After U.N.’s Qana Report, Israel May Sabotage Boutros-Ghali Re-election

by Ian Williams

Even before the Israeli election there were some whiffs of vindictiveness emanating from Jerusalem about Boutros Boutros-Ghali, suggesting that his stand over the Qana shelling would prejudice his re-election prospects when the question of a second term came up later in the year. It is possible that Likud will be even less forgiving. There are several reasons to wish for a replacement for the man who was one of the main architects of the Camp David accord. But this is not one of them. It is worth remembering that neither Israel, the U.S., nor the U.S.S.R. objected to a third term for Kurt Waldheim despite his amnesia over his war record with the Nazis in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front. It was China, feeling that it was time for the Third World to get a look in, which scotched his prospects.

As we reported last time, Boutros-Ghali’s unforgivable sin is that he condemned and deplored the shelling at Qana when the rest of the Security Council went along with the U.S. and dismissed it as just a tragic accident. He resisted pressure to hide the U.N. report that clearly destroyed most of the Israel Defense Forces’ excuses for the killing of over a hundred civilians. An apocryphal story says that when the Israeli representative complained in person that publication of the report would open deep wounds in Israeli society, the exasperated secretary-general retorted undiplomatically that the shelling itself had opened some fairly deep wounds in Qana.

In fact, he did somewhat better on this score than Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who gave a fairly disastrous press conference at the U.N. in which he failed to mention the attacks on Lebanon at all, let alone the various Israeli breaches of the peace process, but seemed to think all was well because President Clinton had been very friendly toward him on his visit to Washington. Of course, Bill Clinton would be friendly to anyone—even Bob Dole—but, in the end, on Middle East matters he does whatever Israel’s government and its American Jewish supporters tell him to do.

There are good reasons to make unkind assumptions about the mercenary basis for much of the president’s policy, but there is little doubt that while he feels the gain of all those campaign contributions, in so far as he is ideologically committed to anything, it is to the principle that Israel is always right.

So, as Arafat basked in Clinton’s undisputed charismatic charm, as ever the White House emissaries were ensuring that whatever happened, the U.N. Security Council would not chastise Israel in word or deed. As always, Israel and the U.S. connived to keep the world organization, with its corpus of legally binding resolutions, out of the Arab-Israel discussions. So it was somewhat ironic that, the very week of the Qana bombing, the U.N. Association of the USA gave its annual U.N. award to the late Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin’s qualifications for this were somewhat questionable.

There has indeed been a change in Israeli attitudes. Before this most recent Labor government the Israeli Mission treated the U.N. as hostile territory. Under Rabin and Clinton, the U.S. mission has, on Israel’s behalf, treated the U.N. as occupied territory.

In mitigation, it has to be said that the political line of the Israeli Mission was probably more accommodating to the Palestinians than that of the U.S. This takes some stretching to qualify Rabin as an outstanding pro-U.N. figure, but there is a logic to the UNA-USA’s nomination regardless of the deceased prime minister’s own merit or otherwise.

In most countries, the U.N. has had a strong constituency among people of liberal, leftish or cosmopolitan opinions. In the USA that constituency is strongly pro-Israeli, and, following the “Zionism is Racism” and similar resolutions, many of those people became at best scornfully indifferent to the world organization, and at worst virulently opposed.

More recently the de facto alliance between pro-Israel liberals and the pro-Israel Jesse Helms-Newt Gingrich wing of the GOP has led eventually to the present hypocritical U.S. stance of hectoring the rest of the world about responsibility and good management while at the same time welshing on two years dues to the U.N. So wooing this ill-suited and unsavory pro-Israel constituency back over is a shrewd move by the friends of the U.N. in the USA.

In accepting the UNA-USA award, Yitzhak Rabin’s widow, Leah, talked eloquently of the changed times and of how in the past there were votes on whether Israel should be recognized, and how most of the world joined in condemnation of the Jewish State. All that added up to one very pragmatic reason why the UNA-USA should have given such an award.

However, the award dinner was held within days of the Qana shelling, and during the Israeli attacks on Lebanon that awoke memories of how Rabin himself had softened up Israeli public opinion for the Oslo accords—by similarly making half a million Lebanese homeless.

It was somewhat ill-timed, and Mrs. Rabin herself spoiled the good impressions she had made in her funeral orations, when she had appeared to be more sincerely committed to peace than her deceased husband. This time she praised the fact that Israel was now no longer an outsider in the U.N., but lamented loudly that “now, people we thought were our friends” were attacking, just like the old days. If it were not for the fact that she was so patently sincere, this would be a prime example of chutzpah.

If you go round shooting up civilians and devastating your neighbors, real friends, unlike Bill Clinton, would surely suggest that you change your behavior patterns if you want to be socially acceptable. However, with the might of the U.S. behind it, an Israeli government is unlikely to heed any such advice from lesser mortals.

While Likud was previously hostile to the United Nations, it is possible that this time it may be less so, since incoming Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was once Israel’s representative to the U.N. He may not like the place, but with his nose for publicity, he is likely to see the opportunities inherent there, not least since frequent trips to the U.S. will be in order to counter the impression among Israelis that the White House was closer to the Labor government than to him. And on his visits, we can expect chutzpah by the bucketful.

One example of such chutzpah is the claim that Israel’s voting record at the U.N. shows it to be an exemplary friend of the U.S. In fact, reading the annual State Department report to Congress on voting practices at the U.N. shows a somewhat different story. Israel did indeed vote with the U.S. on 97 percent of resolutions and on all of the 15 votes cast as important. But it was largely a case of the U.S. supporting Israel, not the other way.

Both voted the same way on the Middle East Peace Process, the Special Committee on Decolonization, Israeli Nuclear Disarmament, Israeli Settlements, and Palestinian Self-Determination. On votes on such measures to condemn Israeli actions, in fact, it was just Israel and the U.S. against the world. So instead of Israel demanding more U.S. aid in return for loyalty at the U.N., it ought to be the other way. Israel should be paying off the U.S. for voting so often in Israel’s favor! That’s logical, but logic and diplomacy seldom march hand in hand.