Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 2009, pages 12-13, 35
United Nations Report
No U.S. Veto for Israel, Just an Abstention, On Security Council Resolution on Gaza
By Ian Williams
SECURITY COUNCIL Resolution 1860, calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, was passed nem con (without dissent) the first week in January, with the U.S. alone abstaining from a text that Condoleezza Rice had worked hard to craft. Press reports claim that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had called the White House to secure the abstention.
Hitherto, the Bush administration had been calling for “a” cease-fire, but had made it plain that what it meant by it was of the nature of Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass: when he used a word, it meant just what he meant it to mean, neither more nor less. Doubtless scalded by the hostile global reaction to Tony Blair and George W. Bush’s opposition to a cease-fire in Lebanon two years earlier, this time their idea of a “durable” cease-fire actually meant the eradication of Hamas from the strip.
When, predictably, this goal proved unrealizable—and when, even more predictably, the civilian casualties mounted—there was a pause for thought. The Europeans who had initially nodded blindly in support of Israel’s “right to defend itself” grew more and more restless, not least as the Israeli media blackout failed to filter out the images of dismembered mothers and children from the screens and newspapers.
Then there was the political damage. Türkiye, Israel’s strategic partner in the region, and in many ways a far more useful ally to Washington than the Jewish State, called for immediate Israeli withdrawal. The Jordanian ambassador to Tel Aviv was withdrawn, and by some accounts Hosni Mubarak also made panicked calls to Bush, as his initial hope that Israel would sort out Hamas ended with his role as gatekeeper of the Gaza Ghetto becoming more and more untenable at home and abroad.
Despite the usual insouciance of Israel to foreign public opinion, the government had mounted a no-holds-barred campaign across the globe to prepare world public opinion for the onslaught. Marshaled by former U.N. Ambassador Dan Gillerman, we heard on radio stations and in editorial pages across the world variations on the same theme from a mass choir of Israeli representatives and local sympathizers: if you were being rocketed from suburb A, x miles or kilometers away, what would you do?
Faced with an actual U.N.-administered school turned into a charnel house by Israeli fire, the shootings at U.N. relief convoys, and other examples of Israeli moderation, amazingly, across the world, the public seems to have replied that they would not go and kill the women, children and other civilians who lived there.
At the U.N., faced with Washington’s initial obduracy blocking action in the Security Council, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann had risen to the occasion. At the request of Malaysia and other non-aligned members, he called a special emergency session of the General Assembly under the Uniting For Peace formula originally pioneered by the U.S. to bypass the Soviet veto during the Korean War.
This may well have been a contributory factor in the U.S. decision to accept a Security Council resolution, as there would certainly have been the usual overwhelming majority—the rest of world versus the U.S., Israel and a dependent atoll or two—and the U.S. would in effect have been forced to give implicit endorsement to the school massacres by voting against a cease-fire.
However, since if there is any rationality for the assault on Gaza, it is about rallying Israeli public opinion for Livni and Barak at the next election, it was extremely important for them that the U.S. not actively support the resolution calling for a cease-fire. Israelis may not care much about foreign opinion as a general principle, but they know that their prosperity and security depends on keeping the U.S. behind them.
Olmert’s phone call seems to have secured that by cutting the feet from under Rice—and the results were obvious. A mere Security Council resolution, unsupported by the U.S., is considered optional advice, to be readily ignored by Israeli leaders, who promptly celebrated the passing of Resolution 1860 with 30 new air raids and messages of defiance.
The Israeli recklessness about international law and the U.N., as epitomized in the school massacre that helped bring about the resolution, could be taken as a final farewell salute to the honeymoon between Ban Ki-moon and Israel.
Ban came into office with somewhat limited appreciation of the Middle East, and seemed to take much of his attitude second-hand from Washington. But his own deep sense of ethics and growing experience of Israeli duplicity and obduracy could be plotted on the rising curve of indignation in his public statements. Israel has been provided with the exact coordinates of all U.N. agency installations in the Strip—so are those who fired the shots incompetent, ruthless, or undisciplined and vindictive?
There is a morbid circularity in this. When Boutros Boutros Ghali took office as U.N. secretary-general, he was reviled by much of the Arab world as the architect of the original Camp David accords, which they regarded as treachery. He left as their hero after Israel shelled the U.N. compound at Qana in Lebanon, killing over a hundred civilians who had taken shelter there.
Famously, when the Israeli ambassador came to ask for the suppression of the U.N.’s report on the incident because it would “open deep wounds in Israel,” Boutros Ghali retorted that they could not match the wounds inflicted on the Lebanese who were shelled.
Ironically, Boutros Ghali’s successor, Kofi Annan, who was accused of trying to soften the report in Israel’s favor and did much to bring the Jewish state into the U.N. mainstream, left office in 2006 with a similar problem: the day-long shelling of the U.N. compound at Khiam and the killing of four U.N. peacekeepers, despite long hours of messages from local UNIFIL commanders, and even high-level messages from the U.N. HQ directly to Israel.
There is a pattern here. Firstly, the regular gruesome pre-election blood sacrifice to prove that Israeli politicians like Ehud Barak are hairy-chested and macho enough to be elected. (The Qana massacre took place just prior to an earlier Israeli election in which then-acting Prime Minister Shimon Peres hoped actually to be elected to that office.) The IDF personnel involved are either criminally culpable or incompetent. In either case, however, they can be confident they will escape with impunity—an impunity that increases with each shooting incident in the territories. IDF spokespeople will refer to alleged “terrorist” activity near the sites, as they did in Gaza, and tut tut about how the nasty Arab terrorists use human shields.
