I know that this is hard to believe, and it’s absolutely ludicrous, but nevertheless true: Tiny and much-besmirched Israel is the 31st highest dues-paying country – out of 192 member countries – at the UN!

Israel pays over $40 million a year in membership fees to the United Nations, which is more than any Arab or Islamic country, and much more than any of the Third World (and some European) countries who spend a tremendous amount of the UN’s time and budget bashing Israel.

This outrageous and never-before-reported fact was recently revealed at a conference in Israel by Meirav Eilon Shahar, Director of UN Political Affairs in the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. People in the audience gasped and then guffawed when they heard her mention this.

Lest you think that Israel is expected to pay especially high dues because of the cost of UN peacekeeping on its borders, I called Mrs. Eilon Shahar to check it out. Nope. The Israeli bill has nothing to do with UNIFIL or UNRWA or UNDOF, etc. In fact, most of the 140,000 UN peacekeepers – troops, policemen and observers – are in Haiti, Darfur, Sudan, Congo, Chad and the like; nowhere related to Israel.

For its money, Israel gets a tremendous amount of UN “love.” Some 20 General Assembly resolutions routinely pass condemning Israel. Three special UN entities with enormous bureaucracies and budgets continue their dedicated work on behalf of the Palestinian cause (the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories, the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, and the Division for Palestinian Rights within the UN Secretariat – which alone has a sixteen-member staff).

The UN Human Rights Council continues to fund the viciously anti-Israel Flotilla and Goldstone follow-up committees that it established this year, along with a special rapporteur on Israel’s “crimes,” and it habitually devotes most of its time to criticizing Israel (33 of 40 resolutions since its establishment in 2006, and 7 out of 10 emergency debates).

So as the annual General Assembly of the United Nations again readies itself to ritually hammer Israel, this is the situation: Israel will cover about 0.4 percent of the UN’s budget, which is more than 160 nations pay, and in return get the lion’s share of the UN’s collected umbrage, ire, censure, condemnation, demonization and vilification.

A good deal, huh?!