The word “audacity,” defined by the Cambridge English Dictionary as “courage or confidence of a kind that other people find shocking or rude,” is, as its definition suggests, construed mainly in personal terms, and often, as with Barack Obama’s “the audacity of hope,” in positive ones. But there is another kind of audacity, one that is both less discussed and less amenable to being conceived of in positive terms. This is structural audacity: the ability and willingness of small sets of operators to enter institutions then turn them to their own ends without demonstrable concern for the opinions of the people those institutions are supposed to serve.
Structural audacity is what powerful Jewish supporters of Israel have practiced in America the past forty years. As I have reported for the Libertarian Institute many times, they have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness and ability to turn American defense, policing, finance, technology and education, academic, philanthropic, political, and media institutions to work to the benefit of the “Jewish state” at Americans’ expense.
Yet to some extent these Zionist operators were swimming with the current. All of the institutions they co-opted were at the center or downstream of America’s military-industrial complex, the “merchants of death” President Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned against in 1961, which meant these institutions wanted to be co-opted in exactly the way that Zionists co-opted them. These were institutions, in other words, that made their existence off the practice of war, and after the end of the Cold War in 1991 they were in search of a new playing field. This made them more than willing to be used by influential Zionists to support America’s endless presence in the Middle East and wars in foreign lands to fight Muslim “terror.”
All of this is ugly audacity: the practical politics of voluntary co-option. But to co-opt an institution so that its agenda is 180 degrees the inverse of what it was set up to do without concern for the people it is meant to serve is a rare and perhaps unprecedented form of structural audacity. It is fitting that the person pioneering it is not only Israel’s closest ally but also the most audacious player in world politics today.
The player is Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan, since 2009 the de facto leader and since 2022 the de jure leader of the United Arab Emirates. The target of Mohammed’s audacious co-option is the United Nations: since 1945 the venerable, flawed representation of a commitment by the world’s countries to human rights and international cooperation. The vessel for Mohammed’s co-option is Lana Nusseibeh, the 48-year old Palestinian-Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Affairs of the UAE who served as the UAE’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 2013 to 2024; and who the UAE has recently sponsored as a contender for the position of UN Secretary General.
What might seem to be a side-show matter of internal politicking in a fading institution in a world consumed with trade wars, oil wars, actual wars, and genocide is anything but. It is in fact an act of such structural audacity in an institution of such symbolic weight with such global connections that it shines a clearer, cleaner light on murky depths only rarely glimpsed.
These hidden depths are the strategic operations of a rising duo of neo-colonial operators, Israel and the UAE, which have allowed them to reverse-colonize their own western underwriters. I have written in the past for the Libertarian Institute about Israel’s and the UAE’s unprecedented success bringing their influence back to Britain and America. But the UAE’s play with the United Nations is a step beyond. It is a move by one of the world’s preeminent imperial powers and violators of human rights to take over the most venerable institution representing sovereign nations and human rights.
What investigating the development of the United Nations, the role of Lana Nusseibeh, and the mechanics of the UAE’s co-optive play reveals goes well beyond the play itself. It reveals that Israel and the UAE, with the support of Donald Trump’s White House, are not simply shaping global power to their ends. They are also shaping a narrative that legitimizes this power: making it seem humanitarian, secular, liberal, even progressive. And in this way they are further obscuring from citizens the audacious exercises of unregulated authority being committed against their interests and in their name.
Today, with its finances and influence in tatters after both the second Trump administration’s accession and a genocide live-streamed from Gaza, the United Nations can seem opaque and irrelevant. But the United Nations, seen on its own terms, is a rationally if contradictorily constructed institution which, though deeply and perhaps irredeemably flawed, retains structural influence today. It was created in 1945 as a compromise between nationality and empire: a forum for all nations to debate, compromise, and pass resolutions underwritten financially by the “big five” imperial or quasi-imperial powers of Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and China. This has created opposition from conservatives in America who rightfully believe that the UN’s Security Council is an unwarranted expansion of American empire, and that its General Assembly resolutions are threats to national sovereignty.
It has also created a predictable dynamic of mutual friction within the United Nations itself: one in which the member states of the General Assembly speak on behalf of their own sovereign interests, only to have many of their initiatives go nowhere thanks to the “big five” on the UN Security Council in the interests of empire. The logic behind this friction is that of loyal opposition or, more pejoratively, co-opted dissent, and it is the logic of the “postwar” world in which the UN was created. The universities, media, corporations, and nonprofit organizations which created internationalism’s scaffolding in the late 1940s may have been governed by representatives of empires, mostly WASPs. But they also took care to construct the scaffolding in such a way as to allow outsiders, or potential dissenters to the project such as developing nations, a platform for criticism. Their purpose was twofold: to encourage buy-in to the structures and to keep the structures honest.
This watchdog dynamic played out, imperfectly, at universities where immigrants and people of color made anticolonial and ethnic studies as well as anthropology into significant scholarly forces. It played out more seamlessly at the United Nations, where the concerns of developing nations were regularly broadcast via General Assembly sessions. There was enough perceived legitimacy to this setup that the United Nations became, for many years, the decisive pronouncer on genocide, humanitarian crises, and various other global concerns.
From the 1950s through the 2000s, the decade I was in middle school, United Nations posters were ubiquitous in secondary schools, and UN personnel featured heroically, directly and indirectly, in various American movies about international crises. When the W. Bush administration waged war in Iraq in 2003, it felt the need to make its case to the United Nations, and sent Secretary of State Colin Powell to do so. Even today, the UN retains enough symbolic meaning that political candidates like Darializa Avila Chevalier took the opportunity this year to be arrested and zip-tied in front of the building to raise awareness of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Like elevator music, the UN is ubiquitous and in the background. Like elevator music, some of what it says and does seeps into our heads unawares.
Lana Nussebeih, the UAE’s longtime representative at the United Nations and now its nominee for UN Secretary General, is in some sense a product of this world—and in some sense its exact inverse. She is a scion of a prominent Palestinian family which is also the oldest Muslim family in Jerusalem, with its lineage stretching back to the seventh century. Her grandfather, Anwar Nusseibeh, was an official in the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s who, after 1948 and the creation of Israel, served Jordan’s government as a minister. But both he and his son, Lana Nusseibeh’s uncle the prominent intellectual Sari Nusseibeh, consistently engaged with representatives of Israel on behalf of Palestinians. Lana Nusseibeh, for her part, was instrumental in her role at the UN in delivering significant aid to Gaza after Israel’s incursions following October 7, 2023.
So far, so traditional, as origins stories go. This one is about an aristocratic family with longstanding ties to the land which knows, in the aftermath of catastrophe, how to leverage its contacts and prestige: to make itself a legitimate communicant with the occupying power without reneging on its commitments to Palestinians. It is the story of exactly the type of family, spokespeople for the dispossessed via the institutional mechanisms of the postwar world, whose members would traditionally be considered ideal candidates to lead the United Nations. (In fact, past Secretary Generals like Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan very much fit this bill.)
What throws the wrench in the story is Lana Nusseibeh’s father, Zaki Nusseibeh, and his choice in 1967 to decamp to Abu Dhabi, just then in the process of forming the United Arab Emirates with six other Emirates under Sheikh Mohammed’s father Sheikh Zayed. According to the Middle East magazine Bidoun, Zaki Nusseibeh “became the translator and interpreter for Sheikh Zayed…he quickly became a trusted advisor to the rulers of Abu Dhabi, and he has been at the center of political and cultural life in the country’s largest emirate ever since.”
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