First Trump at the UN!

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2017, pp. 32-33

United Nations Report

Just Like the President-Elect, Trump Cabinet Appointments Send Mixed Messages

By Ian Williams

Ambassador Peter Thomson of Fiji, president of the 71st session of the United Nations General Assembly, addresses a special meeting of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, held in observance of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, Nov. 29, 2016. (U.N. PHOTO/MANUEL ELIAS)

CRYSTAL BALLS DO NOT work well in the United Nations at the best of times. If you want a recipe for chaotic outcomes, then take 193 direct players, 5 of whom have an ace up their sleeve in the form of a veto, dictating to an organization with dozens of relatively autonomous agencies whose heads often apportion their allegiances to the nations who proposed them and those who finance them. And into this, Donald Trump has thrown the Tea Party-backed governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, born Sikh, converted to Methodism, one of whose few foreign policy stands mandates state opposition to BDS efforts.

On the bright side, the new U.N. representative did have the courage to oppose Trump earlier, and to oppose deportation of Muslims, and we can assume that her subcontinental origins will to some extent inoculate her against xenophobia, and perhaps even American exceptionalism. However, quite how this works for future American foreign policy in general, let alone toward the United Nations, is even more of a mystery than before.

The previous pattern was that Democratic presidents included the U.N. ambassador in their cabinet, while Republicans do not. But Donald Trump has promoted Haley to the cabinet. Was this because he was not aware of previous practice, or because he wanted a minority woman in his cabinet? Or was it a bribe to get her to give up her independent position in South Carolina?

Previous U.N. ambassadors have always had to cope with the ghost of Andrew Young, the U.N. envoy fired for meeting informally with the Palestinian representative at the U.N., so even those who privately disagreed with the Lobby’s manipulation of U.S. Middle East policy have gone along with the flow and dutifully—and shamefully—leveled the veto on the mildest criticism of Israel.

It would be difficult to piece together a coherent foreign policy from Trump’s erratic statements on the campaign trail and afterward. From one point of view, his phone conversation with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen was a welcome sign of refusal to be bullied by Beijing—but if it was not part of a considered policy, it was an indication that we have a president-elect who could puckishly start World War III with an ill-considered gesture. And to add to the confusion, it is not clear against whom he would start it!

So, on the one hand, he opined that the Israelis should pay for their U.S. weapons supplies—but on the other, he made the standard pledge of moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. But had anyone explained the intricacies of international law to him? Or, since almost every other candidate made the same pledge, did he, too, have his fingers crossed behind his back when he said it?

Trump’s nominee as defense secretary, Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, has wisely suggested that Israeli policies in the occupied territories are a clear and present danger to U.S. forces in the region—but then wants to step up pressure on Iran, just as Netanyahu and the Lobby ordered.

We are not even sure what Trump’s views on the United Nations are. From some quarters, hostility to the organization is engendered by the member states’ insistence that Israel does not have an automatic pass for breaches of U.N. decisions. Certainly the Democratic Party has been torn for years between supporting the great creation of Roosevelt and Truman and deploring its support for Palestinian rights. Since the Republican/Likud Axis has become so prominent, the GOP has merged its pro-Israel stance with its nativist dislike of foreigners—a blend manifest in Rudy Giuliani, the curmudgeonly ex-mayor of New York who in 1995 ordered PLO leader Yasser Arafat out of a U.N. anniversary banquet.

To some extent Trump has prejudices rather than policies—but he is enough of a businessman to realize that it is often profitable to overlook reflexive aversions. Trump the realtor obviously appreciates the U.N.’s effect on property values in New York City, building one of his most outstandingly tasteless edifices just across the road from U.N. headquarters. Whatever prejudices he and his father had against African-American tenants is clearly not carried over to the many African and Arab diplomats who rent and buy his properties.

So will the policy be neglect, or will he see what other administrations, not least Bill Clinton’s, have: that the U.N. saves a lot of effort compared with being the world’s self-appointed cop? It is really difficult to say, but then that is true of previous regimes. Clinton posed as a liberal internationalist and then issued his Policy Directive 25 that vetoed any expenditure on peacekeeping that did not directly serve self-defined U.S. interests. The victims of Rwanda and Srebrenica were not, we discovered, essential U.S. interests.

