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With much of the attention on the Israeli and American elections over the next two weeks, there’s a third race that just got interesting. A possible compromise candidate has emerged to replace outgoing United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres: Lana Nusseibeh, a diplomat from the United Arab Emirates and scion of a prominent Jerusalem Arab family.
Guterres’s term ends on Dec. 31. Costa Rica’s Rebeca Grynspan held the frontrunner spot, but her support has declined recently. The winning candidate will need backing from 10 Security Council countries, but the big five—the U.S., Russia, China, Britain, France—can each veto any candidate. Argentina’s Rafael Grossi is also in the running, among others.
Grynspan now seems unlikely to get the full range of support she’d need. The UAE nominated Nusseibeh yesterday in what might turn out to be a masterstroke of timing.
Nusseibeh isn’t running to sit on her hands. And she’d also be better positioned to actually accomplish something than most secretaries general, who embrace their own uselessness and accept the UN’s corruption from Day One.
Chief among the reasons Nusseibeh is a plausibly decent candidate is her country of origin. The UAE is a signatory to the Abraham Accords and a staunch advocate of restoring sovereignty in a Middle East riven by Iran’s imperial satrapies.
Nusseibeh is, like any potential UN honcho, a lacerating critic of Israel’s stewardship over Judea and Samaria, which the Palestinians call by its modern Jordanian moniker the West Bank. But thanks to the Abraham Accords, she also represents the framework of normalization with and recognition of Israel. That gives her an unusual level of credibility on both sides.
For example, in 2024 Nusseibeh presented an advisory opinion to the International Court of Justice regarding the question of Israel’s compliance with international law. She did not hold back. In Gaza, she told the ICJ, “Israel has imposed a policy of collective punishment against the Palestinian people, in violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Israel has repeatedly issued so-called evacuation orders that in effect seek to transfer Palestinians forcibly, in violation of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” She added: “And while the eyes of the world are trained on its brutal military operation in Gaza, Israel’s violations in the West Bank have intensified. As submitted to the Court, a number of Israeli acts in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, constitute grave breaches under the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
So any suggestion that Nusseibeh would be some kind of hyper-Zionist shill, or whatever else anti-Israel nudniks will accuse her of, can be dismissed out of hand. Her rhetoric on the Palestinians would generally match UN talking points.
Yet her positions on Israel and Iran offer some balance that could give her credibility with the Jewish state and with the U.S. She supports the U.S.-led mission in Gaza and at the same time has worked to get food and other necessities into the strip. And her open condemnation of the Iranian terror proxies would ease the pressure on Israel to allow those proxies to threaten the region.
In the debate over a 2023 UN resolution on Lebanon, Nusseibeh said the UAE “fails to understand the hesitation to name Hezbollah and its group, who are actively undermining UNIFIL’s ability to conduct its mandate within its areas of operation. No amount of accommodation will change the fact that the pursuit of progress in Lebanon through partnership with Hezbollah has only yielded disappointment and misery, not least of all for the people of Lebanon.”
Nusseibeh has been no less tough on the Houthis. She voiced the UAE’s support for Saudi Arabia’s initial military operations in Yemen after the Iran-backed Houthi putsch. And just last month, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, Nusseibeh said: “We have been calling for the management of non-state actors in the region for well over a decade, including when we were part of a coalition in Yemen, and so the attacks of the Houthis [prior to the UNGA] against Saudi Arabia’s stability and sovereignty are an outrage. We strongly condemn them, as we have done consistently. The UN cannot be absent in some of these key core crises of our time.”
In March, Reuters reported that Nusseibeh “offered no criticism of the U.S. or Israel for launching the attack on Iran, and said their military campaign should be viewed separately to what she called Iran’s ‘egregious illegal and unlawful attacks on the Gulf countries and Jordan.’”
It would be an interesting experiment to have a UN secretary-general who has some desire to see actual improvement in the Middle East. Either way, we may just find out if it makes a difference at all who occupies that chair.