Israel gets singled out. Nobody treats any other country in the world this way.

The fuller answer

8 sectionsJump to one

Read this before you use it. This is the strongest argument available on the subject and the one most likely to go wrong in your hands. Used badly it is heard as an instruction to care about nothing, and a room that has heard that stops listening.

It arrives at a council meeting, in a union branch, under a post. You need no title and no organisation behind you to put it. What you need is the version that works, which is the rest of this page.

The version that loses the room

“Why aren’t you protesting about Syria?”

That sentence has never worked. Aimed at a person it says their concern is illegitimate until they have audited their own compassion, and the honest reply is available to anyone: because I am here, about this.

It also concedes the argument you meant to have. The subject is now who cares about what, and you are pointing at other people’s dead.

Two things are true at once.

People are entitled to care selectively. Everybody does. Attention is finite, and somebody who turned up for one cause and not another has done nothing that needs excusing. Pointing at an individual’s silence about another country proves nothing on its own, and a briefed opponent will say so in one sentence.

Institutions are not owed the same latitude. A body that has adopted a position on one country and on no other has made a decision, and a body that makes decisions can be asked for its reasons.

Ask the question of the institution

Ask it of the institution, never of the person. That is the whole rule, and it is the one thing to carry out of this page. A body with a policy on one country and none on any other has made a choice, and can be asked what test it used. A person has only turned up.

A student who came to one march has not chosen a foreign policy. A senate, a council, a pension committee or a professional association that has passed one country-specific motion in its history has done precisely that.

So the question is never “why do you care about this and not that”. It is “what test did you apply, and does anything else pass it”.

Four lines you could say without editing:

“I’m not asking why you came. I’m asking what the committee’s test was. Has it ever applied that test anywhere else?”

“This is the only country policy this organisation holds. Who decided it would be the only one, and when?”

“If the threshold is serious harm to civilians, name the other cases that met it. If none did, the threshold is doing no work.”

“I’ll take an answer of any kind. What I cannot work with is a rule for one country and no rule at all.”

And one that carries the scale, for when you are asked to show your working:

“In twenty years the Human Rights Council has passed 112 resolutions against Israel and 45 against Syria. The UN counted three hundred thousand civilians dead in Syria. That’s not a gap in attention, it’s a different category.”

None of them asks anybody to stop caring, and none turns another country’s dead into a debating counter. Each asks a body to account for a policy it wrote down.

Lead with the agenda, not with a tally

The strongest fact here is not a count. It is the shape of an institution, published by that institution.

The UN Human Rights Council works to a standing agenda of ten items, fixed by its own resolution 5/1 of 18 June 2007 and used at every regular session since. Item 4 is “Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention”. That is where every country on earth is dealt with. Item 7 is “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”. It is the only item on the agenda that names a place.

None of that is compiled by anybody with a position. It is the Council’s own agenda paper, and a doubter can have it open in a minute.

Somebody who says “according to UN Watch” and is told UN Watch campaigns on the subject has lost the exchange. Somebody who says “the Council has a permanent agenda item for one country and none for anywhere else, go and look” has not.

One more structural fact. On 27 May 2021, by 24 votes to 9 with 14 abstentions, the Council established a commission of inquiry with an open-ended mandate and no closing date, the first of its kind.

The counts, and how to handle them

Volume figures are worth having, and they need different handling, because campaigners do the compiling.

Use the twenty-year number, not this year’s. A single year invites the reply that the year was chosen, and it is a fair reply. Since the Human Rights Council was created in 2006 it has adopted 112 resolutions against Israel, 45 against Syria, 16 against Iran, 11 against Russia and 4 against Venezuela. Two decades, every session, no year picked by anybody.

Then set Syria beside it, because that comparison is the argument and the other figures are only scenery. The UN’s own human rights office counted 306,887 civilians killed in Syria between 1 March 2011 and 31 March 2021. Syria drew fewer than half as many resolutions as Israel over the same institution’s whole life.

