Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1998, Pages 53, 91

United Nations Report

Israel’s Netanyahu Still Maneuvering for Conditions On Israel’s Withdrawal From Lebanon

By Ian Williams

It must have been a refreshingly pleasant experience for the beleaguered Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to find himself among friends, as he said he was when he visited the U.N. in May. After his long and amiable lunch with his “friend,” Kofi Annan, the U.N. “Director General,” as Netanyahu described Annan to reporters, the prime minister contrasted the bad old days when he was Israeli delegate to the U.N. with the present, when it has become a place that offers “fairness and peace” to Israel.

It would have been heartwarming, if it were not that this was the week that Israeli troops had killed half a dozen Palestinians in the territories and Israeli airplanes had killed even more in raids on Lebanon. On the menu for lunch was Lebanon, which once again was good news in a perverse sort of way.

Ambassador Samir Moubarak of Lebanon had not managed to get Israeli behavior in Lebanon on the agenda of the Security Council for some time, but Netanyahu had no such problem. He had come to New York to talk to Kofi Annan about Israel’s decision to accept Resolution 425, which calls for unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Israel. In fact, the resolution called for it a long, long time ago, back in 1984.

Even so, Netanyahu was hardly coming as a penitent sinner. “We added no conditions, no requirement for a peace treaty with Lebanon, although we’d like one—but we simply follow the stipulations of 425,” he said, stressing that “the Israeli cabinet’s acceptance was ‘without conditions.’” However, Netanyahu could not help adding, “under the stipulations contained under this resolution.”

It seems likely that he wants a strengthened UNIFIL peacekeeping force to secure the area after any Israeli withdrawal. The Blue Helmets who are expected to act so supinely in the face of Israeli attacks such as the one on their Qana camp two years ago would almost certainly be expected to turn themselves into multilateral tigers to keep the Hezbollah down and to take the electorally unpopular casualties that the Israeli army is now suffering.

However, the Qana massacre has not been forgotten, although the Israeli delegate accused the Arab group of “flogging a dead horse” over it. This is undoubtedly a more moral position than shelling live refugees, and the Arab and non-aligned group successfully kept the issue alive by pointing out Israel’s failure to pay the $1.8 million costs to UNIFIL of relocating the ravaged base.

That bill was allocated to Israel at last year’s General Assembly after a much under-advertised U.N. report firmly put the blame on the Israeli military for the incident that killed 107 civilians and wounded many more, as well as wounding four Fijian peace-keepers.

Israel’s Zvi Cohen referred to this as “the cynical attempt last year in the Committee to impute responsibility to Israel for the Qana incident.” In fact, he said, the casualties were the by-product of “Offensive military operations against terrorists, who had shamelessly used a UNIFIL outpost as their headquarters.” And yes, Virginia, there is, no doubt a Santa Claus.

Richardson’s Successor

The man currently charged with wielding the U.S.’s lonely vote in support of such double-think is U.S. delegate Bill Richardson, following in a long line of such uncritically supportive votes. He will soon have his mind on other things. He has been tapped to become secretary of energy in Washington, and there is even talk of him being on the vice presidential slate with Gore in 2000.

His replacement, Richard Holbrooke, will find the post constraining. Dealing with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic may well have been good preparation for coping with Netanyahu, but the U.S. and Israeli insistence on sidelining the U.N. on the Middle East will constrain him from any serious attempts to do a Dayton and lock up the participants until they come to an agreement. In this case, of course, there is an agreement, every bit as morally flawed as Dayton, but the problem is how to get Netanyahu to abide by it.

Holbrooke will find that this administration considers that the U.N. is only useful for occasional grandstanding on issues like drugs, or lending an international flavor to current foreign policy, so he will find it difficult to stay in the limelight, for which he has shown such affection. However, the issue of deepest current U.S. interest there is, of course, Iraq. He could make a name for himself with a change of policy there, but would probably have to face down his predecessor and current boss, Madeleine Albright, to do it.

Iraqi Lives vs. Iraqi Weapons

After eight years, the sanctions and their effects on civilians are clearly outweighing any residual fears of Iraqi weapons programs for most countries.

There is no longer a Gulf war coalition, as the double standards over Israel’s non-compliance with U.N. resolutions and the suffering of Iraqi civilians erode the Middle Eastern and European support there had been for Desert Storm. Although Baghdad decries and derides the “Oil for Food” deal, which has just been enhanced yet again, it has moved a long way in the face of strong initial resistance from American diplomats.

In fact, Iraq cannot produce enough oil with its present facilities to meet the allowed quota of oil sales, so the Security Council is authorizing $300 million of the revenue to be used to redevelop the infrastructure. Iraq, of course, denounces this as an expedient way to postpone the end of sanctions, but a lot of hungry Iraqis will no doubt be pleased with the palliative.

Indeed, many diplomats now feel that the lifting of sanctions is closer to possibility than ever before. Following Kofi Annan’s Baghdad deal, and despite much groaning and grumping on both sides, there seem to be signs of genuine rapprochement between the Iraqi negotiators and Richard Butler, the chairman of UNSCOM, the U.N. disarmament commission.

Butler produced what he described as a road-map which would show what the Iraqi side has to do persuade the commission that Iraq has genuinely disarmed and has come clean about its nuclear, chemical and biological warfare programs. Once again, many diplomats are developing mixed feelings. On the one hand, Saddam Hussain’s regime has clearly lied and hidden evidence on every occasion that it felt that it could get away with it. On the other hand, it is difficult, if not impossible, to prove a negative—to show conclusively that something has not been hidden somewhere.

The closer UNSCOM gets to declaring Iraq clean, the more the U.S. will come under pressure to allow sanctions to be lifted. It will need to find a very good excuse to use its veto, and presently it looks as if Baghdad is having one of its rare lucid moments and so is not giving any good excuses.

Of course, no excuses will be necessary—or for that matter acceptable—for the veto the U.S. will probably wield against the resolution Palestine Ambassador Nasser Al-Kidwa is trying to get in the Security Council over recent Israeli settlement activities in East Jerusalem. As usual, there is no great enthusiasm among Security Council members to risk annoying Washington, which has now decided that the territories are “disputed” rather than indisputably occupied as determined by the U.N., with assenting U.S. votes at the time, and international law. Even so, Ambassador Al-Kidwa told the Washington Report, “We’ll have no choice but to move it in a formal way. The Council has to act in a material way over this.” He is right. But it will be very surprising if it does.