Outside the United Nations building in New York stands a statue of a muscular man beating his sword into a plowshare. It was a gift from the Soviet Union that, as the UN website states, “symbolizes man’s desire to put an end to war and transform tools of destruction into tools to benefit mankind.” The motif recalls a passage from the book of Isaiah: “[A]nd they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (Isaiah 2:4).

That the gift came from an atheistic regime that persecuted religious believers makes this statue an irony. But it is a fitting symbol of the United Nations, one of the world’s greatest ironies.

President John F. Kennedy called it the world’s “last, best hope” for peace, but the UN’s track record since its inception shows that it has failed, as its founding Charter promises, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” and “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights.”

It has failed to stop wars that have claimed millions of lives since the last world war ended in 1945. It did not stop the United States and the Soviet Union, two of its chief architects, almost going to war three years later over Berlin. Its 1994 mission to Rwanda famously failed to protect an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 Rwandans from slaughter in a genocide; when peacekeepers fled “safe zones,” their occupants were massacred. It failed to stop North Korea from gaining nuclear weapons despite its International Atomic Energy Agency supposedly gaining access to monitor denuclearization in 1994. The UN continues to sit on its hands as crises in Ukraine, Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere erupt and fester.

Herbert W. Armstrong, editor in chief of the Trumpet’s predecessor magazine, the Plain Truth, attended the inaugural United Nations conference in 1945.

“In the plenary sessions of the conference we hear beautiful oratory enunciating lofty aims of altruism and world peace to be printed in newspapers throughout the world for public consumption,” he wrote at the time. “But the real sessions are behind locked doors of committee council chambers. And there the savage battle for national interests rages fiercely.”

“Already,” he continued, “I see the clouds of World War iii gathering at this conference. I saw it first as it was injected indirectly into every press conference. We learn of it in private talks with delegates in hotel lobbies. The nations can have peace—if they want it. But they don’t want it. They want to gain at the expense of others.”

Many examples show how the UN has failed. But arguably the biggest of these is the Israel-Hamas war. In this case, through its United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (unrwa), the UN played a massive and active part in creating the crisis. How did this happen?

Billions

Founded in 1949, unrwa is one of the UN’s largest programs. It was established for refugees in the aftermath of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence; unrwa counts their descendants as refugees. Today roughly 6 million people in various countries qualify for their services.

unrwa operates all over the Levant. In Gaza, more than 13,000 staff members run roughly 300 schools, clinics, facilities and financial programs. unrwa states that it has educated more than 286,000 students in 183 schools and received an average of 3.4 million patient visits to its 22 health-care facilities every year. That is far more than Gaza’s prewar population of roughly 2 million.

Like the terrorists hiding in its intricate network of tunnels, the logistical and financial network that supports Hamas has largely operated underground. The UN—with its respectability compared to, say, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—has been able to provide generous support quite openly. From 2014 to 2020, the UN spent roughly $4.5 billion in Gaza. By comparison, Qatar—a wealthy Gulf state that supports Hamas to the point of providing haven for its leaders immediately after they committed the atrocities of October 7—over the even longer span between 2012 and 2021, provided only $1.3 billion.

The UN also supplies Hamas an important benefit that few other sponsors could: legitimate-looking facilities to actively use for terrorist and paramilitary purposes.

Human Shields

Hamas uses unrwa facilities to store weapons. In one well-reported example from 2014, unrwa reported a cache of 20 rockets in one of its schools. This was during a major conflict with Israel. unrwa contacted “the authorities”—Hamas—to dispose of them. The rockets then went missing.

As Israel progressed in its ground invasion of Gaza in late 2023, military spokesman Jonathan Conricus claimed the Israel Defense Forces (idf) found “Boy Scout camps that have rocket launchers in them, rocket launchers next to children’s playgrounds, rocket launchers and ammunition and military facilities within school compounds, and the false systematic abuse of hospitals and ambulances by Hamas” (cbs News, Nov. 8, 2023). Some of these were UN facilities. “Every unrwa school we entered had Hamas weapons in it,” Conricus told the New York Sun. “Each one was a place for Hamas to hide in and fight from” (January 24).

If Israel strikes any of these facilities, Hamas can frame Israel as intentionally targeting civilians. In other words, Hamas is literally using its own people—its own children—as human shields. The United Nations is obviously aware of this. By failing to resist or even report these things, by working with Hamas, and by providing billions to Palestinians in Gaza, it has kept Hamas in power.

Hamas even converted unrwa Gaza headquarters into a paramilitary facility. In 2014, the parking lot began to sink. “No one talked about what was causing the collapse,” a former unrwa official told the Wall Street Journal, “but everyone knew” (February 2). In February, the idf invited journalists to examine the now-abandoned headquarters in Gaza City. They found what the Wall Street Journal called “a warren of tunnels and subterranean chambers [that] snaked for about a half-mile beneath UN and other buildings in the area” (February 10). Computer servers and other evidence suggests this compound was an intelligence-gathering facility.

Gaza’s children are worth more to Hamas than as mere human shields, however. After all, the next generation of jihadists has to come from somewhere. And unrwa has become a vital supplier for Hamas’s recruitment initiatives.