In contrast, President Barack Obama amended that directive last year, in a reasoned assessment that asserted, “Multilateral peace operations, particularly United Nations (U.N.) peace operations, will, therefore, continue to be among the primary international tools that we use to address conflict-related crises.”

The crucial question is whether a Trump administration will have anything like a coherent foreign policy—and to what extent it sees the United Nations as helping in fulfilling that.

Using the old Confucian cliché of crisis as opportunity, new U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has a better chance of independence than most—even if the major powers will nominate most of his senior officials. As previously noted (see Nov./Dec. 2016 Washington Report, p. 30), elected unanimously as a former prime minister of an important, if small, power; as head of one of the U.N.’s most called-upon agencies; and even as former president of the Socialist International, he has far more experience and better international connections than Trump—or any of his cabinet members.

Interestingly, Guterres had the support of China for his candidacy, and China has upped its dues payments, so that it is now the next biggest financier, after the U.S., for U.N. operations—and provides more peacekeepers than any other great power. The U.S. might still be the “indispensable power” Madeleine Albright claimed it to be, but it has never been more dispensable than now, as its primacy is increasingly challenged.

ANNEXING U.N. TERRITORY?

Meanwhile, back at the U.N., Israel’s Ambassador Danny Danon has shown his heritage in the settlement movement since he became chairman of the U.N. General Assembly’s Sixth Committee, which deals with legal affairs. He is clearly enjoying himself and has expanded the toehold to annex more and more organizational territory. His latest escapade was to convene a meeting of self-appointed legal experts that included Alan Dershowitz and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America to consider legal action against advocates of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. It appears to be a tendentious extension of the claimed privileges of the chair, but has no legal effect.

However, politically, it surely is time for the Palestinian Mission to convene a U.N. conference on how to give international legal effect to the decisions of the International Criminal Court on the applicability of the Geneva Conventions on Occupied Territories to the Israeli-occupied territories.

On Nov. 29 the U.N. commemorated its Annual Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. Ban Ki-moon has been an articulate defender of international legality, not to mention humanitarian solidarity, in the region, but his statements have rarely been reported, not even in indignation by pro-Israeli press—almost as if they realized that condemning such a mild-mannered and manifestly principled person would only validate his statements. So it is only fitting that as he leaves office we reproduce his remarks:

“Recent years have witnessed two unsuccessful attempts at negotiating a peaceful settlement, three armed conflicts, thousands of dead—the vast majority of them Palestinian civilians—rampant incitement, terror attacks, thousands of rockets and bombs fired at Israel from Gaza, and an expanding, illegal Israeli settlement enterprise that risks undermining Israel’s democratic values and the character of its society.  This year, the number of demolitions of Palestinian houses and other structures by Israeli forces has doubled, compared to 2015. Gaza remains a humanitarian emergency, with two million Palestinians struggling with crumbling infrastructure and a paralyzed economy, and tens of thousands still displaced, awaiting reconstruction of homes destroyed by conflict.”

While it contains the obligatory “balance” so often demanded by U.S. and Israeli representatives, the inescapable truth of who is most to blame emerges clearly from its enumeration of the details. In the General Assembly debate on the resolutions, U.S. representative Richard Erdman came out with the usual worries about “the disproportionate number of one-sided resolutions that had been designed to condemn Israel.” Interestingly, he added, “While the United States consistently opposed every effort to delegitimize Israel at the United Nations, his delegation would also continue to view Israeli settlement activity as illegitimate, corrosive and a threat to a two-state solution.”

Erdman failed, however, to identify how much of Israel Palestine occupied and how many settlements it had built there. Nor did he identify what steps Washington had taken to persuade Israel to give up its corrosive ways, short of stuffing its arsenal with offensive weapons and its treasury with cash.

