Not for the first time has Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called for the United Nations to replace the United States as the No 1 mediator between the Palestinians and Israelis. In 2014, with peace talks under President Obama and Secretary Kelly floundering, Abbas wanted the UN to replace the US as the leading peace broker between the two sides. But in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s recent announcement that the US was recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, Abbas has a much stronger motive to ditch the US as the premier dealmaker and seek another party for the job.

At least in the UN, the Palestinians would find a party that shows concern over their plight. Since its founding in 1948, the Security Council has adopted over 80 resolutions directly related to the Arab–Israeli conflict, most of them on the side of the Palestinians. In the last five decades, the UN has endorsed several resolutions regarding Jerusalem, including resolutions 465, 476, 478 and 2334 that emphasized that any unilateral measures taken to change the historic or legal status of Jerusalem would be null and void. The UN has also sponsored several peace negotiations between the parties and has maintained a central role in the region, especially by providing support for Palestinian refugees and by providing a platform for Palestinian political claims.

However, in its early years the UN helped create the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The passing of the infamous UN Resolution 181 in November 1947 to partition Palestine was one of the earliest acts of the UN, helping to exacerbate the situation by acting contrary to its own declared principles. Despite the fact that the population of Palestine at the end of 1946 was more than two-thirds Arab and one-third Jewish, and Arabs owned 85 percent of the land compared to only about 5.8 percent owned by Jews, the recommendation of the majority of the members of the UN Special Committee on Palestine was that Palestine should be partitioned into two states, with the majority Arabs surrendering land to the Jews for their state. Under the proposal, 45 percent of the land would be for the Arab state, compared to 55 percent for the Jewish state.

It thus must be recognized that the conflict that still rages today between the Israelis and the Palestinians in no small part is a consequence of the decisions made by UN member states that were contrary to the very principles the organization was ostensibly founded to uphold.

Since then, all resolutions issued by the UN Security Council insisting that Palestinians had a right to self-determination and should not be forcibly removed from their lands were simply ignored by Israel. With the US using its veto power in the Security Council, Israel was shielded from any accountability and provided cover to continue its illegal occupation and crimes against the Palestinian people.

Which is why the claim by US ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley that the US will not allow the UN to “bully” Israel anymore, defies logic. Israel has been allowed to turn the position upside down. It is Israel that does not recognize UN resolutions. It has refused to accept UN resolutions for more than half a century yet no sanctions have been applied against it. Not only did Israel consistently refuse to withdraw from occupied Palestine and comply with UN resolutions to that effect, it systematically established new settler colonies in the territories.

If the US does not trust the UN and the Palestinians do not trust the US, the parties have reached a fork in the road. While Washington will never accept that the UN or any other party supersede it in the negotiations, Abbas at least has judged that the US has not helped solve the issue, past or present. He is instead hoping that the UN, which helped create the problem, will now help fix it.