Washington Report, December 2005, pages 34-35

United Nations Report

Israel’s Current U.N. Offensive Gets By With a Little Help From Its Enemies

By Ian Williams

Perhaps more than ever before in the past 30 years Israel is on the offensive in the United Nations, helped no end by the stupidity of its enemies. The Iranian president‘s declaration that Israel should be wiped out played right into the hands of the former pariah state, and led to calls for Iran’s expulsion from the United Nations.

While it is unlikely to succeed, it certainly strengthened the hands of those in Israel and the U.S. administration pushing for action against Iran’s nuclear program. The original purpose of the U.N. Charter was to protect member states against aggression, and whatever one may think of Israel’s behavior, it is indisputably a member state—and it is hardly stretching the case to consider wiping out a state a form of aggression!

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s call has also allowed Israel to cloak with international amnesia its own much larger and more advanced nuclear weapons program, which has had neither international inspections nor IAEA discussions at all, let alone Security Council attention.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov admitted shortly afterward that it made it difficult to defend Iran in the Security Council, where the U.S. has put members under very heavy pressure to support action against Iran. Unfortunately, Tehran suffers in Washington from the dual burden of being Israel’s number one target since Iraq fell, and, of course, unforgiven by the U.S. for the 1979 hostage taking following the Islamic Revolution.

It almost seems that a trend is evolving: Presidents with hotlines to heaven making a mess of things.

After Iran, of course, the other target being lined up in the sights of Ariel Sharon and the Bush administration is Syria—which once again seems determined to play into the hands of its enemies. It is a measure of the ineptitude of the regime since Hafez Al-Assad died that some people thought that the “suicide” of Secret Service chief Ghazi Kenaan showed some sophistication—he was only alleged to have shot himself once in the head.

The regime of Bashar Al-Assad seems to have inherited his father’s ruthlessness without his brains. The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri not only was criminal, it was stupid, and threatens to bring down the regime in Damascus. That in itself may be no bad thing—until, as Iraq demonstrates, the question comes of what replaces it.

The obsession with disarming Hezbollah reflects Israeli concerns.

The report of Detlev Mehlis, the U.N.’s special investigator on the Hariri assassination, showed that, despite the opacity of the Syrian regime, the U.N. is as transparent as ever. Leaked draft copies of the report contained the names of suspects that were deleted in the final report, and even timed the edits to the very time Mehlis was talking to Kofi Annan. Mehlis was promptly accused of bowing to pressure from the secretary-general, but the secretary-general’s visitors do not customarily carry their computers with them. It could have been a laptop still set on Beirut time, for example. However, in a region with so many genuinely murky conspiracies afoot, it is hardly surprising that after a while even Newton’s laws begin to look like a sinister plot.

It was common knowledge, and hardly needed a U.N. investigation to establish, that the Syrians and Lebanese secret services who carried out the murder pervaded Lebanon’s society and government. Another deleted paragraph indicates that Hariri might as well have been using a megaphone as a telephone, since it asserts that not only was his phone tapped, but the transcripts were handed over to everyone else the Syrians trusted, from the Lebanese president downward.

The Mehlis investigation has been extended to Dec. 15 to allow him to refine his voluminous material, all of which points eventually across the border to Damascus, but which also shows substantial Lebanese involvement from local supporters and appointees of Syria.

However, it’s almost a déjà vu-all-over again-situation. The U.S. can’t wait for a chance to smack at Syria, and shows signs of unseemly haste at wanting at least sanctions before Mehlis releases the final report, which will show from how high up the Assad regime the orders emanated. The draft resolutions have been tinkered with to stroke the sensibilities of countries that are suspicious about Washington’s rush to take action.

Of course, they have much to be suspicious about. The obsession with disarming Hezbollah reflects Israeli concerns, not Lebanese nor global welfare. While U.S. officials are making reassuring noises about not seeking military action against Syria or Iran, there are many in the administration—not least those who led the country into Iraq—who would love to spread the war across the borders, in a way reminiscent of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.