In fact, he missed a golden opportunity to suggest ways to take the wind out of the sails of the international BDS movement. If the U.S. and U.N. took the action they had against South Africa, then consumers’ boycotting bath salts from the occupied Dead Sea would be totally unnecessary. ◙

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U.N. correspondent Ian Williams’ book UNtold: the Real Story of the United Nations will be published by Just World Books in Spring 2017.

Gaza double standards

United Nations Report

Israel’s Ongoing War on the U.N. Waged With Impunity

By Ian Williams

A U.N. vehicle destroyed in an Israeli strike on Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, July 29, 2014. (MOHAMMED ABED/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

One of Ban Ki-moon’s forgotten achievements just after taking office in 2007 was to secure compensation for the U.N. premises destroyed by Israeli weaponry in Gaza. He is unlikely to get anything this time, however—even though in at least one incident, in which it seems almost certain that Israeli mortar fire landed on the UNRWA school at Beit Hanoun, killing dozens of sheltering refugees, evokes memories and suspicions. Not only was it the fourth UNRWA school that Israel had fired on, it was just the latest in a long chain of incidents, going back to the 1948 assassination of U.N. envoy Count Folke Bernadotte, in which Israelis have targeted U.N. premises and personnel. (See September 1995 Washington Report, p. 83, and the September 2013 issue, p. 30.) Who now remembers Qana in 1996, when the IDF continued its shelling even after being called and told what it was doing? (See July 1996 Washington Report, pp. 6 and 21.) The innocent dead victims find themselves promoted to “human shields.”

The savagery of these attacks defies military logic. Like the Sarajevo marketplace massacre, it is just possible that the motive was undisciplined individual bigotry and that the higher military and political echelons winced at the undiplomatic crassness of their personnel. But in Bosnia it eventually proved too much, and the international community unleashed force against the perpetrators and their protectors.

Looking at the long chain of incidents, even with the vicious, racist and reactionary ministers in the Israeli cabinet, we have the same disturbing paradigm of impunity. The Israeli government will deny rather than condone these incidents of murderous barbarism, but it will blame the victims rather than take action against the perpetrators. In the IDF chain of command and control there is a clear culture of impunity. Even if Beit Hanoun was the product of one or two Israeli soldiers exercising their racist fantasies, they can be confident that their careers will continue untrammeled, and that they might even be heroes to the civilians lounging on deck chairs cheering the assault on Gaza.

While not quite cheering, much of the international community shares complicity in this culture of impunity. Where is the pressure on Israel to stop such incidents, to punish the guilty? At one time, it seemed that the International Criminal Court offered a means to do so. But Washington and its allies are effectively writing an exclusion clause into international law: Israel can do no wrong. We can rightly condemn Slobodan Milosevic or Bashar al-Assad for deeds in Bosnia or Syria, but not Binyamin Netanyahu.

It is wrong to blame the diplomats, who are, after all, men and women sent abroad to lie for the countries. The real Pontius Pilate emulators, washing their hands in the blood of others, are back in their respective capitals. Nowhere has that been seen more than in the last weeks of the Israeli attack on the Gaza ghetto.

To anyone who is not imbued with U.S. mainstream media, soaked as it is in Israeli hasbara and its official spokespeople intoning lying platitudes with straight faces, Israel’s disproportionate use of force in Gaza was already apparent even before its shelling of U.N. shelters. So where to begin?

We could start with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whose effort to win statehood for Palestine is now revealed to be a pointless morale-boosting diversion since he refuses to take the only step that would have given it any significant meaning—accession to the International Criminal Court, which would make crimes committed on Palestinian territory subject to ICC proceedings.

The unity government of Hamas and Fatah—which is, of course, the real proximate cause of IDF operations and crimes in Gaza—de-emphasized the applicability of the treaty to a Palestine that had joined. But of course Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are hostages to Israeli security, waiting for the IDF to pick them up, or off, at will.

Then we can move to Secretary of State John Kerry for his indiscreet remarks on Fox—“Hell of a pinpoint operation”—in which his private candor about IDF operations contrasted so signally with his hypocritical mantras about supporting Israel’s right to self-defense.

