Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2008, pages 20-21

United Nations Report

Tails Wagging Dogs, Dogs Barking

By Ian Williams

	Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dan Gillerman (AFP photo/Stan Honda.)

TORTURE APOLOGIST Alan Dershowitz wrote a book on Chutzpah. Any later edition should have a special chapter on Israeli Ambassador to the U.N. Dan Gillerman, who has often treated the international organization as if it were occupied territory rather than the legal authority of Greater Jerusalem under the partition plan that gave Israel its legal existence.

Gillerman’s latest outburst was to call President Jimmy Carter, Nobel Peace Laureate, “an enemy of Israel”—which one supposes that the architect of the original Camp David Agreement could live with—and a “bigot.” The Israeli diplomat said the ex-president “went to the region with soiled hands and came back with bloody hands after shaking the hand of Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas.”

Compared with some of his Likudnik predecessors who simply punched their clock at the mission and hoped the organization would go away, Gillerman has actually done the U.N. the honor of taking it seriously. Indeed, he learned a lesson from the Palestinians, and recently began peppering the Security Council with letters demanding action for every Qassam missile attack into Israel.

There is an interesting contrast with the envoy of Libya, a temporary member of the Security Council, who was immediately condemned as “disruptive” because he derailed a statement condemning the killings of Yeshiva students in Jerusalem. Tripoli wanted to include in the statement a condemnation of Israeli incursions into Gaza, which had killed over 120 Palestinians, many of them civilians. Of course, the U.S. will veto any statement condemning any Israeli action whatsoever, so this blocked the statement, which by tradition must be passed by consensus.

In April Tripoli’s deputy permanent representative to the U.N.Ibrahim Dabbashi compounded Libya’s sins by comparing the situation in Gaza with Nazi concentration camps.

Ironically, Libya has justified Washington’s acceptance of its membership in other respects, by supporting resolutions against Iran, presumably because of the bad relations between Libya and the Shi’i over the 1978 disappearance of Lebanese Shi’i Ayatollah Imam Mussa al-Sadr.

For once, the worm turned and the State Department actually protested to Israel about Gillerman’s comments on Carter, but given the intense political atmosphere of the primary debates, it is odd that the issue did not become a firestorm. Even the Democratic contenders keep a safe distance from their former president.

One cannot avoid comparing the media furor over Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s remarks, also at the U.N., about President G.W. Bush and wonder why there was not a patriotic firestorm about an upstart client state envoy, bloated with U.S. tax dollars, insulting a former American head of state. Where are the sense-of-Congress resolutions demanding a retraction of the insults and a recall of the ambassador? Can you im­agine the reaction if a U.S. envoy to Israel—or a presidential candidate—had used that term about the several Israeli ex-prime ministers who deeply and truly deserve it?

In fact, there was more adverse reaction in Israel itself, from the likes of Yossi Berlin, than there was in Washington, where the main candidates were too busy trying to distance themselves from Carter. Barack Obama, under profound Lobby suspicion because, of all the candidates, he promises the most rational foreign policy, had to denounce contact with Hamas twice as vigorously, and “let go” Robert Malley from his team of advisers for admitting that he had had contact with Hamas.

In any sane polity, there would be profound respect for the views of a president who engineered the only durable Arab-Israeli peace deal at Camp David, one that has now lasted over 30 years.

Condoleezza Rice, representing the administration that brought the world the Iraq debacle and has earned the lowest-ever standing at home and abroad (in particular in the Middle East), saw fit to lecture Carter for talking to Hamas despite State Department instructions. Carter denied getting any such warnings, but whom are you going to believe: the administration that invented Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or the ex-president who wears his principles on his sleeve?

With all this talk of “terrorists,” perhaps we should remember that Carter’s triumph at Camp David involved his talking to terrorists. He negotiated with Menachem Begin, the former leader of the terrorist group that had negotiated with Hitler’s emissaries; assassinated Lord Moyne, the chief allied emissary in the region; massacred Arab civilians at Deir Yassin; and blown up Jews, Brits and Arabs with equal-opportunity ruthlessness at the King David Hotel. Peace often involves talking to unsavory people. That was a lesson obvious even to the first U.N. envoy, Count Folke Bernadotte—himself assassinated by Likud’s political ancestors, who now want the organization he represented to condemn their regional opponents.

The other accusation against Carter was that he used the term “apartheid” when talking about the settlements. No matter that Israeli commentators have also used the term, nor that those who should know—South Africans like Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu—also have done so, with their global halos undimmed. Indeed, even the South Africans never had segregated roads, a refinement that had to wait for the Israeli occupation; and when they established bantustans they did not send murder squads into or drop bombs on them.

Carter did not even mention the extensive Israeli collaboration with the apartheid regime—on nuclear weapons, fighter planes and less bellicose forms of sanctions evasion, or indeed the occupation’s quantitative leap beyond the old South African regime: racially separate roads.

Carter returned with indications that the Hamas leadership was prepared to buy into the only peace plan that has the support of considerable numbers of Israelis and of Arabs, a two-state solution based on the 1967 boundaries. Immediately, the usual suspects rushed to trash this. Hamas must not only recognize the reality of Israel’s existence, but its “right” to exist. It is like asking American Indian tribes to accept the morality of manifest destiny before they could run their own reservations.

Interestingly, no one has asked Israeli government ministers to declare their unequivocal acceptance of the Palestinian state that has been promised for so long by the rest of the world. However, reciprocity apart, no one should doubt that those who condemn Carter, dismiss the Hamas offer and refuse to talk to them, do not want peace. In fact, Israel’s response to the ceasefire offer—the murder of a Hamas leader and members of his family—really summed it up.

The policy of isolating Hamas is looking more and more dubious, as even the European Union envoys in the region are questioning the efficacy of a policy that leaves Hamas stronger while impoverishing and embittering the mass of Palestinians.

At the beginning of May, the so-called Quartet met in London, amid increasing signs of quiet exasperation from some of the major parties. Originally, it could be excused as a way of interpolating the United Nations and international law into the diplomatic discussions. However, under American pressure—which was reinforced rather than resisted by the EU as Blair dragged the Europeans toward a more pro-Israeli posture—and in the face of increasing Russian ambivalence, the Quartet, as former U.N. Envoy Alvaro de Soto pointed out last year, has become a fig leaf for U.S. policy.

Even so, at the London meeting, the parties could not hide the Israeli announcements of settlement building, nor its game of musical barricades, in which it shifts around minor roadblocks while keeping those most damaging to normal life. Since what Israel is doing is in clear violation of international law, its commitments under the so-called roadmap, and its promises to Rice and Bush, it should not be surprising that the likes of Blair and Rice complain about it.

Along with the condemnations of  the Qassam rockets, the settlements, roadblocks and siege of Gaza did get a mention, and one can note an increasing strength of condemnation of Israeli behavior from Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon as he is exposed to the full dissimulation its government promises.

In the meantime, the U.N.’s presence on the Quartet covers the tears in the “roadmap” and hides the dead-ends and roadblocks the Israeli side has very clearly marked on it. The only viable solution is one based on U.N. resolutions, but that is the last thing that the successors of Bernadotte’s assassins want.

Ian Williams, a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations, is working on a book about U.N.-Haters in the U.S., and has a blog at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>. His last book was Rum: A Social and Sociable History of the Real Spirit of 1776.