United Nations for Beginners

Ian Williams. Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1995, 154 pp. (paper) List: $9.95; AET: $6.95.

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

The first volume in the “Beginners Documentary Comic Book” series I ever looked into was entitled Arabs and Israel for Beginners and written by Ron David. I picked it up not because it featured a cartoon of a nearly naked Yasser Arafat wearing nothing but his keffiyeh headdress and a strategically placed holster, but because it was the closest book to a temperamental fax machine which I did not trust to send a news story unsupervised. Long after the story had been transmitted, however, I still stood there reading with awe and fascination the book I had started so casually. It described with words, photographs and irreverent cartoons the entire dispute, from the birth of Zionism to the birth of the peace process, accurately, humorously and, wonder of wonders, objectively. Unfortunately someone else already had spoken for the review. Had I reviewed it, however, I would not have spared the superlatives.

Now I can use those superlatives in describing Ian William’s deceptively easy-to-read and light-hearted volume on the United Nations in the same series. This “for beginners” series also includes such diverse but nevertheless serious subjects as Judaism, “the Jewish Holocaust,” Plato, Nietzsche, Zen, and Sex and Babies. I can’t imagine, but mean to find out, how the publishers have prepared a “comic book” on the Holocaust. I’m not sure I’m ready, and therefore won’t try to find out, what is contained in their Sex for Beginners. But The United Nations for Beginners is useful and instructive. It also is an irreverent romp through all the pompous arcania that has attended the birth, growth and, hopefully, temporary decline of this last best hope of humankind which, the book points out, is situated on an 18-acre sovereign enclave within the United States sited on land mostly provided by John D. Rockefeller which formerly was occupied by slaughterhouses.

For those who, like this reviewer, think excessively illustrated books both demonstrate and contribute to the “dumbing down” of America, a caution: In the case of this book, we are wrong.

I confess, nevertheless, that I read it not because I admire every ironic word the author writes in his “United Nations Report” in each issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs (he freelances for more than 40 publications worldwide), and not because I know that his iconoclastic weekly columns on the United Nations for the now defunct New York Observer resulted in the banning of that newspaper from the U.N. premises. (The U.N. Secretariat staff couldn’t ban author Ian Williams himself because his peers in the U.N. Correspondents’ Association had elected him their president.)

In fact I chose to review the book after asking another magazine editor, who happens to be my daughter, how she managed to find time to read the books she sometimes reviews for the five bimonthly magazines on which she does midwifery. “Choose books with lots of pictures and not too much text,” she advised. “Send the longer books to free-lancers.”

Thus when I saw The United Nations for Beginners I knew it was for me, even though I expected to learn little I didn’t already know from a format that seemed to consist of about one-third impudent cartoons, one-third text, and one-third jokes, anecdotes, factoids and aphorisms.

(Sample joke: A visitor asks a U.N. guide, “How many people work here?” Answers the guide, “Oh, about half.”) (Sample anecdote: the U.N.’s second secretary-general, U Thant of Burma, was an avid believer in astrology. That meant that long before Nancy Reagan’s astrologer took over the setting of important times and dates for events on the calendar of the president of the world’s only remaining superpower, astrologers also were helping chart the course of the august successor organization to the League of Nations.) (Sample factoids: In 1968, as Western newspapers began carrying graphic reports of torture by the Savak, Iran’s secret police, U Thant accepted an invitation from the Shah of Iran to open an International Conference on Human Rights in Iran’s capital. And, in 1970, less than a decade before the Shah’s ouster by his outraged subjects, his twin sister was elected without opposition to the Chair of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights.) (Sample aphorism: U.N. Middle East peace negotiator Ralph Bunche, who drafted training manuals for American troops going to North Africa in World War II and wrote most of the U.N. Charter sections dealing with colonization and trusteeship, once told a U.S. State Department colleague: “A black man like me, who has a sense of humor, can survive; a black man like Paul Robeson, who doesn’t have a sense of humor, takes to wine, women, song, and communism.”)

In fact, while reading the book in an unhurried evening, I learned much that I didn’t know but should have known about the United Nations itself. I also found it a valuable refresher and reference on many of the problems that have engaged the U.N. over the years, and still do. Among Middle East-related problems it describes are Cyprus, Bosnia and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Curiously, however, the book omits the Kashmir problem, which already has displaced the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as the most likely flashpoint for an international nuclear exchange.

It deals bluntly and objectively, however, with the half-century of Israeli-Arab conflict, issue by issue and war by war.

Like the earlier Ron David book in this series, Ian Williams tells the story as simply and forthrightly as he deals with it in his journalistic columns. He notes that the 70 American vetoes in the U.N. Security Council are second only to the 116 vetoes of the former U.S.S.R. and its Russian successor (Britain has 30, France 18, China 3) because of U.S. determination to protect Israel from U.N. censure for its violations of the U.N. Charter, which prohibits the acquisition of territory by war.

Discussing the events of 1947-1948, only three years after the creation of the United Nations in San Francisco at the height of World War II, Williams describes how the 1947 U.N. partition plan “left huge Arab populations in the Jewish state,” how neither side accepted the General Assembly decision that the U.N. Trusteeship Council would administer Jerusalem, how U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden “was assassinated by [Yitzhak] Shamir’s party in Jerusalem,” and how, as a condition of its membership in the U.N., Israel pledged to accept all previous U.N. resolutions including resolution 194, which mandated that the Palestinian refugees “should be allowed to return or, if they wanted, to be compensated.”

