Alice Nderitu, Who was UN’s ‘Genocide’ Investigator at the UN, Has Been Let Go

Having worked quietly at the UN on conflicts around the world for the last four years, the celebrated human rights investigator from Kenya, Alice Nderitu, has just learned that her contract as Special Advisor For The Prevention of Genocide will not be renewed. Her crime? She refused to describe the IDF’s actions in Gaza as a “genocide.” More on the redoubtable Ms. Nderitu can be found here: “A suppressed voice for truth from within the United Nations,” by Ben Cohen, FDD, February 7, 2025:

When histories of the war in the Gaza Strip are written—a war triggered by the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023—the name of Alice Nderitu probably won’t garner more than a footnote at best. That’s an enormous shame because Nderitu’s courage in confronting the institutionalized obsession of the United Nations with the Palestinians takes us to the heart of the great issues wrapped up in this conflict—its purpose, the manner in which it has been fought and the manner in which it has been presented to the outside world.

The story of Nderitu’s ordeal as the U.N.’s Special Advisor for the Prevention of Genocide was the subject of an engaging piece by Johanna Berkman published last week by the online magazine Air Mail. Nderitu took over the unpaid position during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. She lasted for nearly four years in the post before U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres decided against renewing her commission last November following a sustained and often abusive campaign directed at Nderitu—a storied human-rights advocate from Kenya—for her refusal to label the fighting in Gaza as a “genocide.”

At the time, Guterres’s decision to effectively sever Nderitu was the subject of a scathing Wall Street Journal editorial that accused the international organization of a “new low” in its efforts to tarnish Israel as the worst offender among its member states, which include such human-rights luminaries as Russia, China and North Korea. But by and large, the scandal passed unnoticed among the chattering classes, despite their tendency to dip their toes into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with agonized appeals on behalf of the “people of Gaza” from time to time. The same was true for the Air Mail piece profiling her; while the Free Press republished it, everyone else pretty much ignored it.

One key reason why was identified by Nderitu herself in her interview with Berkman. For nearly three of the four years of her U.N. tenure, she was incredibly busy but also mostly unnoticed. Her work took her to refugee camps in Bangladesh and Iraq, to the Brazilian interior to monitor the fates of indigenous tribes, and to Chad, where she saw firsthand the impact of the burgeoning ethnic slaughter that has raged, largely outside the media’s view, in neighboring Sudan. “For these other situations,” she said, “nobody seems to bother with what I say.”…

Of course, few were paying attention to all those conflicts, even though some of them, like the Arabs massacring black Africans in the Sudan, certainly deserved the designation of “genocide.” Attention given to those other conflicts, you understand, would take the focus away from the Israeli “war crimes” in Gaza, and that, for the legion of haters of the Jewish state, would never do.

As Nderitu emphasizes, the rush to excoriate Israel is the flipside of the absence of any loudly expressed, ongoing advocacy for populations suffering in conflict zones from Kurdistan to the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s why the U.N. Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization each have a dedicated agenda item to condemn Israel but no other country; why there is a dedicated agency, in the form of UNRWA, for the descendants of Palestinian refugees but no one else; and why U.N headquarters in New York City houses a Division for Palestinian Rights but not the rights of any other beleaguered nation.

The obsession with Israel’s supposed malefactions affects every part of the UN. There are the lopsided votes against the Jewish state at the UN General Assembly. In 2024, the UNGA passed a total of 17 resolutions that singled out the Jewish state, compared to a total of 6 against the rest of the world combined. From 2015 through 2023, the UN General Assembly has adopted 154 resolutions against Israel and 71 against other countries. Israel is the only country, out of 193, to have a special agenda item providing for its condemnation, at both the World Health Organization and the UN Human Rights Council. There is also a Special Rapporteur for Conditions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, a role now filed by Francesca Albanese, an out-an-out antisemite who has compared Israel to the Nazis.