Radical Activists in the International Community System Set the Anti-Israel Agenda

• Anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish rhetoric at the United Nations and associated bodies is nothing new.

• Many members of the UN professional corps reflect this bias and embrace the postcolonial indoctrination that has swept academia, the media, and the general social discourse.

• Radical activists in key UN positions have utilized international community institutions to promote and advance terrorist entities.

• Politically active academics who disseminate biased narratives in international institutions have become the norm.

• Doctrinaire activism has seeped into every crevice of international community institutions.

On July 8, 2025, Navi Pillay resigned as chair of the “UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” which began its work in 2021, charging Israel with alleged war crimes and claiming gender-based violence and “unlawful occupation.”¹ The COI’s June 2024 report accused Israel of attacking civilian sites like schools and mosques without justification, framing these as deliberate assaults on Palestinian culture and identity, while ignoring that Hamas was using these sites as cover for their military operations and weapons storage, without acknowledging its terrorist designation and without condemning in any way the Hamas October 7, 2023, massacre of over 1,000 Israeli and foreign civilians, and their taking of hundreds of hostages.²

All three COI members have now stepped down, possibly due to mounting pressure, including that of U.S. sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967, who has used her position as an impartial examiner as a platform for anti-Israel activism and anti-Zionist statements.

The COI members’ public statements have also markedly prejudiced their objectivity: Pillay has called to “sanction apartheid Israel”; Miloon Kothari asked why Israel is “even a member of the United Nations” and in a 2022 interview alleged social media is “controlled largely by… the Jewish lobby”; Chris Sidoti said that Jews “throw around accusations [of antisemitism] like rice at a wedding” and called for legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). COI disregarded evidence from watchdog organizations like MEMRI and Palestinian Media Watch that document Palestinian incitement, while preferring to rely solely on sources that support its ideological bias that prioritizes politically-generated narrative over genuine and reliable factual analysis.³

Anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish rhetoric at the United Nations and associated bodies is nothing new. The UN has been platforming anti-Zionism officially since Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat spoke at the UN podium in 1974; by 1975 the UN General Assembly passed the notorious “Zionism is Racism” Resolution 3379, the only instance of a nationalist movement being charged with racism in the history of the UN, whose charter pledges to uphold the self-determination of states as well as sovereign equality. That vote was attributed largely to Cold War voting blocs, when the Soviet Union, China, and the Arab states convinced “non-aligned” or “Third World” developing countries that Israel was a colonialist entity, which fit their general anti-Western agenda.

Since that ominous precursor, the “Third World” approach has been institutionalized into a dominant and pervasive false narrative that has seeped into most bodies of the UN and international courts in resolutions and position papers researched under the biased mandates of these states. In addition, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) president and a Consultative Group of five ambassadors from each UN regional group hold the most influence in selecting UN Special Rapporteurs, by shortlisting candidates. UNHRC disproportionately focuses on Israel, with 47% of country-specific resolutions from 2012-2022 targeting Israel, far exceeding those against other nations like Syria or Iran, despite their human rights abuses.⁴ Agenda Item 7, a permanent item solely dedicated to alleged Israeli violations, singles out Israel uniquely, while other countries are addressed under a general item.⁵

Many members of the UN professional corps reflect this bias and embrace the postcolonial indoctrination that has swept academia, the media, and the general social discourse. Some UN appointees are activist academics involved in fields of radical scholarship that regard Israel as a colonialist, imperialist, racist, and foreign settler-colonial entity.

One such field is a Critical Legal Studies sub-field, “TWAIL,” Third World Approaches to International Law, a radical academic and activist framework. TWAIL was established formally as a field in 1996 at Harvard Law School, and has been steered by Global South law professors such as James Thuo Gathii and Antony Anghie.⁶ Its deeper roots lie in the work of Algerian UN Ambassador (1979-1982) and jurist Mohammed Bedjaoui, the National Liberation Front’s (FLN) legal advisor and an ICJ judge (1982-2001) who today serves on the TWAIL legal journal board.⁷

Critical International Legal Theory (CILT) and TWAIL are thought-schools that seek to radically transform or reverse the Western post-World War II international law traditions that guided the establishment of the United Nations. Many UN staff tasked with “watchdog” positions covering Israel are informed by Third World thought schools, which have even been criticized within progressive circles of failing to provide tools to uplift the developing world.

The “Third World” concept is an outdated and contestable Cold War-era relic that radicals have weaponized to subvert the international law system and community. The result has been that radical activists in key UN positions have utilized international community institutions to promote and advance terrorist entities, instead of upholding democracies and encouraging conflict resolution, the international forums’ original intent.

Radical ideologies touted by UN staff, some of whom are academics, undermine the foundations of rules-based law, liberal democracies, and the self-determination and sovereignty of states.

Examining UN Staff’s Radical Credentials, Associations, and Activism

The recently resigned COI commissioners are legal and academic activists. A South African jurist with a Harvard doctorate, Pillay was an anti-apartheid lawyer and who served as UN Human Rights Commissioner (2008-2014). Pillay’s projection of Israel as an “apartheid” state is a trend that intensified in her home country at the World Conference Against Racism and Xenophobia in Durban in 2001, urging boycotts and sanctions against Israel. Kothari, an Indian human rights activist (UN housing rapporteur 2000-2008) who was a visiting scholar at MIT (2013-14), is known for criticizing “neo-liberal” policies and “Western militarism.” Sidoti is an Australian human rights lawyer who taught law as an adjunct professor at several universities.