Interestingly, this does not apply when the IDF sets up machine gun nests on the top of U.N. schools, as they have done in the past, or on the top of apartment blocks, as they most recently have done.
The IDF, of course, always behaves as if it is shocked, shocked, that wild firing into the most densely populated territory in the world produces civilian casualties.
But now let us compare international reactions. A Serb mortar shell into the Sarajevo marketplace in 1995 led to much-belated NATO and U.N. intervention against the perpetrators. In the case of Gaza, however, the U.S. that called for that action has—as in 2006 in Lebanon—resisted almost unanimous international calls for a cease-fire. Washington now is belatedly converted to the idea—albeit hedged around with enough qualifications to keep the blood flowing into Gaza’s already overflowing sewers a little longer.
A Fireman’s Ladder for Israel
When the U.S. does move, it will almost certainly be, as it was regarding Lebanon, to use the U.N. Security Council as a fireman’s ladder to let Israel get down gracefully from the gory pole it has once again mounted. Is it too much to hope that the perpetrators will appear before an international court?
Even more cogently, is there any hope that Barack Obama will end his silence and put some truth in the rumors about change on which he campaigned? In the Jan. 5 Washington Post, John Bolton, the former unconfirmed U.S. envoy to the United Nations, advocated a “three-state solution” to the Palestinian problem. This “solution” involved retroceding Gaza to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan because the Palestinian state has manifestly failed.
A perennial cutter of Gordian knots, Bolton usually misses the complexity of the turns—and the identity of the knot-tiers. In this case, he missed the rather obvious point that the Palestinian Authority’s ailments are connected to Israel’s refusal to allow a viable and contiguous state to exist and its constant undermining of whatever party the Palestinian people elect, first Fatah and now Hamas. In fact, Bolton does not go far enough. Following his line of “reasoning,” Israel should be retroceded to Britain as a mandate and then quickly turned over to the United States.
The Obama administration is not likely to pick up Bolton’s advice to dissolve the Palestinian state. In the current policy vacuum, however, Obama should be ready for a serious rethink of U.S. policy—and that rethink should begin with Israel. Everything else he says about multilateralism or respect for international institutions and law turns into ashes while the U.S. gives a free pass to scofflaw Israel.
Obama’s Window of Opportunity
This U.S.-Israeli relationship gives President Obama, despite his distressing silence on the Gaza conflict, a unique window of opportunity. Domestically, he garnered the votes of almost 80 percent of American Jews, despite a furious campaign from Republican and Likudnik die-hard organizations questioning Obama’s attachment to the Zionist project and Israel’s defense.
Despite his kowtowing to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) during the primaries, Obama won even more support from American Muslims than he did from Jews.
Obama shouldn’t listen to conservative Jewish organizations, who outshout the silent majority of American Jews who abide by their traditional liberal and humanitarian instincts. The overwhelming majority of American Jews voted for Obama, and the emergence of voices like J Street offers an opportunity for a new president who owes the “Israel Lobby” nothing.
If Obama wants to be a real friend to Israel, and to support international law, he has to let the Israeli government know that its actions are not consequence-free. There is both a principled and a pragmatic constituency that he can address in Israel itself. Until now the Israeli electorate has worked on the principle that whatever happens, the United States will provide support. If the government needs replacements for expended cluster bombs, the United States will airlift them in. If the U.N., EU and other international actors criticize Israel’s military actions, Washington will send the aid check as always. This uncritical support of Israel must change.
Obama should not let the immediate crisis in Gaza deflect from the root problem. Israeli leaders have a profound ambivalence toward the peace process, to which they officially subscribe even as they continue to build settlements in the West Bank. The United States must push Israel toward greater engagement with and less ambivalence toward a peace settlement. Nor can the United States, let alone the EU, continue to ostracize any leadership the Palestinians (or for that matter the Lebanese) choose that Israel demonizes as terrorists.
On the carrot side, Obama should promise full security guarantees to Israel within the internationally accepted borders based on the pre-June 1967 war lines.
Since he is being bipartisan, the new president should take up where George Bush Sr. and James Baker left off almost two decades ago. Any Israeli spending on settlement building should be matched by equivalent reductions in U.S. aid, and the U.S. should join in condemnation at the U.N. Obama should also implement existing U.S. law by reminding the Israelis that American weaponry is intended for defensive purposes and that any used in attacks beyond its borders will not be replaced.
This would be a major step—a change the rest of the world could believe in—toward restoring respect for the U.S. in the community of nations. It would strengthen those who want to enforce international law on rogue states and regimes—and, who knows, by sending a signal to the Israeli electorate, it may even offer Israel a peaceful and secure future by removing it from the list of scofflaw states.
Given the cast of mind of many leading Democrats, such a rethink of U.S.-Israel relations is sure to be controversial. But early and speedy action before Obama starts campaigning for re-election should produce results. And backing a durable peace would be the best way of supporting Israel in the end.
Indeed, a word from Obama now on the desirability of Israel abiding by U.N. Security Council Resolution 1860 would give it the excuse it desperately needs to extricate itself out of the hole it has dug in Gaza, while redounding to his credit globally.
Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations and has a blog at <www.deadlinepundit.blogspot.com>.