Kerry’s office later explained that “his private comments were consistent with his publicly stated view…: Israel has the right to defend itself, including against recent tunnel attacks, but he has encouraged them to not only take steps to prevent civilian casualties, but to take steps to de-escalate and we’re working together to achieve a cease-fire.”

An objective observer might comment that “achieving a cease-fire” could be done most effectively by stopping financial, military and diplomatic support to the country that is refusing it, not to mention the personal motives of payback to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for his repeated insults and nose-tweaking of both President Barack Obama and Kerry.

Human Rights Council Vote

The abdication of ethics continued in July, with the U.S.’ lonely negative vote on the U.N. Human Rights Council resolution calling for an investigation into what was happening in Gaza. But Washington was pretty much first among almost equals in its diplomatic amorality. No less than 17 countries went along to the point of abstention on the resolution. Korea and Japan and a fistful of French neo-colonies joined the EU in approving the sentiments of the resolution, but not daring to put their hands up for it.

The 29 countries supporting it were not all great paragons of human rights protection, but at least they went on record in support of “Ensuring respect for international law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.”

Interesting was Dublin’s statement. Ireland, with a population angry about events in Gaza, hedged its bets in a typical manner. It “fully accepts that the Government of Israel has the right to defend its people, but this right does not negate the rights of others. Any use of military force in self-defense must be in accordance with international humanitarian law, and in particular must be both discriminate and proportionate. In view of the casualty figures, we do not believe that this has been the case.”

But it followed the EU line, which was somewhat tangled in its own right. In effect, the EU is hampered because, short of Israel nuking a European city, members like France and Germany cannot bring themselves to condemn the country, and thus prevent any joint EU criticism. But of course they cannot say, anymore than Kerry can, that Israel is above the law, so they made the excuse that the UNHRC resolution “fails to condemn explicitly the indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israeli civilian areas as well as to recognize Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself.”

This is thinner even than the average fig leaf, since the resolution that was passed declares unequivocally that it “Condemns all violence against civilians wherever it occurs, including the killing of two Israeli civilians as a result of rocket fire, and urges all parties concerned to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law.”

It is true that in this context, the mention of the two dead somewhat accentuates the hundreds dead on the other side, but it is difficult to reconcile the EU lie with the reality.

One hesitates to inflict formal U.N. prose on readers, but the preamble to the Human Rights Council resolution cites the international law that Israel is so patently flouting. It begins:

Guided by the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,

Recalling General Assembly resolution 60/251 of 15 March 2006 and Human Rights Council resolutions 5/1 and 5/2 of 18 June 2007,

Reaffirming the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people and the inadmissibility of the acquisition of land by the use of force, as enshrined in the Charter,

Affirming the applicability of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, in particular the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,

Reaffirming that all High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention are under the obligation to respect and ensure respect for the obligations arising from the said Convention in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and

Reaffirming their obligations under articles 146, 147 and 148 with regard to penal sanctions, grave breaches and responsibilities of the High Contracting Parties,

Gravely concerned at the lack of implementation of the recommendations contained in the report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict of 2009, and convinced that lack of accountability for violations of international law reinforces a culture of impunity, leading to a recurrence of violations and seriously endangering the maintenance of international peace,

Noting that 9 July 2014 marked the tenth anniversary of the adoption of the advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice on the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and that no progress has been made on its implementation, and affirming the urgent need to respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law and international human rights law in this regard,

The resolution calls not only for a new “Goldstone” Commission to investigate what is happening, but calls up Switzerland, the responsible power, to convene a convention of parties to the Geneva Convention to consider Israel’s failure to apply its strictures to the occupied territories—thereby giving Europe and the U.S. the opportunity to show their pusillanimity yet again.

Many critics of the U.N. system rightly condemn the veto as an obstacle to progress, but taken overall, a veto is almost healthy, an honest statement of a position. An abstention is in its own insidious way even more pernicious, since the accompanying statements so often show that the governments concerned accept all of the facts, even the conclusions, but are too invertebrate to record a vote in the face of American and Israeli displeasure.