Debacle Expansion

The constant accusations of Syrian involvement and support for attacks on U.S. troops in Iraq, and even the wild surmises about Iraq’s missing WMDs being across the border in Syria, demonstrate the intentions of at least some in the Bush administration to expand their existing debacle across the region.

The current drift is for sanctions against those individuals named by the Mehlis Commission and the Lebanese as being under suspicion, and for cooperation from Damascus in securing them for questioning. If history is any guide, the language in these resolutions should be parsed very carefully for wording that would allow the U.S. to mount a unilateral attack that purports to be in furtherance of U.N. decisions.

Of course, no one would go too far to condone or defend a regime, or even disclaim able officials of a regime, that murders the prime ministers of neighboring countries. But looking at the state of Iraq, let alone the record of Washington, few would really trust the latter to do the right thing, or even to have the right motives. There is a danger that Security Council members may give more faith and credit to the administration’s bona fides than recent experiences suggest is wise.

Also under attack is UNRWA, the U.N. agency that has fed, housed and educated Palestinian refugees since 1948. The attacks are all the more dangerous for their pretense at being concerned for the refugees’ welfare.

Since 1967—despite frequent and politically expedient attacks on UNRWA, not least by American politicians looking for campaign contributions—Israel has not seriously tried to dismantle the organization. Had it done so, as the occupying power it would have found itself responsible under the Geneva Conventions for feeding, educating and providing medical care to the people under its administration—which would have left that much less for settlement building.

With its exit from Gaza, however, there has been a spate of articles in the pro-Israel press and, more sinisterly, a bill in the House of Representatives to merge UNRWA into the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), chair of the House International Relations Committee’s Middle East and South Asia subcommittee, moved the change in the appropriately eccentric bill that sought to halve U.S. contribution payments to the U.N.

Her position makes her a major recipient of pro-Israel campaign contributions, and an equally staunch supporter of current Israeli government positions.

In a recent article in the New York Jewish weekly Forward, she laid out her case. She also claimed that former UNRWA director Peter Hansen was removed for his comments about the organization’s employees and their political affiliations. That is true, of course, but the Cuban-born legislator is the only senior figure gauche enough to admit it.

Adding that “Not only the United States but also the international community, cannot and must not be complicit in both UNRWA’s repeated incitement of and support for terrorism, and its general policies that only perpetuate the refugee problem,” Ros-Lehtinen called for a reduction in U.S. contributions to the U.N. until it merges UNRWA with UNHCR.

The attack is a strange mixture of naivety and cunning, held together with an avid desire for pro-Israel and anti-U.N. campaign contributions.

Had she checked with the State Department, she would have discovered that not only does the U.N. as such not pay for UNRWA from regular contributions, but that the U.S. is by far the largest of the voluntary contributors that have regularly paid for the organization’s work. For people like her, however, any hit at the U.N. is worth a few more contributions to her political war chest.

Altering International Law

But below the expedient political demagoguery is an attempt to alter international law. When the Refugee Convention was adopted in 1951, it included rigid definitions of a refugee, involving movement over international boundaries. The convention excluded from this restrictive definition people who were already being helped by a U.N. agency, such as UNRWA.

Closing UNRWA would remove refugee status, certainly from Palestinians in the territories, as well as from all those who have received other passports. It would also dissolve UNRWA’s role as the custodian of Palestinian compensation claims.

It would mean that UNRWA’s current clients would be thrust under the care of the battered PA administration, which Ros-Lehtinen and her colleagues regularly attack as corrupt and inefficient. Although  Israel could not find the resources for the last four decades to run these services, she implies that the PA, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, could find the money immediately.

Of course, such a move would cut down the number of refugees that haunt the world’s conscience.

On the other hand, the remainder of the Palestinians, especially in Lebanon, would come under UNHCR, whose work the congresswoman so admires. Perhaps no one has informed her that UNHCR’s mandate includes repatriation first, and resettlement only if that fails. Many of the refugees would welcome repatriation. Would Ros-Lehtinen support that, in the case of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon wanting to return to Israel—or would she be prepared to see green cards issued for them to resettle in Florida?

These are not the best of times to be Arab, in either the U.S. or the U.N.

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.