The United Nations marked its 75th anniversary Monday with its chief urging leaders of an increasingly polarized, go-it-alone world to work together and preserve the organization’s most important success since its founding: avoiding a military confrontation between the major global powers. The “Um-Shmum’s” 75 years of bashing Israel while largely ignoring blatant and continuous violations of human rights in other countries went unmentioned. “Um-Shmum” – a derisive nickname for the United Nations was famously coined by then Israeli Defense Minister (and former Prime Minister) David Ben-Gurion in 1955 at a cabinet debate in response to Prime Minister Moshe Sharett’s statement that if it hadn’t been for the UN resolution of 1947, the state of Israel would not have been founded. According to Sharett’s account in his diary, Ben-Gurion shouted: “Not at all! Only the daring of the Jews founded this country, and not some Um-Shmum resolution.” The term became a term of contempt for the United Nations’ biased resolutions against Israel, a tiny democratic country amid a sea of countries guilty of egregious violations against its own citizens. In 1988, Kofi Annan, who served as the UN’s Secretary-General from 1997 to 2006, quoted the term on a visit to the Knesset and coined his own term saying that “in the world that we live in today, without the UN, we will all have klum [nothing].” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres’ appeal for a revival of multilateralism — the foundation of the United Nations — was echoed by leaders of countries large and small, rich and poor. But despite largely positive speeches, it was clear that challenges lie ahead in collaborating to beat back the coronavirus pandemic, end numerous smaller conflicts from the Middle East to Africa, and achieve U.N. goals to eradicate extreme poverty and preserve the environment by a 2030 target. “Today, we have a surplus of multilateral challenges and a deficit of multilateral solutions,” the U.N. chief said, stressing that COVID-19 has “laid bare the world’s fragilities,” which can only be addressed together. “Climate calamity looms, biodiversity is collapsing, poverty is rising, hatred is spreading, geopolitical tensions are escalating, nuclear weapons remain on hair-trigger alert,” Guterres said. Appealing for a new multilateralism that draws on civil society, cities, businesses, local authorities and young people, Guterres said “no one wants a world government — but we must work together to improve world governance.” The United Nations marked its actual 75th anniversary — the charter’s signing in San Francisco on June 26, 1945 — at a scaled-down event. Monday’s mainly virtual official commemoration was a sobering assessment of the state of the world, the impact of the 193-member world body over seven decades and the struggles ahead. Some leaders appeared in native dress and in unusual settings, adding some color to prerecorded speeches. The commemoration was suspended with 58 countries waiting to speak, primarily because many leaders spoke far longer than the three minutes they were allotted. No date was set to hear the remaining speakers. As a sign of the commemoration’s importance, heads of government like Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron spoke. U.S. President Donald Trump was first on the list of 182 speakers, but he didn’t offer remarks. In a snub to the United Nations, the United States instead was represented by its acting deputy U.N. […]

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