Israeli think tank funds anti-UN lobbying
Misgav Institute paid Mercury Public Affairs to push Congress and the White House toward full US withdrawal from the UN system.
The agencies that feed Gaza’s children, investigate Israeli conduct at the UN Human Rights Council and keep Palestinian statehood on the Security Council’s agenda are the actual target of a Washington influence operation now sitting in the public record. A Foreign Agents Registration Act filing made public this week shows an Israeli think tank paying Israeli think tank lobbyists to persuade Congress and the Trump administration that the United States should leave the UN altogether.
The filing names the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy, a right-wing Israeli think tank, as the client, and Mercury Public Affairs, one of Washington’s largest lobbying firms, as its hired agent. Haaretz first reported the disclosure on 13 August. Unlike most stories about the Israeli think tank’s lobbyists in Washington, this one comes with a paper trail: a signed contract, a fee, and a list of the offices its authors walked into.
Israeli think tank lobbyists on their Washington run The contract ran one month, to 24 July, for $5,000. In that window Mercury circulated a Misgav report titled “From UN Bureaucracy to American Global Leadership” among lawmakers and administration staff, and arranged roughly five meetings where the report’s co-author, Misgav executive director Asher Fredman, presented its findings in person. The itinerary covered the House and Senate foreign affairs, armed services and appropriations committees, the National Security Council, the State Department, the US Mission to the UN and the White House budget office. Nine days after the contract closed, Fredman was sworn in before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee to testify at a hearing on “Abraham Accords 2.0.”
The report itself was co-written with Gilad Erdan, Israel’s UN ambassador from 2020 to 2024, a diplomat whose tenure was built almost entirely around discrediting the same institution he is now urging Washington to quit. Erdan tore up a UN Human Rights Council report at the Security Council podium, wore a yellow star to make his case that criticism of Israel amounted to persecution, and spent years pressing the case that UNRWA taught children hatred and sheltered militants. The report he and Fredman wrote argues that “nowhere are the UN’s politicization and double standards clearer than in its treatment of Israel,” and that the US should abandon the organisation for institutions built from scratch to serve American interests. That is Erdan and Fredman’s claim, not an established fact, and it sits awkwardly against the ICJ rulings and UN human rights findings it is designed to wave away.
None of this started with Misgav. Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2026 withdrawing the US from 66 international bodies, from the World Health Organization, which the US formally left on 22 January, to the IPCC and Education Cannot Wait. UNESCO’s exit is due to complete in December. That order followed 2025 moves to pull the US out of the UN Human Rights Council and cut all funding to UNRWA, the agency Erdan had spent his ambassadorship trying to discredit. A standing bill already sits in Congress, the Restoring American Sovereignty Act, which would go further still: full US withdrawal from the UN, a ban on American troops serving under UN command, and the end of diplomatic immunity for UN staff. The Misgav campaign did not invent the idea of leaving the UN. It bought a Washington lobbying firm to push a fight the administration had already started, and a bill that was already sitting in committee, over the line.
That context is also the honest answer to the obvious objection: $5,000 for a month’s work is a rounding error, and it would be wrong to read a single small filing as proof of capture. But the Misgav contract is not the whole story, it is one visible thread in a much larger one. Research from the Quincy Institute puts Israel’s public diplomacy spending since 2023 at more than $1bn worldwide, including over $100m in disclosed FARA-registered US influence work, on pace to make Israel the largest single FARA filer in the United States this year. Misgav’s own funding is opaque: roughly 7 million shekels, about $2.3m, came in through anonymous donors funnelled via two US nonprofits in 2024 and 2025. A small, disclosed fee bought direct meetings with the National Security Council and the appropriations committees that fund the US government’s UN dues. That is what an influence campaign looks like when it is working as intended: cheap, targeted, and legal.
Who wins if Washington walks
If the campaign succeeds, the winners are easy to name. The Israeli right loses the forum where it has faced Human Rights Council resolutions, ICJ proceedings and Palestinian statehood votes, and gains a US absent from the table that funds and legitimises all three. US isolationists in Congress gain a foreign-funded amplifier for a bill that has gone nowhere in previous sessions. The losers are the people the UN system was built to protect: Palestinians who depend on UNRWA for food, schooling and medical care now that US funding has already stopped; Global South populations losing WHO, UNESCO and IPCC-linked programmes; UN peacekeeping missions that rely on US funding and, under the pending bill, US personnel.
Britain has its own stake here that nobody in Whitehall has yet said out loud. As a permanent Security Council member and major UN funder already cutting its own aid budget to 0.3% of GNI by 2027, the UK would be one of the states left to fill the gap a US walkout would leave, in money, in diplomatic weight, and in whatever is left of the mechanisms that hold any state, including Israel, to account. The lobbying contract cost $5,000. The bill for what it is trying to buy will be paid by people who were never in the room.
