Mideast Expected to Again Lead the U.N. Agenda

UNITED NATIONS —  The Security Council began its first session of the new year by hearing an impassioned demand that it pay more attention to the Middle East. The preoccupation with Afghanistan threatens to make the Israeli-Palestinian dispute a mere “footnote” in deliberations here, said Syrian Ambassador Mikhail Wehbe.

But if half a century of diplomatic history is any guide, the fears of the Arab bloc’s representative on the council would seem misplaced.

If there is anything that can be confidently predicted about the United Nations in 2002, diplomats say, it is that it will once again devote an extraordinary amount of time, money, documents and oratory to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Already, with a raging controversy over clandestine arms shipments to the Palestinians and continuing gun battles, there are renewed calls for U.N. intervention.

But after hundreds of conferences and resolutions on the Middle East--far more than on any other regional dispute--the U.N. has had frustratingly little to show for its efforts, many officials here concede.

Most frustrated of all are the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel says a majority of member states remain hostile to the very premise of a Jewish state. And the Palestinians complain that despite their many roll call victories here, the U.N. has not brought them closer to their goal of an independent state.

In its last official act of 2001, the General Assembly condemned Israeli occupation of territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and called for an international monitoring mechanism to oversee a cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal. It was a now-familiar ritual: The resolution was vetoed by the United States in the Security Council, where it would have had binding legal force, then passed overwhelmingly in the one-nation, one-vote assembly, where resolutions are not binding.

As usual, the only opposition came from the U.S., Israel and--in one of those enduring U.N. oddities--the Marshall Islands and Micronesia, American protectorates and Israeli aid recipients.

“Any Israeli ambassador knows that his country is more or less completely alone in this so-called family of nations,” said Yehuda Lancry, Israel’s representative at the world body.

For the Palestinians, who acknowledge that last month’s resolution moved them no closer to independence, Israel’s isolation is precisely the point.

“The fact that we don’t have that much to show for it doesn’t make it any less important,” said Nasser Kidwa, the Palestinian representative here. “It is important for us to feel that we are not alone.”

General Assembly to Take Up Mideast Issue

When it reconvenes this week, the General Assembly is certain to pick up the Palestinian cudgel again. In the Security Council, Syria can count on a solid majority of the 15 members to support its insistence on immediate Middle East debates and briefings by U.N. envoys. And Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to return to the region for more hands-on diplomacy, as he has every year.

Some diplomats say the U.N.’s devotion to the Arab-Israeli dispute is wildly disproportionate, given the myriad unresolved conflicts elsewhere in the world, from Kashmir to Colombia to Congo. But others--noting the Middle East dispute’s capacity to inflame a vast region--say the world body should do much more to force a negotiated settlement.

The chief adversaries here insist that there is no personal animus in the conflict. Lancry, in his third year as Israeli representative, says his relationship with Kidwa is “correct, and beyond correct.” The two men say they converse regularly, alternating between Arabic and English, notwithstanding the Israeli Cabinet’s announced severing of ties with the Palestinian Authority.

“I consider him a good professional,” Lancry said. “And he is a man who at a personal level is without hatred.”

Kidwa returns the compliment: “The Israelis have a very reasonable and decent representative here. Whether he really represents [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon is another question.”

Many Israelis would concede that Kidwa has a point. Lancry’s office features a portrait not of Sharon or Foreign Minister Shimon Peres but of David Levy, the past foreign minister who appointed him.

But there is no question as to whom Kidwa represents. Yasser Arafat is his uncle--the Palestinian Authority president’s sister, who lives in Gaza, is Kidwa’s mother--and sent him to what was then the Palestine Liberation Organization’s U.N. office 14 years ago. Trained as a dentist, Kidwa has practiced only diplomacy since.

“He is a brilliant negotiator,” said Nancy Soderberg, who served as a deputy U.S. representative to the U.N. under the Clinton administration.

Yet Soderberg, like many U.S. foreign policy experts, contends that the Palestinian representative’s victories here have been pyrrhic, creating an illusion of progress toward statehood but undermining that cause by alienating Washington and reinforcing Israeli fears.

“The Palestinian attempt to use the Security Council and the General Assembly to score points for their political victimhood doesn’t work,” Soderberg said. “They have been doing it for 40 years, and they will probably keep doing it, but it hasn’t worked yet.”