2 + 2 = Jihad

Hamas has used schools not only for storing weapons but also for motivating the next generation to use them for jihad and terror.

The nongovernmental organizations UN Watch and the Institute for Monitoring Peace and Cultural Tolerance in School Education reported in March 2023 that “unrwa deliberately and systematically” supports terrorism and anti-Semitism in its schools. Geography lessons show maps of the “State of Palestine” as encompassing all of the Holy Land. Teachers portray terrorists convicted of killing Israeli civilians as examples to follow.

Notice these selections from educational material encouraging elementary schoolchildren to become jihadists:

“The enemy is despicable, Palestine is ours. The departure of the occupier from our land is inevitable. We shall oppose the enemy’s tanks with blood and flesh.” —Tel al-Hawa Middle School, poem recited in a seventh-grade Arabic language lesson

“1) What is the most precious thing in life and why? The most precious thing in one’s life is the homeland. 2) Why does one sacrifice that which is precious and dear to him for the sake of his homeland? Because it is the most precious thing in life. Nothing is more precious or lofty than it, and one derives his identity from it. … 6) Why does one sacrifice himself for the homeland? So that he would nourish the homeland with his blood, which is the most precious thing he has.” —Asma Girls’ Middle School B, sixth-grade Arabic lesson

“The punishment of he who neglects jihad is that Allah curses him, blinds his eyesight, and deafens his hearing.” —Gaza Middle School for Girls B, ninth-grade Islamic lesson

The unrwa knows that its schools push violent propaganda on impressionable elementary schoolchildren who don’t know any better. Those children grow up conditioned—by the United Nations—to become terrorists. After all, the jihadists who massacred defenseless people and entire families on Oct. 7, 2023, learned their hatred.

But should it be surprising that unrwa students become terrorists when their own employees engage in terrorism?

Sponsoring Terrorism

According to an Israeli intelligence dossier given to media in January, at least 12 unrwa employees had connections with the October 7 massacre. The dossier identified six unrwa workers as among the wave of terrorists who killed 1,200 people on October 7. Two helped kidnap Israelis, and two others were tracked to Hamas’s execution zones for Israeli civilians. Some assisted with organizing the logistics of the attack ahead of time. Six of the unrwa employees implicated were primary-school teachers. Israeli intelligence estimates roughly 10 percent of unrwa’s Gazan staff have membership or some other affiliation with either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad, another Gazan terror group.

The victors of World War ii founded the United Nations to stop wars and other horrific atrocities, such as those of October 7. The UN’s mission was to punish aggressors and to enforce peace. But in this case, the UN has been sponsoring and equipping Hamas for war.

The United Nations was founded to prevent catastrophes like the Holocaust from happening again. October 7 was its own small holocaust. The UN holds a massive responsibility for building up Hamas to commit that atrocity. It has betrayed the purpose for its existence.

Instead of Isaiah 2:4, a better verse summarizing the UN’s role is found in the same book: “The way of peace they know not, and there is no justice in their paths; they have made their roads crooked, no one who goes in them knows peace” (Isaiah 59:8; Revised Standard Version).

The Way of Peace

In his 1966 booklet The Wonderful World Tomorrow—What It Will Be Like, Mr. Armstrong reflected on where the UN had come since 1945. His verdict: “[I]t has failed. The United Nations has no power over the nations. It has no power to settle disputes, stop wars, or prevent wars. The so-called United Nations are not united. This effort has degenerated into a sounding board for Communist propaganda. Man has failed his last chance!”

Since 1966, the UN has degenerated into something far worse than a “sounding board for Communist propaganda.” It actively sponsored the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. It has regressed from being a failure to being a farce to being a sponsor of terror.

What does this mean for the world? If the best solution man could invent to prevent a Holocaust ends up starting one, does that mean peace is unattainable? Is the status quo of war and bloodshed an inevitability? Should we accept October 7 as normal?

How can Isaiah 2:4’s imagery of mankind beating their swords into plowshares become reality? Man, through the UN and other ways, has tried his own means. And he has failed every time—because he ignores the fundamental causes leading to war in the first place.

A clue to what causes genuine peace appears in the preceding two verses: “And it shall come to pass in the last days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it. And many people shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; and he will teach us of his ways, and we will walk in his paths: for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (verses 2-3).

It is only by turning to God in repentance and walking in His ways—a change in human nature—that real peace comes.

God is a God of peace (John 14:27). He created mankind to build the same character that He has (Genesis 1:26). God calls peacemakers His children (Matthew 5:9). Real peace is a blessing that ultimately comes from Him (Psalm 29:11).

“Utopia? Why not?” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “Why should it be an imaginary or impossible pipe-dream? There is a cause for today’s world chaos and threat of human extinction. That cause will be supplanted by that which will bring a utopia that is real, that is successfully functioning! …

“We shall never have utopia on Earth until human nature is changed. But you say—‘Man can’t change human nature.’ Oh, but God can! And that’s precisely what the living Christ is going to do, when He returns to rule all nations of the Earth” (ibid).

The same prophecies of swords beaten into plowshares show how this vision will be realized. It will not come because of the United Nations. The Gaza war is the biggest demonstration yet of the UN’s failure at its own mission. But peace will come. It is as sure as the rising of tomorrow’s sun.