It's not UNusual
UNreformed and UNrepentant

By Tzvi Fleischer

Abba Eban, Israel’s first ambassador to the United Nations, once declared that the Arab-Muslim Bloc in the UN General Assembly could get a majority for a resolution declaring the earth to be flat. Last month, the lobby succeeded in doing something very close to that for the nth time, and did it with a majority of 131 to 3. That was the vote by which the General Assembly passed a resolution in Emergency Special Session which condemns Israel for building the Har Homa housing project in Jerusalem, with all such building described as illegal and implied to be a violation of Israeli-Palestinian agreement, though in fact it is neither.

Furthermore, there was a clear hint that economic sanctions against Israel should be the next step, with Israel ordered to supply members with "information about goods produced or manufactured in the illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory." Of course, such outrageous behaviour by the UN General assembly is nothing new. The UN General Assembly, at Arab and Soviet instigation, used to make it an annual ritual to pass scores of anti-Israel resolutions couched in the most extreme terms possible. These abated somewhat following the Oslo peace accords. Other problems for Israel at the UN continued. To this day, Israel cannot join any of the regional groupings which control all nominations for UN bodies. As a result, Israel can never be nominated to take part in the UN Security Council or other important Committees or positions within the UN.

Further, the various discriminatory and one-sided UN committees set up over the years, The Special Committee to Investigate Israelis Practices in the Occupied Territories, the Division on Palestinian Rights of the UN Secretariat, and most notoriously, The Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, continue to operate and spew out anti-Israel propaganda.

What is most upsetting about the current vote is not so much that it happened, but that support for it was so overwhelming. Virtually all of the EU, barring only Germany, supported the resolution. So did most Latin American countries. Egypt, with which Israel has had a peace treaty for 18 years now, co-sponsored the resolution. Even in the bad old days, most of these nations would have abstained. Eleven nations actually did in this case. One was Russia, a pleasant change from the old Cold War days.

Reassuringly, another was Australia. Officially, Australia’s policy on the Israeli-Arab dispute is one of even-handedness, and in this context, the abstention on this latest resolution seems reasonable. Yet, in the latest annual General Assembly debate on the Middle East, which concluded last December, Australia voted in favour of 10 resolutions critical of Israel, and abstained on four others. Australia voted against none of them.

Since the UN General Assembly never debates resolutions critical of Palestinian or Arab behaviour in the Arab-Israel conflict, even when terrorist atrocities are committed, when the Palestinians violate accords signed with Israel, or in the face of human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority against its own people, there is no opportunity for Canberra to use its UN votes to criticise both sides of the Middle Eastern conflict without fear or favour. However, even given that only anti-Israel resolutions are likely to appear, it is not unreasonable to argue that a truly even-handed observer might feel that specific measures are justified or useful, and vote in favour of them. However, when specific resolutions are unhelpful and excessive, as many of them appear to be, it is difficult to understand why this same even-handed observer cannot bring itself to vote against them. Yet abstention is the best Israel can hope for.

Some might argue that these UN votes are of little importance and that UN General Assembly resolutions on the Middle East remains essentially only a tool for propaganda. After all, its decisions are only "advisory" and have no legal force, according to the UN Charter.

However, this is short-sighted. In the Middle East peace process, if the UN General Assembly is not a part of the solution, it is part of the problem. The international community needs to be supporting the peace process, by offering aid and support for the parties, by monitoring and helping to guarantee the sanctity of the agreements signed, by possibly providing neutral observers or other services that the parties may want or need as security measures.

The UN cannot do this today, because as long as it remains a one-sided tool for Arab propaganda, Israelis will not trust it to be part of this effort.

Israel is called on to make sacrifices and to take security risks for peace. Israelis will be less likely to agree to do so as long as the international community, represented by the UN General Assembly, remains so thoroughly in the pocket of the Arab-Muslim Lobby. It is today inconceivable, even after a final peace, that the UN would ever even vote to condemn an aggressive Arab attack on Israel, a renewal of bloody suicide bombings by Palestinian extremists, or a blatant violation of a signed treaty by an Arab party. At the same time, Israel’s Arab peace partners may see the passing of UN resolutions as an alternative to the only actual road to peace with any possibility of success, namely direct negotiations between the parties.

For all these reasons, the UN does matter. And for all these reasons, those who truly want to see progress toward a final peace, and this should include the Israeli government, Australia, and the EC, should be doing everything in their power to prevent a return to the UN’s destructive bad old days. There would surely be bitter irony in the transformation of the UN, founded to bring peace, into one agent of its destruction in the Middle East.