Let me start out with a quote from a speech delivered last Wednesday in Jerusalem by the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice:
“The UN must do more, much more, to live up to the brave ideals of its founding—and its member states must once and for all replace anti-Israel vitriol with a recognition of Israel’s legitimacy and right to exist in peace and security.”
Susan Rice has been at the UN for about nine months. She has discovered what so many of us who have represented the United States at the UN have discovered in the past: the anti-Israel vitriol that is very deliberately injected into a good many UN operations. This anti-Israel vitriol is closely intertwined with anti-American vitriol and, furthermore, with old-fashioned antisemitism as well.
That one does not have to be Jewish to make that discovery was a fact that was first brought home to me in the spring of 1981 when I visited the then U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Jeane Kirkpatrick. She had been at the UN for just a few months. In a truly agitated tone she said to me: “Dick, I think another Holocaust is possible. I am in a cesspool of antisemitism here. They think that because my name is Kirkpatrick they can talk freely to me. You would be surprised by some of the sources of antisemitism here.”
It is difficult for any one who has not worked at the UN to be able to imagine how central the Israel issue is to the workings of the United Nations. You have undoubtedly heard of the report approved earlier this month by the UN Human Rights Council, known as the Goldstone Report, which has now been submitted for action by the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. It may turn out that the votes won’t be there for Security Council action but they can be expected to be there for action by the General Assembly.
Seeking to delegitimize Israel is clearly the single most important function of the UN Human Rights Council. Please consider the following: in recent years millions of civilians have been deliberately killed in military actions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of thousands in Sudan, tens of thousands in Sri Lanka. Thousands are now dying in Somalia and Yemen, where al-Qaeda attempts to establish itself. The UN watches it all. But when Israel acts in self-defense against attacks and in doing so tries its very best to save civilian lives, but fails, causing hundreds of civilian casualties, the UN sledge hammer comes down.
The Goldstone Report is not a unique phenomenon. For years the UN’s anti-Israel operation has been supported by a UN-managed anti-Israel propaganda apparatus that operates right out of the UN Secretariat, but is totally beyond the control of the UN Secretary General.
I need to emphasize at this point that I have been and continue to be a strong believer in the principles set forth in the UN Charter. I believe that the UN has done much good in the past and is able to do much good in the future. I also believe, as the quote from Susan Rice suggests, that it is indeed possible to reform the UN. The challenge is to figure out how that can be done. To be able to determine how to correct the UN’s defects we have to analyze how these defects developed.
In April 1945 I was a soldier in western Germany when I read in the army newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, that a conference had started in San Francisco, whose task it was to create a new international organization to replace the defunct League of Nations. With German Army Group B dissolving in front of our eyes, as German soldiers just put down their arms and started walking home, it was clear that the end of the war in Europe was near. As we saw all the destruction and hardship that surrounded us, those of us who paid attention to the San Francisco meeting had high hopes for the success of the conference.
The organization that emerged later that year may not have met all our hopes, but it began to build institutions that over time did a lot of good. The UN could for obvious reasons not make a contribution to ameliorate or end the Cold War. But it created important organizations that have accomplished a great deal of good for the lives of individual human beings across the globe, such as the World Health Organization, the United Nations International Children’s Fund, and the High Commissioner for Refugees It adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, let us not forget, it adopted the partition resolution for the Palestinian Mandate that led to the creation of the State of Israel.
As the central UN organization and its offshoots matured, they became increasingly effective in dealing with at least some of the world’s problems. That state of affairs lasted for more than twenty-five years. It was only in the 1970’s that it became evident that something had gone seriously wrong at the UN.
It was in 1975 that Daniel Patrick Moynihan arrived in New York as the new U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and before long raised questions about what appeared to be a new trend at the United Nations. It was during his tenure that the United Nations General Assembly passed the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, over his vehement protest. Pat Moynihan’s memoir about his time at the UN is appropriately titled: “The United States in Opposition.”
As for the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, it is worth noting that it was adopted by a vote of 72 to 35, with 32 abstentions. If Mexico, which voted for the resolution, had voted against it, it could have passed only if the General Assembly had decided that the resolution was not “important.” That is so because the UN Charter requires a two-thirds vote to adopt a resolution that is important. This is just one instance of a problem to which I shall refer later: we have two parties at the UN, one of which has a whip operation and the other one does not.
When I arrived at the UN a few years later and began to have first-hand experience with the institution, I found vivid confirmation for the criticisms that had been offered by Pat Moynihan. The UN had strayed far from the ideals set forth in the Charter.
I have tried to explore how that came about. It was clear that the truly creative period of the UN had come to an end. It came to an end as a result of the extraordinarily clever maneuvering of the totalitarians represented at the UN and the failure of the democracies to match their clever manipulations.
