Israel strives to conform to UN demands to the letter, even when they are clearly detrimental to our national interests, but Lebanese terrorists-cum-politicians have the good sense and courage to dismiss the UN as irrelevant outside New York.

Yet a Bush era NIE claims that Iran abandoned its military nuclear program. As we can see now, that intelligence estimate is technically correct: Iran had mostly completed its work on weaponization by 2007, and turned to quasi-peaceful uranium enrichment instead. The NIE achieved its effect by a slight substitution: ‘abandoned’ instead of ‘completed.’

And knowing full well the dimensions of the Iranian military program, the White House played it down for a decade. Today we doubt that they would slap Iran with a ban on its oil and gas exports.

The White House’s move was predicated on a 1990s law which prohibits the government from funding any UN body that admits Palestine as a member state before it arrives at a negotiated settlement with Israel.

So much for Israeli politicians, including Lieberman, who view NATO membership as a security guarantee for Israel.

The Arabs mustered eight votes in the UNSC in favor of Palestinian statehood and are likely to obtain the ninth critical vote from Colombia, which gives them a majority. Besides South Africa, the Palestinians are supported by China, India, Brazil, and Russia—half of the world’s population, plus a billion Muslims in countries that are not members of the UNSC. Israel counts on countries representing barely 5% of the world’s population.

We scored a significant political victory be demonstrating to world leaders that we can manipulate the White House into supporting Israeli objectives no matter what. But PR-wise, the affair was lost: the UNGA displayed as much anti-Israeli attitude as during the Cold War era.

For our part, we believe that de jure recognition of the Palestinian state that has existed de facto for twenty years would not be any more harmful to Israel than the current situation, and might actually relieve us of international pressure in the form of support for stateless Palestinian Arabs.

UN officials claim that the hackers stole a great deal of secret data. But why does the UN conduct secret business at all? The international organization lacks the pretexts of sovereignty and national interest which allow governments to conduct secret diplomacy.