The single-year figures still have a use, and it is a different one. In 2025 the General Assembly adopted 15 condemnatory resolutions on Israel and 11 on the entire rest of the world: six on Russia, two on the United States, one each on North Korea, Iran and Myanmar. Read that as a sentence rather than a ratio. Israel alone drew more than Russia, the United States, North Korea, Iran and Myanmar put together.

Two things to be exact about, because both will be put to you.

Say where the numbers come from before anybody asks. “These are compiled by UN Watch, which campaigns on this, and every resolution is a UN record you can check.” Withheld, that becomes a discrediting line in somebody else’s mouth. Volunteered, it is the reason the number is believed.

And say resolutions rather than condemnations for the cumulative figure. UN Watch counts resolutions adopted against a country, some of them renewed annually as a matter of procedure. It does exclude texts it judges non-condemnatory, and it says so: a 2025 resolution on Syria and one on assistance to the Palestinian people were both left out on that ground. Describe the count accurately and it holds. Inflate it into 112 condemnations and somebody will open the database in front of you.

Two more wars ran through the same years, for the same reason of scale. A UNDP study projected 377,000 dead in Yemen by the end of 2021. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine estimated more than 61,000 deaths from all causes in Khartoum state alone between April 2023 and June 2024, more than 90 per cent of them unrecorded, and Sudan has eighteen states.

The explanation that is not hostility

Take this seriously or the argument falls over.

Attention has never been evenly distributed, and the reasons have nothing to do with Jews. Reporters can work in the territory and file the same day. The conflict is old enough that audiences already hold the map. Former colonial powers were directly involved in the arrangements that produced it. Large diaspora and solidarity populations live in the countries where the campaigning happens. The UN has claimed a permanent responsibility for the question since 1947, which generates documents on its own.

Item 7 has a defence and you will meet it. Al-Haq and Addameer, two Palestinian human rights organisations, argue it is necessary because the Security Council is vetoed and other machinery has not delivered. Read their case first-hand. It is an argument about need, and need does not explain why this situation got an agenda item of its own while every other one is handled under item 4.

Kofi Annan put both halves to the General Assembly on 19 September 2006. Supporters of Israel, he said, feel it is harshly judged by standards not applied to its enemies, and too often this is true, particularly in some UN bodies. In the same passage he said people are outraged by the disproportionate use of force against Palestinians. Quote both, because an opponent who knows it will.

What survives the explanation

Two things do.

The size of the gap. Media access and historical involvement can account for a gap. They do not account for one body condemning a single state more often than every other state on earth combined, in years containing the wars above.

The form the campaigning takes. Coverage volume explains why people know about a conflict. It does not explain why the response takes shapes used nowhere else. Academic associations have adopted boycotts of one country’s universities and of no other country’s. Exclusions in culture and sport get applied to one country’s nationals and to nobody else’s. No comparable machinery exists for any other state, including the states whose conduct produced the death tolls above.

Ban Ki-moon told the Security Council in December 2016 that decades of political manoeuvring had created a disproportionate volume of resolutions, reports and conferences criticising Israel, and that this had hampered the UN’s own work. He was the Secretary-General, and he said it on the way out.

The claim is not that the gap proves antisemitism. Somebody will hand you that version and it collapses. The narrower claim is harder to shift: an institution that treats one state as a category of its own owes an account of why, and mostly none has been produced.

What a briefed opponent will say

That this is whataboutery, a recognised fallacy. That the same move has been used for decades to see off criticism that deserved answering. That the UN’s own history with the question explains the volume. That pointing at Sudan does not make an allegation about Gaza false.

Each lands on the bad version. None touches a question about what test a committee applied. Stay on the institution and the ground stays under you.

What to ask, and what to do when they turn it round

Action. “Before the meeting on the fourteenth, I will find out in writing whether this organisation holds a policy on any other country, and take the answer in with me.”

Coping. “If somebody tells me I am asking them not to care, I will say that I have not said that and they can care about whatever they like, then repeat that my question is about the committee rather than about them.”