But the Palestinians have unquestionably succeeded in keeping their cause at the forefront of the U.N. agenda. Their legal status here has improved to the point where “we have everything but the vote,” said Kidwa, who as the “permanent observer from Palestine” enjoys full speaking rights in the General Assembly and other U.N. forums.

Israel, meanwhile, is only now emerging from “international pariah status,” Lancry said.

Blackballed from joining other Middle Eastern nations in the Asian regional caucus here, Israel could not gain a seat on the Security Council or U.N. committees, where its conduct was so often criticized. But two years ago, acceding to pressure from Washington, the Western European group admitted Israel as a member.

Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 also improved its standing here, Lancry noted. The pullback was monitored by U.N. cartographers, and as Israeli forces fought off subsequent cross-border attacks from Hezbollah guerrillas, the world body for the first time in decades sided with Israel in a dispute with an Arab neighbor.

Annan was instrumental in securing this support, said Lancry, calling him “by far, from Israel’s view, the best secretary-general the U.N. has ever had.”

Since the U.N. was founded, the Security Council has passed more than 250 resolutions dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. And the General Assembly’s tally is approaching 1,000. So voluminous is the record of debates, hearings, reports and declarations on the issue that the U.N. has an entire computerized information system--known as UNISPAL--devoted exclusively to “the question of Palestine.”

Palestinian, Israeli Views of United Nations

“The United States and Israel see the U.N. as a kind of virtual universe, but the Palestinians use it as a counterbalancing forum, and they use it brilliantly,” said David Makovsky, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel think tank.

Yet Israel also takes the U.N. seriously: Its very creation as a state was one of the first orders of business when the world body was created, and the U.N.’s original two-state solution for the former British protectorate of Palestine has been endorsed by Israel and Palestinian leaders in the last decade as the ultimate formula for resolving the conflict.

Both sides, moreover, accept in principle that the U.N. is the ultimate adjudicator of the dispute. Israel and Palestinians cite the same Security Council resolutions--242, adopted in 1967, and 338, passed in 1973--as the legal basis for a negotiated settlement, echoing the stated position of the United States and the world body.

Yet 338 is essentially a demand for the implementation of the 1967 resolution--and for more than three decades the Palestinians and Israelis have disagreed not only about what Resolution 242 requires but also about what it says.

In English, the 1967 text--adopted unanimously shortly after the Six-Day War--demanded the “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The resolution did not define precisely what those territories were, and Israel contended then as it does now that the extent, timing and terms of a withdrawal are subject to negotiation.

But in French, an equally official Security Council language, the resolution required withdrawal from “des territoires occupes”--the occupied territories--language that “leaves no room for any ambiguity,” the French ambassador at the time told the council, asserting that it applied to all of Gaza and the West Bank, including the Old City of Jerusalem.

Most council members explicitly endorsed the French interpretation, which the Palestinians have cited since. But the omission in English of a modifying “the” before “territories” was no accident: The British drafters sought to avoid a veto by the U.S., which opposed any resolution that might prematurely turn the pre-1967 armistice line between Israel and its neighbors into a permanent border.

Israel said it was not bound by Resolution 242 in any language. Lancry says arguments over the resolution’s meaning “can only be resolved politically, in negotiations, with everything else.”

Although Lancry expects any future negotiations to be managed by Washington, Kidwa hopes that the U.N. can “internationalize” a Middle East settlement, with European and perhaps Asian, African and Latin American participation as well.

Though they live on Manhattan’s East Side, the two men move in very different worlds, culturally and politically. In New York, where Israeli diplomats have long been a part of local political life, support for Israel is broad and deep. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani made four trips to Israel while in office.

For a Palestinian official, New York seems less welcoming. Kidwa bitterly recalls how Giuliani barred Arafat from city-sponsored diplomatic functions.

In elite American society, Kidwa said, he is a nonentity at best, a suspected “terrorist” at worse. “If we were in Washington, he wouldn’t give me the time of day,” he said, referring to his Israeli counterpart.

“But here,” he says, smiling as he greeted an effusive stream of well-wishers in the U.N. Delegates Lounge, “he has to chase me.”