Alice Wairimu Nderitu did something very few officials who work for the United Nations have done: She approached the subject of Israel with dispassion and professionalism. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she’s now out of a job.
Nderitu is a human-rights advocate and conflict mediator. She was hired in 2020 as the UN special adviser on the prevention of genocide. To her colleagues at the UN and her peers in the NGO world, she had one job: She was the UN special adviser on accusing Israel of genocide. But she did not fulfill that job. So Nderitu’s UN contract was not renewed.
The journalist Johanna Berkman has a worthwhile profile of Nderitu out in which the two talk about how Nderitu’s objectivity cost her the UN special adviser post. It’s also an eye-opening look at the UN ecosystem itself.
Nderitu took the job in 2020 and for three years went unnoticed—because the conflicts she was warning about did not involve Israel. Nderitu “traveled to refugee camps in Bangladesh and Iraq; to Brazil, where the government invited her to assess how the Yanomami and other Indigenous tribes were faring; to Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to assess the extent of genocide denial; and to Chad, to assess the risk to the various populations of Darfur in Sudan,” writes Berkman.
All of that flew under the radar. Then came Oct. 7, 2023 and Hamas’s mass slaughter and sexual torment of Israeli civilians. Nderitu put out a statement condemning it, and the floodgates of harassment—both within and without the United Nations—opened.
Almost immediately, a UN civil servant wrote an email complaining about Nderitu to several top officials, warning that her condemnation of Hamas “might cause reputational risk on the image of the United Nations as an independent neutral impartial body.” He suggested Nderitu rewrite her statement to copy the usual anti-Israel belligerence from UN activists.
Then, of course, came the open letter from “concerned UN staff” pressuring Nderitu to treat Hamas as Israel’s moral equal. On Dec. 9, she was greeted with a Change.org petition that gave the game away: “With the official in charge of genocide prevention taking no action despite public pressure, statements by UN Special Rapporteurs, and thousands of civilians killed, including UN staff and their families, we demand Nderitu’s immediate resignation and for her to be held accountable for her failure to act in response to mass atrocities in Gaza.”
Nderitu, they said, had failed “to fulfill her mandate”—which was, of course, to lend her credibility to the anti-Semitic mob’s blood libels. She’d open her UN email address to find messages like “Filthy zionist rat, you will burn in hell forever for supporting the rape and torture and murder of little kids by your bestial masters.”
The next venue for the harassment campaign against Nderitu was the UN’s press briefing room, where representatives from Saudi and Qatari state outlets trashed Nderitu by name. Yet here again, the phrasing of those posing as journalists is instructive. One question from the Dec. 14, 2023, briefing was this gem:
“Ms. Nderitu has always been very vocal and very active in calling out every little sign she sees around the world that there is genocide may be happening. She spoke out for Darfur recently, even Nagorno-Karabakh — against the hateful rhetoric coming out of that, Nagorno-Karabakh. Why has she been silent on Gaza?”
It’s at this point that one is tempted to feel encouraged by the reporter, who is so close to getting it! He is, in fact, arguably answering his own question. If the genocide specialist is outspoken on some conflicts but not others, what might we learn from this? The obvious answer is: The genocide specialist talks about genocides and does not talk about cases that clearly don’t amount to genocide. That’s why you have an expert on genocide in that position.
The UN ecosystem completely flips out when an official isn’t corrupt. And these open letters and protests, barely six weeks into Israel’s counter-incursion into Gaza, also serve to remind us how badly anti-Israel activists telegraphed their pitches. “Genocide” was the talking point with which they began the war.
Nderitu didn’t understand that she wasn’t being hired to do her job. She was being hired to read a predeveloped script. It’s just that she was too honorable to degrade her life and work for the sole purpose of spreading lies about the Jewish state. So they’ll have to find someone else.