The UN position “Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967” has long been a platform for anti-Israel hate. Francesca Albanese, appointed as Special Rapporteur in 2022, has made countless public statements and speeches against Israel. On July 16, in a tweet on X, she criticized the EU for failing to suspend the EU–Israel Association Agreement — the main trade and political framework binding the EU and Israel since 2000, saying the EU “is consciously supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians” asking them to “activate the (Court of Justice of the European Union) CJEU….Cut ties with Israel, starting with trade, including of weapons. Do the right thing. Our European history commands it.” In May, Albanese was alleged to have received work travel funds from Hamas-associated organizations.⁸

Likewise, Albanese has authored a book titled “Genocide as Colonial Erasure”⁹ and framed the post-October 7 war in Gaza as one of settler-colonialism. Albanese’s genocide report on Israel, “(Settler Colonial) Genocide in Gaza: The Report of the UN Special Rapporteur,” published on March 25, 2024, was featured in the TWAIL Review,¹⁰ and she has referenced the movement.¹¹ She also worked for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), now notorious for its staffing and infrastructural support of Hamas militants. She has also been an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University, and an advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement for the progressive Jordanian research institution Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), which is also partially funded by the UN.

Canadian law professor Michael Lynk of the Western University of Ontario¹² preceded Albanese in her position, serving from 2016 to 2022. In January 2024, Lynk and radical law professor and activist Noura Erekat spoke at a TWAIL-sponsored “Decolonise Palestine Teach-In” on South Africa’s ICJ case against Israel. Lynk’s predecessor was emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University Richard Falk. Falk spoke at a roundtable in 2023 with Erekat, John Reynolds, and professor and UN official Ardi Imseis.¹³ Falks’s eight-year tenure culminated in his eventual condemnation by then-UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for inflammatory statements, including “blaming the Boston Marathon bombings on the United States and Israel, supporting 9/11 conspiracy theories, endorsing an anti-Semitic book, and calling for a non-governmental organization – UN Watch – to be investigated and effectively shut down.”¹⁴

Falk’s predecessor was South African professor of international law John Dugard, who claimed in 2008 in The New York Times that Israel’s attack on Hamas headquarters was illegal since the target was near a wedding venue, where one civilian was killed. Dugard also claimed, with no legal basis, that Israel’s closure of the Gaza borders was illegal “collective punishment.”¹⁵

Together with Irish law professor John Reynolds (also active in TWAIL), Dugard described Israel as an apartheid regime, “emblematic of the struggle of the decolonized third world. With the workings of international law rarely favouring the people and nations of the global South…”¹⁶ Reynolds wrote that “the question of Palestine” is “a rigorous test for intellectuals in the Global North today….It considers the interventions of international lawyers in these debates concerning Edward Said’s ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ intellectuals, and explores ways in which anti-colonial international lawyers (as amateur intellectuals) can transcend prevailing professional orthodoxies to deploy language, arguments or tactics that rupture liberal legal processes and narratives on Palestine.”¹⁷ Reynolds echoes Said’s depiction of Israel as the last colonialist entity.

Other UN officers also share these dogmatic biases. Balakrishnan Rajagopal is Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing, and is also a legal academic and “TWAILer.” On November 1, 2024, Rajagopal tweeted (and Albanese retweeted) a picture of scantily clad men at the Jabalya camp in Gaza, apparently told to strip by the IDF as part of its counterterrorism policies, with the accompanying text: “These images are seared into our collective consciousness as a symbol of bestiality (sic), brutality and eternal shame. Hundreds of Palestinian men stripped naked in the middle of rubble in Jabalya. When and how will this end? Where is humanity?”¹⁸

Like the other rapporteurs, Rajagopal’s academic credentials are solid, his classroom also a circle of influence: he is an associate professor of law at MIT, where he founded two associations, is active in the American Society of International Law, is a faculty associate at Harvard Law School, taught at other universities, and has been a fellow at the Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.¹⁹ Rajagopal is a leader in the TWAIL “network of scholars and is one of its founders, and is recognized as a leading global commentator on issues concerning the global South.”²⁰

Ardi Imseis, a UN staffer for 12 years, is also a law professor at Queen’s College in Canada²¹ and is associated with the Critical Legal Studies academy. He served as a legal officer in UNWRA, and advised the ICJ in the “apartheid wall” case against Israel’s security barrier in 2004. In his book The United Nations and the Question of Palestine: Rule by Law and the Structure of International Legal Subalternity, he states that he builds on TWAIL, and his book “argues the existence of ‘international legal subalternity’ – a condition that marks the relationship of the global south with international law from its modern European origins to the present day.”²² 

Politically active academics who disseminate biased narratives in international institutions have become the norm. Doctrinaire activism has seeped into every crevice of international community institutions. The damage to Israel is clear, yet the radical ideology that now engulfs the UN also threatens to undermine the international legal and diplomatic system as a whole, in addition to the bases of legal academia.

The coming installment of this series will explore how the principles of the academic discipline of Critical Law and its international applications undermine the original intent and purpose of the international community system.

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Notes