Israel, paradoxically, is a state created by the United Nations that, since its foundation in 1948, has never stopped challenging the UN's primacy. But while the history of relations between Israel and the UN is peppered with crises, Israel's ambassador to the UN made an unprecedented provocation on October 30, in New York. In response to UN criticism of Israel's campaign in Gaza, Ambassador Gilad Erdan, a former Likud minister and a loyal follower of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wore the yellow star with which the Nazis branded Jews, calling it a "symbol of pride."

This thinly veiled accusation of anti-Semitism was part of a verbal escalation against the United Nations and Antonio Guterres, its secretary-general, described by Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen, on December 6, as "a danger to world peace" whose actions "constitute support of the Hamas terrorist organization." In addition, Israeli bombs have already killed 134 local UN employees in Gaza as of December 15, an unprecedented toll.

And yet, it was the UN which, through the November 1947 vote of its General Assembly, adopted a partition plan for Palestine, which had then been under British mandate for a quarter of a century. Approved by the Zionist leadership, the plan divided the former Ottoman territory between a Jewish and an Arab state, with the UN continuing to administer an international zone in Jerusalem. The Arab side rejected such a plan, on the grounds that the Jewish population, then only a third of Palestine's inhabitants, would receive 55% of the territory for their state.

Hostilities soon broke out between Jews and Arabs. The conflict changed in nature at the end of the British mandate in May 1948, with the proclamation of the State of Israel, against which the six neighboring Arab states went to war. The UN appointed Folke Bernadotte as mediator. As the Swedish Red Cross's number two, Bernadotte had negotiated with Nazi authorities in February and March 1945 to obtain the rescue of 21,000 prisoners, including 6,500 Jews.

Bernadotte obtained a truce, during which he proposed a settlement to the conflict, based on the internationalization of Jerusalem (in the spirit of the partition plan) and the return of Palestinian refugees (already numbering in the hundreds of thousands). He was assassinated in Jerusalem in September 1948 by an Israeli hit squad from the extremist Lehi group. Two of the murderers were sentenced by Israeli courts to 10 and eight years' imprisonment, but were released shortly afterwards under a general amnesty.

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