Israel is destroying the United Nations, and with it, our only venue for an internationally coordinated project of climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Over the last year, Israel has tortured and killed UN workers, accused a UN agency of being a terrorist front, escalated a smear campaign against the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, banned UN Secretary General António Guterres from the country, and attacked a UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon with restricted chemical weapons.

Over the same period, Israeli leaders have waged a rhetorical war against the legitimacy of the UN. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” Eli Cohen, Israel’s energy minister, recently declared the UN a “failed organization.” Shortly after October 7, 2023, the country’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, claimed the body does not have “even one ounce of legitimacy or relevance.” Erdan has since gone a step further, calling for the United States to cut its funding to the UN entirely. The US remains the only major donor that has not restored funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, after false accusations made earlier this year led to a widespread freeze. Last month, Israel upped the ante by banning UNRWA altogether.

Meanwhile, UN resolution after resolution has sought a ceasefire in Gaza, only to be blocked by the US at the Security Council or passed—against US and Israeli opposition—by the General Assembly. The US is almost always joined in these votes by a small handful of what we might glibly call US proxies, frequently including Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Despite Israel owing its existence to the 1947 UN Partition Plan, it has run afoul of and sought to delegitimize international institutions throughout its short history. Some of the headlines we see today appeared almost verbatim in 2017, when the Israel-affiliated organization UN Watch launched a smear campaign against Michael Lynk, the previous Special Rapporteur for Palestine. His successor, Francesca Albanese, now faces similar attacks, part of what Larry Haiven describes as a “wholesale offensive” against the UN itself.

These tactics are not new, but, taken together, they represent an escalation, in part because the US and its allies have not just blocked any kind of intervention, but have joined in the attacks against the UN, backing many of Israel’s most outrageous claims. This is all happening, of course, in the context of a genocide that is unfolding in real time.

Netanyahu, in perhaps the most blatant demonstration of his and Israel’s disregard of the UN, authorized the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah from the UN building in New York just minutes after delivering a speech to the General Assembly.

If, in the face of a genocide being perpetrated and enabled by member states, the UN can’t do more than pass toothless resolutions, then what, exactly, can the body do?

The fact that we are forced to ask this question suggests that we may be witnessing the effective demolition of the world’s most important, albeit flawed, international organization.

I have heard activists argue over the course of the last year that the UN is and has always been an institution that serves primarily to legitimate the US-led world order. The UN is, after all, the institution that implemented the Partition Plan, enabling Israel’s claims to statehood and the Nakba. Yet, despite the UN’s origins in the racist Wilsonian belief in American superiority, it is a mistake, in my view, to discount it entirely.

Throughout the 1960s, a flush of new African member countries of the UN used it to accelerate decolonization, pushing not just for sovereign nationhood but for an entirely new world. For a brief period in its short history, the UN was a key tool in the Global South’s fight for a just future, a struggle that transformed the institution and redefined the principle of self-determination.

That the UN has nearly succumbed to what is in effect a counterrevolution—a new international order defined by unilateralist actions and neoliberal globalization—does not invalidate the UN’s transformative potential, but rather reinforces its importance as a site of struggle in the past, present and future.

Its prospective death, then, has profound implications. The most obvious of these are being felt by Palestinian and Lebanese civilians every day. But the implications for the project of global climate mitigation—and, particularly, any kind of climate justice—are deeply troubling.

I do not mean to imply here that the UN’s climate framework and its annual conference, known as COP, have achieved much in the fight against global warming. Indeed, there is a strong argument that the process has been significantly derailed by capitulation to the fossil fuel industry. Even American environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben, ever the optimist, wrote after COP28 in 2023 that the COP process “is designed less to solve a crisis than to guard the interests of the world’s powers (both political and economic) as they relate to that crisis.”

Indeed, successive COP conferences have done more than greenwash, they have also whitewashed oppressive regimes. COP29, now underway, is no exception. Azerbaijan, this year’s host country, has been accused of genocide in the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Israel has been a key supplier of arms to the Azerbaijani regime, whose assaults on the region over the last decade have killed thousands and spawned a refugee crisis. Incidentally, Azerbaijan supplies 40 percent of Israel’s oil needs.

But the failure of the COP process does not mean that global climate negotiations would be better off without the UN. Climate mitigation and adaptation are fundamentally questions of both global justice and global coordination. The climate crisis is experienced with what Adam Tooze calls a “triple inequality.” First, there is the obvious inequality in culpability. The wealthy countries of the world have contributed far more carbon to the atmosphere than the Global South, both in absolute and per capita terms (though China is increasingly an exception on the former metric).

Second, the Global South is, from a geographic perspective, much more vulnerable to climate change. Most wealthy countries exist in a temperate climate, and while they are susceptible to devastating climate impacts, the scale is entirely different. Indeed, some of the world’s poorest countries are disappearing completely because of sea level rise; others are projected to become uninhabitable due to higher temperatures.

Third, not only are the countries of the Global South more geographically vulnerable, they are also less equipped to pay for adaptation, further widening the gap between how climate change impacts the rich and the poor.

The General Assembly was the venue in which the Global South fought for, and briefly won, reforms that sought a fair integration of recently decolonized countries into the world economy. Today, the climate crisis demands another new international economic order. The ongoing erosion of the UN risks eliminating this important site of struggle.

Even if we put the question of justice aside, though, the importance of the UN and international institutions persists: the most liberal visions for decarbonization still require large-scale technology transfer and financial flows to allow the countries of the Global South to “leapfrog” beyond fossil-fueled development. A recent review found that meeting the Paris goals will require $2 trillion per year to be flowing into the Global South annually by 2030.

Simply put, there will be no decarbonization without international coordination. Unfortunately, Israel and its enablers are in the process of destroying the only framework for international coordination that actually exists.

It is clear that the Security Council needs to be reformed and that future climate agreements need to have binding and enforceable terms. Perhaps the COP process should be abolished entirely. Yet it is difficult to imagine a workable path forward on climate without the UN playing some role, particularly at this moment of heightened geopolitical rivalry and diminishing accountability on the global stage.

To paraphrase Andreas Malm, the destruction of Palestine is, today, the destruction of the UN, and the destruction of the UN carries with it a grave risk of the destruction of life on this planet. The climate movement needs to fight to keep the UN alive at the same time as we demand that it adopt a more robust framework to confront the challenge head-on. Right now, that means opposing genocide and rejecting our government’s complicity in it.

Nick Gottlieb is a climate writer based in northern BC and the author of the newsletter Sacred Headwaters. His work focuses on understanding the power dynamics driving today’s interrelated crises and exploring how they can be overcome. Follow him on Twitter @ngottliebphoto.