JNS
"We need to see how the plan is implemented,” said Andrew Baker, of the American Jewish Committee. “That will be the real measure.”
The United Nations released its long-delayed “action plan” to monitor and respond to Jew-hatred on Friday.
The 22-page document, which is labeled “advance and unedited,” drew praise from Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. envoy to the global body, and from Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism.
“We are encouraged by the U.N.’s announcement of a strategic framework to counter antisemitism,” the two stated jointly.
“The challenge now lies in putting the plan into practice,” the two wrote. “The U.N. must demonstrate its full commitment to its human rights mandate and take concrete steps that will lead to tangible progress.”
Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, told JNS that it was a “positive step forward” that the global body recognized the dangers of Jew-hatred “in all its forms and its resurgence today.”
The plan’s “rhetoric” must “be matched with real action for calling out and combating antisemitism whenever it appears inside the U.N. ecosystem—including double standards and flagrant attempts at singling out and demonizing Israel—and worldwide,” Danon added. (Jewish U.N. staff members told JNS that they faced Jew-hatred at work after Oct. 7.)
The new U.N. plan has “some very significant elements,” according to Andrew Baker, a rabbi and director of international Jewish affairs at the American Jewish Committee.
Baker told JNS that it is “a real step forward” that the Spanish diplomat Miguel Ángel Moratinos, the U.N. under-secretary general and the high representative for the global body’s Alliance of Civilizations, oversaw the plan’s development through U.N. bureaucracy. (Moratinos is also the U.N. focal point for monitoring Jew-hatred.)
“We need to see how the plan is implemented,” Baker said. “That will be the real measure.”
A draft of the plan that was to be released in July 2023—some three years after Moratinos was appointed to the U.N. role focused on Jew-hatred—was scrapped amid strong disagreements between the U.N. official and Jewish groups. The new plan doesn’t endorse the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of Jew-hatred but appears to weigh it more heavily than the previous plan draft did.
“As of December 2024, 45 U.N. member states have adopted or endorsed the IHRA version as a non-legally binding working definition of antisemitism, and many use it for training law enforcement agencies and educators,” the plan states. “While there is a diversity of views and other definitions have been developed, unlike the IHRA definition, none of them have been adopted by any U.N. member state.”
“Nonetheless, the U.N. secretariat does not endorse any definition on antisemitism,” the plan adds.
Katharina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s coordinator on combating antisemitism and fostering Jewish life, told JNS that the European Union has worked with the United Nations “closely” on the plan, whose “concrete actions” she praised.
“Obviously, the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” she said. “So we look forward to seeing the implementation of the plan, and are willing to cooperate with the U.N. on it to ensure that Jews around the globe can live in line with their cultural and religious traditions and free from security concerns.”
David Michaels, director of U.N. and intercommunal affairs at B’nai B’rith International, told JNS that “although it’s obvious that we would want the U.N. to be a leader in seriously tackling antisemitism globally, this is an inherently thorny task.”
The global body is a “key venue” for Jew-hatred, particularly demonizing and discriminating against Israeli Jews, and since the plan doesn’t adopt the IHRA definition nor commit to remove antisemites from its ranks, it is unclear how it will be implemented, according to Michaels.
‘Right away ready’
Among the commitments that the United Nations makes in the plan is to better train its staff to recognize and respond to Jew-hatred, including Holocaust denial, and to create a better process for staff to report bias. It also calls on the global body to monitor its implementation of the plan and to vocally denounce Jew-hatred when it occurs.
JNS asked Moratinos at a press briefing on Friday how long he expects it to take for the global body to begin the monitoring.
“I think we are ready to start,” he said. “We’ve been working with the different envoys that have the responsibility of member states to defend the fight against antisemitism.”
“We are right away ready to implement the new elements,” he added.
Baker, of the American Jewish Committee, told JNS that he sees the timeline differently.
“I don’t think that’s the language I would use,” he said of the U.N. official’s schedule. “I think now that it’s out there, it really is a question of how robust the pace is, or how quickly it happens.”
“Obviously, pieces of it, such as calling for the development and implementation of training modules for U.N. personnel training that presumably have the input of Jewish organizations, Jewish communities in their development, they don’t have to start from scratch,” he said.
Ronald Lauder, president of World Jewish Congress, thanked Moratinos and his staff for including Jewish groups in the process and stated that the plan “will require sustained commitment, coordination and action at all levels of government, civil society and international organizations.”
Baker told JNS that he thinks Moratinos faced staunch opposition from “U.N. bureaucracy” for including as strong a mention of the IHRA definition as he did in the plan. “There were many people who did not want to see this, or are probably not happy about it,” Baker said.
Even though the plan doesn’t adopt the IHRA definition, Baker told JNS that the language in the U.N. plan, in some ways, “is much stronger, or at least more pointed, regarding the IHRA definition, than the language in the U.S. national strategy” to counter Jew-hatred.
Moratinos told JNS at the Friday briefing that it is up to member states whether to adopt the IHRA definition.
“Of course, we acknowledge how we can better understand antisemitism, because if we better understand antisemitism, we would be better equipped to get better results,” he said.
“It may not be the action plan that we would have written,” Baker told JNS, “but it certainly reflects many of the points we made to [Moratinos] in the overall development.”
