Court shares UN anti-Israel bias

By Jeff Robbins
July 14, 2004
Boston Globe
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YEARS AGO, before I went down to Washington to serve a stint as counsel to a US Senate committee, a friend of mine passed on a warning he had received from an old Washington hand before he went to work on Capitol Hill. Remember one thing, kid, the Washington veteran told my friend. Things ain't all on the level down there.
Later, as a US delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission during the Clinton administration, it was readily observable that the warning that things ain't all on the level there applied to the United Nations in numerous respects, none more obvious than when the UN passed judgment on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Despite the record of Arab efforts to obliterate Israel that predated Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and that had no relationship to that occupation, and despite the fact that Israel came to occupy those territories only in defending itself from a war initiated by her Arab neighbors for the purpose of annihilating Israel altogether, UN bodies can be counted upon to lay the blame for the conflict on Israel, whatever the issue, whatever the context.
This is so despite the disturbing evidence -- from the events preceding the 1967 war to the Arab spurning of peace with Israel after that war to the Palestinian rejection of an independent Palestinian state on virtually all of the occupied territory when offered in exchange for peace in 2000 -- that the conflict is not soluble unless and until the Arab world, including the Palestinian leadership, decides that it is genuinely willing to permit Israel to live in peace.
It is fairly clear by now that the organs of the United Nations are dominated by governments that desire to see Israel disappear and that on matters involving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are often supported by countries that desire to curry favor with them. This is an unfortunate fact, but it is a fact nonetheless: Anyone looking for fairness when it comes to UN votes on that conflict would do well to remember that things ain't all on the level there.
One was reminded of that wisdom when news came last week of the long-expected International Court decision condemning Israel for having begun construction of a fence in 2002 in order to stop the campaign of murder of Israeli civilians launched by Palestinians two years earlier. Issued by judges appointed by the UN General Assembly, the result was foreordained the moment the court accepted the Palestinians' challenge to the fence while simultaneously refusing to consider the Palestinian campaign of targeting Israeli civilians that had brought about the decision to construct the fence in the first place.
Indeed, the court's decision was written as though the events that had led the Israeli government to decide it had no alternative to constructing a fence had never occurred. Since 2000, the Palestinian leadership has unleashed a premeditated campaign aimed at murdering and maiming Israeli civilians, thereby terrorizing an entire Israeli civilian population, in order to achieve political ends. In March 2002 alone some 130 Israelis were murdered -- the proportional equivalent of 6,000 Americans, or twice the number of innocent victims murdered on Sept. 11.
This campaign of straightforward terror has been called for, paid for, facilitated, protected, praised, and encouraged by the Palestinian leadership. Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have concluded that these deliberate attacks on civilians constitute crimes against humanity and war crimes -- in short, the most egregious forms of human rights violations. Predictably, the UN has remained largely silent about them.
When the Israelis pleaded with the Palestinian leadership to stop the murder of its citizens, it refused to do so. Confronted with the Palestinian refusal to stop the deliberate murder of Israeli civilians and the international community's silence on the subject, the Israelis had a choice: to continue to hope vainly that the Palestinian leadership would have a change of heart or to take steps to defend its civilians. They chose the latter, through a security fence that, whatever tragic hardships it imposes on innocent Palestinians, offers the Palestinian leadership a choice of its own: to either stop the terror and see the fence come down or continue the killings and see the fence completed.
The whitewashing of Palestinian human rights violations aimed at Israeli civilians represented by the International Court's decision will surprise no one familiar with the UN's record of looking the other way at the victimization of the Israeli population through Palestinian terror. In his statement condemning the decision, Senator John Kerry stated succinctly what by now should be obvious to fair-minded observers: Israel's fence, he said, is a legitimate response to terror that only exists in response to the wave of terror attacks against Israel.
This would seem self-evident except in places like the UN, where all too frequently Orwellian meets Kafkaesque and where, when it comes to Israel, things ain't on the level and show little sign of improving.
Jeff Robbins, who served as a US delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, is an attorney in Boston.