Williams notes that “peacekeeping in the modern sense was invented…when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt in 1956. For once, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. agreed with each other. All three aggressors had to get out. It was one of the last times that they agreed and certainly the last time that the U.S. took a strong stand against an Israeli attack.” He also notes that “[U.S. President Dwight D.] Eisenhower had threatened to cut U.S. financial support from Britain and France so they reluctantly decided not to object to the U.N. Emergency Force as it was called,” and the members of that force adopted blue helmets and berets to distinguish themselves from the British, French and Israeli invaders whose uniforms resembled some of theirs.

(The British and French withdrew promptly, but Williams does not go on to report that the Israelis only withdrew in early 1957 after Eisenhower also threatened to withdraw the tax exemption that enabled U.S. Jews to deduct donations to Israeli charities from their income taxes exactly as if the donations had been made to tax-exempt American charities. Thirty-nine years later, that exemption for nearly a billion dollars in annual private donations to Israel still stands, and still costs the U.S. Treasury hundreds of millions of dollars every year.)

Williams is even blunter in describing the origin of the next Middle East war when “in 1967 the Israelis attacked Egypt and Syria, while claiming that they had been attacked. Their version predominates.” He reports that early in 1967 the Soviets falsely informed Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser that there were 12 Israeli divisions massed on the Syrian border, prompting Nasser to ask U Thant to remove the UNEF force that would block Egyptian forces from going to Syria’s assistance in case of an Israeli attack, and that Israel refused to allow that force, displaced from Egyptian territory, to be stationed on Israel’s side of the border.

Williams continues: “The U.N.’s role became the traditional one of scapegoat. The Americans, unable to restrain Israel or reassure Egypt, blamed U Thant. When the Israeli attack started on 5 June, 14 remaining UNEF soldiers were killed, Israel occupied the Golan Heights, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Sinai peninsula right up to the Suez Canal. And this time there was no Eisenhower in the White House prepared to tell them to quit, either directly or through the United Nations.”

Williams explains why the English-language version of U.N. Security Council Resolution 242 calls upon Israel to withdraw from “territories occupied” in the 1967 war in exchange for Arab acknowledgment of Israel’s right to live within secure and recognized boundaries, while the French-language version calls for Israeli withdrawal from “the territories occupied” in 1967—and the problems this inconsistency has posed for peacemakers ever since.

His “pull no punches” style continues in his explanation of the rescinding of the “Zionism is Racism” resolution adopted in 1975 by the U.N. General Assembly because it concluded that “Zionism was based upon the exclusive claim of one group of people.” Williams writes: “In December 1991, George Bush faced election problems from American Jews over his tough stand against Israeli Prime Minister Shamir. Bush had opposed U.S. aid money being used to build settlements in the occupied territories, so he twisted elbows around the world and had the resolution repealed by 111 to 28. The Israeli delegation didn’t care either way. They stayed away from the assembly and from Bush’s speech, which was, after all, aimed at American political contributors, not them.”

Undoubtedly Williams, a Welshman who worked in the British trade union movement before he took up journalism, has his biases. They manifest themselves mostly in a tendency to deal with the British at least as irreverently as he deals with American, French, Russian and U.N. officials. His slang is a bit more British Isles than North American, and he plays inside jokes on the readers by switching from American to British spelling and back again as he describes which U.N. agencies use which spelling system—depending apparently upon where they are headquartered.

While his publishers have given him free rein on the politics of his book, they have served him badly when it comes to proofreading, as attested by a grammatical error and a typo on the back cover, at least seven typos or misuses of words in the text, and an apparently missing passage between pages 110 and 111. All of these are correctable in future editions, of which this reviewer hopes there will be many.

Who—besides Washington Report readers who will delight in seeing in print objective accounts of the modern history of the Middle East—will benefit from reading these terse, punchy, fast-paced, ironic and accurate portraits of the peacemakers, those who help and hinder them, and the standing problems with which they must deal?

First, of course, are those American conspiracy theorists who believe that invasions of “black helicopters” presage the imposition of “world government” by conspirators at U.N. headquarters. This book makes it clear that if any such action were contemplated, the Michigan Militia alone would be more than a match for the conspirators.

More important potential beneficiaries are young Americans who may also be unaware of why the U.N. is incapable of imposing itself on any major country like the United States. Any of the five permanent Security Council members—China, France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.—can veto a resolution of the Security Council. Since the veto-vulnerable Security Council is the only part of the U.N. that can pass binding resolutions, the U.N. really has no power apart from that conferred upon it by its members.

So forget the black helicopters. Before parents and grandparents seize on this low-cost paperback as the gift-giving solution for students below the college level, however, it’s best to order a copy for themselves. They may be less amused than college-age recipients will be at some of the book’s illustrations and languages.

Nevertheless, in addition to an attitude and a sense of humor about its subject, the book provides an index. Therefore, of works with which this reviewer is familiar, it’s the least formidable and the most entertaining introduction to and reference work about a nearly 52-year-old institution long ago described by former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Henry Cabot Lodge in words that still apply: “This organization is created to prevent you from going to hell. It isn’t created to take you to heaven.”