian National Authority (PA) lists 147 nations that have recognized the State of Palestine, not including the recent announcement by Slovenia to join. Israel currently has relations with 165 out of 193 U.N. member states, though some have withdrawn ambassadors, downgraded relations, cut ties or threatened to do so since the war in Gaza began.

Still, in answering Newsweek's question on the issue, Erdan argued that he did not see the latest nations recognizing a Palestinian state "cutting ties with Israel," and argued they "sometimes they do it because there are special relations with the Palestinians or with the Muslim world, sometimes they do it because of other interests."

Yet he referred to such decisions as "a terrible mistake, because it only makes peace less likely to be achieved," which he asserted could be done only "by pressuring the two parties to sit at the negotiating table and achieve a solution." He felt such external processes only allowed Palestinians to "see—be it bilaterally or here at the U.N.—that they can receive international support for all of their demands, without agreeing to even the slightest compromise.

"Peace always has to include mutual compromises," Erdan said. "Maybe Israel will have to support or to do bigger concessions, but some concessions will be needed from the Palestinians as well."

Erdan declined to broadcast in advance any compromises he felt Israel may need to make in the event of a broader peace agreement. But he provided one example of a potential Palestinian concession—the withdrawal of "their demand of descendants of descendants of Palestinians from 1948 to return to their original cities," prior to the establishment of the State of Israel and the ensuing Arab-Israeli War that began that same year.

Today, the U.N. continues to recognize Palestinian territory as being composed of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which was seized by Israel during the 1967 Six-Day War and later annexed without international recognition. Israel also remained in control of Gaza and the West Bank until the 1990s Oslo peace accords, which saw powers partially transferred to the newly established PA, with Israeli forces disengaging entirely from Gaza in 2005.

Hamas took control of Gaza in 2007 amid a violent-post election clash the PA's dominant Fatah faction. The PA continues to administer parts of the West Bank, but much of the territory is under direct or indirect Israeli control, including a growing number of internationally unrecognized Israeli settlements.

Erdan continues to view the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza as a "failure," and felt that the PA in its current form was also an unsuitable alternative, though "if it's revitalized, that's a different story."

At a time when independent Palestinian polls continued to show overwhelming preference for Hamas remaining in power in Gaza, representatives of both Hamas and the PA-affiliated Palestine Liberation Organization told Newsweek last month that only Palestinians themselves should choose their leadership and no government could be externally imposed.

A day before Erdan's meeting with journalists, a spokesperson for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office told Newsweek: "What we want to see in Gaza—in the day after Hamas—is a demilitarized territory and a de-radicalized society, potentially run by local civil administrators who have no link to terrorism."

But in casting doubt on a recent Arab League proposal to deploy U.N. peacekeepers to Gaza, the Israeli premier's office spokesperson also argued that "in the foreseeable future Israel will have to maintain some security responsibility over the Gaza Strip to make sure that we don't see a resurgence of terrorism after we destroy Hamas as a governing body in Gaza and military wing."

Erdan also asserted, however, that a return to military occupation would be far from ideal.

"We already evacuated Gaza and withdrew from Gaza," Erdan said. "It's not [in] our interest to stay there and we hope that we'll be able after achieving the total victory after destroying Hamas and its terrorist capabilities that we will have as soon as possible a partner that we can hand Gaza to and feel safe that we won't be attacked from Gaza."

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