As it was, the diplomats
representing the Soviet Union and its East European satellites at the
United Nations lacked the finesse needed to succeed in the effort to
block the United States and the other Western democracies in a
parliamentary setting in which mere bluster would not suffice to win
votes. But they found a close ally who had the skills needed to build
a new majority bloc in the United Nations General Assembly. It was
Fidel Castro.
Castro assembled a highly
competent cadre of diplomats, who took on the task of building an
international network of institutions that would operate in opposition
to the United States. Though he was clearly aligned with the Soviet
bloc, Castro got Cuba admitted to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and in
due course turned the Non-Aligned and a parallel organization, the
Group of 77 (G-77), into mouthpieces at the UN for the Moscow
line.
An important step on the way toward taking control of the NAM and the G-77 organizations was for Castro to link up with the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. At its September 1973 meeting, where Castro sought to link the NAM to Moscow, he was initially challenged by Muammar Qaddafi, who wanted the Non-Aligned to remain truly non-aligned. It was at that point that Castro appears to have realized how he could best attain his goal: he broke diplomatic relations with Israel and added Israel to the United States on his and the entire Soviet bloc’s UN enemies list.
Castro had no genuine interest in the Palestinian cause. The
purpose of his move in 1973 and in Cuba’s key role since that time in
the anti-Israel effort at the UN was to build a strong bloc at the UN
of opponents of the United States. He was aware of the fact that the
membership of the UN was growing and that many of the UN members
belonged to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which had been
founded in 1969, or were newly-independent African states, or both.
What Castro was well aware of was that by breaking ties with Israel, he
would be able to get Qaddafi’s help in lining up the votes of the
Organization of the Islamic Conference. But there was still the
question of how to reach out to those African states that did not
belong to the OIC.
It did not take the Castro and Qaddafi alliance very long to
find an answer to that question. Only weeks after the September 1973
NAM summit, the General Assembly considered a resolution that called
for more pressure on South Africa to end the apartheid regime. The
clique that had begun to manipulate the UN chose Burundi to offer an
amendment which referred to “the unholy alliance between Portuguese
colonialism, South African racism, Zionism and Israeli imperialism.”
The amendment was adopted by a two-to-one majority. By linking Zionism
with South African racism, many of the non-Muslim states of Africa were
brought into the new alliance.
In his memoir Pat Moynihan quotes from a letter
that he had received from a professor of international relations at
Princeton and an expert on the United Nations, who had called
Moynihan’s attention to the Burundi initiative in the fall of 1973.
Gordenker wrote Moynihan to complain about the failure of the United
States to engage in a concerted effort at the UN to win votes:
“Surely a government that can negotiate with China and the Soviet Union can organize enough persuasiveness to reduce the production of pernicious symbolism and to win the support from sensible regimes for human rights.”
Moynihan explained the reason for this failure: the State
Department’s ‘bilateral system,’ he said, “resisted, and usually with
success, the effort to introduce multilateral considerations into its
calculations.” These words, let us note, were written in 1975. It is
now 34 years later. They are as relevant today as they were then. Our
mission to the UN usually lacks the needed back-up in the capitals of
UN member states.
That back-up is needed because of the vastly different manner in
which our mission operates when compared to our principal opponents.
Once a Cuban diplomat is assigned to the UN he stays there and, over
the years, truly learns the business of multilateral diplomacy. As he
continues in the UN system, he watches his counterparts from other
countries arrive, begin to learn the routine, and then depart as their
tour of duty at the UN comes to an end, and they are replaced by a new
set of diplomats who have to learn the UN routine from scratch.
There is another
aspect to the Cuban performance. While there are missions to the UN
that operate under specific instructions from their respective
governments, there are many others that receive no specific
instructions, allowing their representatives at the UN to make their
own decisions on how to vote. It is that aspect of the UN system that
has been fully utilized in building the anti-democratic bloc. For one,
arrangements are made for diplomats of these missions to be rewarded
for their cooperation by being elected to positions in the UN system
that are of special interest to them. For another, an informal job
placement service operates at the UN that enables relatives of
cooperating diplomats to obtain jobs in the UN Secretariat. As one
diplomat once put it to me: “After you have been at the UN for a little
while, you start playing the UN game and you forget about your
country.”
There is more to it than that. I recall an incident from the
time in which I represented the United States in the UN Human Rights
Commission. Having done the needed parliamentary work, I had gotten a
resolution adopted that the Cubans had opposed. Immediately following
the vote, the Cuban representative rose to accuse me of having bribed
some of the representatives so that they would vote with the United
States. After the meeting had adjourned, I asked colleagues from other
missions whether that really happens at the UN. They all thought I was
terribly naïve. “Of course it happens,” they said. “The Cubans do it
all the time. So do the Libyans.”
