UN Secretary General António Guterres is reportedly a top contender for the Nobel Peace Prize, which is scheduled to be announced on Friday. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (better known as UNRWA) and the International Court of Justice are also being considered.
Awarding the prize to any of them would be a travesty. Indeed, the secretary general’s numerous statements implying moral equivalence between terrorists and victims, his false statistics and his distortions of international humanitarian law raise serious questions regarding his neutrality, his commitment to justice and his ability to uphold the principles enshrined in the UN charter.
The past year has seen the barbaric October 7 Hamas slaughter, rape, torture and burning of innocent people, including babies in Israel’s south; Hezbollah’s unremitting 8,000-missile attack on civilian populations in Israel’s north (which UN Resolution 1701 was mandated to prevent); and two attacks by Iran, including the most recent launching of 180 ballistic missiles at millions of Israelis in civilian population centers across Israel. Throughout, Guterres has disproportionately focused on condemning Israel’s legally justified actions—actions taken to defend its citizens to ensure that all 135,000 of them can safely return to their homes. Israel has been facing an existential threat from Iran and its terrorist proxies on multiple fronts.
António Guterres’s ineffectual response contrasts sharply with the moral clarity of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
Those of us with institutional memory recognize a troubling recrudescence of the era of Kurt Waldheim, the UN secretary general with a hidden Nazi past, who presided over the UN for a decade in which the General Assembly passed its infamous resolution declaring, “Zionism is racism.” Waldheim’s tenure as UN secretary general was mired in accusations of antisemitism. Eventually, he was barred in disgrace from entering countries in Europe and the United States.
Similar political theater was on full display last month at the UN General Assembly when an automatic majority of anti-Israel member states were elated at the passage of the Palestinian-drafted UN General Assembly resolution calling for an arms embargo against Israel.
In the immediate aftermath of the October 7 massacre, Guterres averred, and has repeated since, that the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust “did not happen in a vacuum” but should be understood in the “context” of Palestinian oppression. He has also repeatedly said that during his tenure he has not seen any conflict anywhere in the world with the scale and speed of killing inflicted by the IDF in Gaza—a tendentious and false statement that accepts without question the exaggerated casualty figures supplied by the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. Even when the UN cut the number of confirmed Gaza deaths nearly in half, Guterres continued to use his voice to influence UN member states, ignoring casualties in other conflicts such as Ukraine and Sudan.
When Francesca Albanese, a UN official who is part of the UN’s human rights apparatus, wrongly and astonishingly accused Israel of apartheid and genocide—and called for Israel to be expelled from the United Nations—the Secretary General’s Office offered nothing more than a weak deflection, noting that UN rapporteurs are “independent.”
Guterres’s ineffectual response contrasts sharply with the moral clarity of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who rightly advocated for the dissolution of the discredited Human Rights Commission, recognizing that its lack of credibility and disproportionate focus on Israel was contrary to the UN’s mission. During his tenure, Annan also firmly denounced the infamous “Zionism is racism” resolution, calling it a “low point in history” and stating that he was “glad it had since been rescinded” (it took 16 years to be revoked). When a UN member state claimed that Israel was infecting Palestinians with AIDS-tainted blood, Annan swiftly admonished that there was no place at the UN for such rhetoric.
Today, by contrast, Guterres not only fails to confront baseless accusations against Israel; he has become a megaphone for the Palestinian narrative and allows dangerous allegations and hate speech against Jews and Israel to flourish unchallenged. His failure to include in his annual report sexual violence committed by Hamas on October 7 against Israeli women, citing “lack of evidence,” is a further outrage.
Nor has the secretary general ever unconditionally condemned Hamas’s kidnapping, starvation and cold-blooded execution of Israeli hostages without linking it to a call for a cease-fire (which would enable Iran and its terrorist proxies to fulfill their stated genocidal goal of eliminating the only Jewish state and democracy in the Middle East).
On October 1, when Iran launched a barrage of 180 ballistic missiles against Israeli population centers, forcing millions of Israelis to seek protection in bomb shelters, Guterres rushed to post on X an outrageous statement that failed to even mention Iran:
“I’m gravely concerned by the dramatic escalation of events in Beirut in the last 24 hours. This cycle of violence must stop now. All sides must step back from the brink. The people of Lebanon, the people of Israel, as well as the wider region, cannot afford an all-out war.”
In fact, Iran had just launched the largest single ballistic missile attack ever recorded against a sovereign UN member state during Guterres’s tenure—and this did not happen in a “vacuum,” either, as Iran is the world’s greatest purveyor of state-sponsored terrorism in the history of the United Nations.
Guterres even condemned the brilliantly precise targeting of Hezbollah combatants through simultaneous explosions, distorting international law by saying that widespread targeting of civilian objects was a war crime that should be investigated and the perpetrators prosecuted. According to the U.S. Department of Defense military manual and legal experts, such activity is not prohibited by international law.
The secretary general’s rhetorical invective against Israel, swallowed whole and regurgitated by many in the media, functions as a force multiplier for the Palestinian narrative. From informing international policy to creating a social media frenzy, Guterres’s moral inversions contribute greatly to public hysteria, university campus hostilities against Israel and Jews and the explosion of antisemitic violence worldwide.
When the fog of war clears, history will undoubtedly judge Secretary General Guterres’s legacy as a stain on the UN—as was the case with Secretary General Waldheim. Rather than honoring him, or even considering the idea, members of the Nobel Committee who rightly question Waldheim’s era—asking, “Where was the moral authority of the Secretary General then?”—would instead do well to ask, “Where is the moral authority of the Secretary General now?”
Top image: UN Secretary General António Guterres at the United Nations in New York in 2020. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe
Eve Epstein is president of Epstein & Associates, a strategic communications and media firm located in NYC. She has advised top UN officials including a UN secretary general.