Even though the Jewish state did come into being relatively soon after the U.N.’s creation, it had enemies from the moment of its birth. At the U.N., on the vote on partition—which created Jewish and Arab states—13 countries voted against partition and 10 abstained. 33 voted for partition, but from the outset there was an animus toward Israel that was already building, and that has, to this day, not abated.

For decades, Israel has been treated as a pariah in the U.N.’s General Assembly, its Security Council (to which it has never been elected) and a host of U.N. agencies. I recall, as we were crowded around our TV, Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba Eban standing alone, along with U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, as one Arab country after another took to the microphone to castigate and lacerate Israel in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War.

The adoption of the “Zionism=Racism” resolution in 1975 spawned what is now over 50 years of demonizing and delegitimizing of the Jewish State that has burgeoned out of control globally. The initial impetus for the immense challenges we are facing today as Jews began right there, in the General Assembly Hall in New York. And even though the resolution was rescinded in 1991, the path to defamation never stopped.

Israel was even barred from joining its natural geographic grouping at the U.N. It instead was squeezed into something called the “Western European and Others Group” in 2000—but it could only participate in meetings in New York. On behalf of B’nai B’rith, I was involved in many rounds of public diplomacy urging that Israel become a fully participating member anywhere. I believed then, as I do now, that it was an affront to Israel that did not have to happen. Israel became, again, an orphan in an organization based on the highest sounding words of inclusion.

In 2001, the presumptuously named “World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” took place in Durban, South Africa. It was a hate fest to end all hate fests against Israel and its supporters. B’nai B’rith led the Jewish organizations represented at the gathering and was subject to the anti-Semitic atmosphere that pulsed through the meeting hall and in the streets surrounding it.

Henry Monsky was prescient. He saw in 1945 that there were and would be countries that are serial abusers of human rights. He urged a tough and unforgiving policy that would call out those who abuse the human rights not only of the recently decimated Jewish world, but of all peoples.

Perhaps Monsky knew that, left to their own devices, nation states would revert to looking the other way, or excusing the bad behavior of others. The U.N. Human Rights Commission, later renamed the U.N. Human Rights Council, has become exactly that. While letting countries whose human rights records are among the world’s worst get away with it, the U.N. has made Israel the go-to target of the council’s opprobrium. Special rapporteurs whose job is to single out Israel for scorn and vicious, unwarranted criticism and hold Israel to impossible standards, are routinely appointed. A special Commission of Inquiry was established within the council in 2021. It has no shelf life and its permanent presence has only one purpose: to report, quarterly, on Israeli “violations” of human rights.

There is much more, but you get the point. What you see at the U.N. regarding its treatment of Israel, you see daily in the streets of our major cities, on university campuses, in the back and forth on social media, and in the major mainstream media as well. Essentially, the bias and outright anti-Semitism that emanates from the U.N. and some of its operatives give credence and legitimation to those on the street, and beyond.

It’s not what Monsky and his Jewish organizational colleagues necessarily thought would evolve when they gathered in San Francisco. Even with their insightful efforts to move forward the idea of a Jewish state, they most likely thought that from the depths of the Holocaust, and a world ravaged by six years of war, a better world might emerge. It is, after all, in our biblical teachings and in our Jewish DNA to be optimistic, even in the worst of times.

My mother also looked at the world around her with a “trust but verify” eye. That said, she took my sisters and me for a tour of the still new United Nations Headquarters on First Avenue, in 1955. I was about to enter first grade, and all I recall from that visit was that I received a shiny blue metal pin with the U.N. logo on it as we began the tour. Ten years after the worst crimes ever committed against our people, there was a glimmer of hope that maybe—unlike the earlier, failed experiment of the League of Nations—a body encompassing the international community just might bring about a more peaceful world.

Those hopes have been dashed time and again by self-serving rogue states, mindless bloc voting, risk aversion and a lot of “going along to get along.” That, and the enormous expenditure of time, energy and funds used to victimize the only Jewish state, whose fight to survive continues to the present day.

There is little sense in giving the U.N. a report card on its 80th anniversary. Actually, B’nai B’rith has been doing that in many ways since we opened the first full-time office on U.N. Affairs in a Jewish community in 1960. We call out the U.N. constantly for its bias. We meet on a regular basis with U.N. officials and diplomats posted there. We travel to Geneva for meetings of the U.N. Human Rights Council, and to Paris to meet with officials at UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). A day hardly passes without a statement or comment from us, or a social media post on one U.N. resolution or another.

We do this because, given the opportunity, as Jews, we must. That’s why Henry Monsky was there in May of 1945. There for B’nai B’rith, for the Jewish people and for what ultimately became the State of Israel.

Though the U.N. has lost its way over these eight decades, we haven’t. The fight continues, guided by the same dedication laid out so eloquently by the leader of B’nai B’rith, in those heavily intense days in 1945.