I am sure you agree that we
should not pay bribes to UN ambassadors. But I have not found it easy
to understand why we were under specific instructions at the UN never
to suggest any relationship between U.S. foreign assistance and UN
voting. I recognize that we should understand why Egypt or Pakistan
would vote against the U.S. at the UN, but why, for example, should we
not make it clear to the Philippines, which during the current fiscal
year receives about $125 million in U.S. foreign assistance, that our
resources are limited and that these limited resources will, in the
first instance, be made available to states that are prepared to
reciprocate our friendship?
During my stay at the UN I also learned how the
clique of anti-US and anti-Israel operatives that manipulate the UN get
their message out to their following.
I was offered an explanation by an
ambassador from a NAM state with whom I was having lunch. In the
course of our conversation he asked me whether I knew how the so-called
NAM consensus was formed. When I told him that I did not know, he
said: “As you know, we used to be on the other side.” By that he meant
on the pro-Soviet side. He continued by telling me that on the day
preceding any meeting of the NAM caucus, which had 101 members at that
time, the friends of the Soviet Union, about 17 or 18 states, would
have a special meeting. When they were all assembled, a small group
would enter the room, always including Cubans. That group would then
give out instructions on how the assembled representatives should act
when they met the next day at the meeting of the full NAM caucus. Each
representative would be assigned a specific task, to make a motion on a
position to be taken by the NAM, to be the first speaker in support of
a motion, or to be the second speaker in support. Then, the next day,
when the full caucus met, the whole scenario would be played out. My
colleague concluded his account of NAM procedure by saying: “And there
sits the silent majority and just goes along.”
The Soviet Union is gone. Almost all
East European states vote at the UN with the West Europeans, but
Castro’s people are still at work and the system set up in the 1970’s
continues to operate. We do need to note that in 1991, the Zionism is
Racism resolution was repealed by a vote of 111 to 25. The repeal was
the result of an unusual major effort undertaken by the State
Department in capitals. The substantial margin of victory for our side
was also the result of the fact that the Soviet bloc had dissolved, the
Soviet Union was disintegrating, and the anti-democratic coalition at
the UN was in utter disarray.
But this disarray did not last long. The
anti-democratic forces at the UN quickly regained their footing and
were soon again in full operation. While they used to fly the flag of
the Non-Aligned Movement in earlier decades, they now sail under the
flag of the Group of 77. There is only one significant difference
between the NAM and the G-77. China does not belong to the former, but
belongs to the latter. In fact the G-77 calls itself now the “Group of
77 and China.” China has become an increasingly significant player in
the anti-democratic camp at the UN.
China, incidentally, is one country that has no history of antisemitism. On the contrary, Chinese intellectuals see parallels between their ancient culture and the ancient culture of the Hebrews. China has also excellent trade relations with Israel. But at the UN, China consistently votes against Israel. It does so because it is an integral part of the group of member states that use the UN to embarrass the democracies, particularly the United States.
The case of China, with its 100% anti-Israel record at the UN, demonstrates the underlying purpose of the UN’s anti-Israel effort. There are many countries in the UN that are truly, vehemently against Israel, but Israel is merely the canary in the coal mine. The needed additional support comes from those, like Cuba, who really want to strike at the United States. They find that more difficult to accomplish directly and thus engage in an indirect attack with their program to delegitimize Israel.
It is against this background that I would like to return to the point I made earlier, that it is indeed possible to reform the UN, to end the anti-Israel campaign at the UN. That there is an anti-Israel, anti-American, and antisemitic culture at the UN is unquestionably true. These attitudes are so thoroughly ingrained that it is not likely to change the culture at the UN in New York.
But what we need to keep in mind is that the diplomats at the UN represent governments, governments that can give these diplomats instructions on how to vote. I believe that a majority of the governments of the UN member countries are neither anti-U.S. not anti-Israel nor antisemitic. It is important to reach out to these friendly governments and ask that they make sure that their representatives at the UN vote in accordance with their government’s policies, that they do not forget about their country.
Let me now illustrate how this can work. In May 2006 the UN General Assembly had a very important resolution before it. It was a resolution to reject the proposals of Secretary-General Annan to reform UN management. The United Stats strongly supported reform and the State Department tried to line up votes for our side. We lost 121 to 50.
Five months later, in October 2006, the General Assembly had to fill one of the Latin American seats on the Security Council. Venezuela had announced its candidacy. So had Guatemala. At that point the entire leadership of the Executive Branch, the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the NSC staff, became fully involved. Heads of friendly governments got messages from Washington on the subject of the Venezuelan candidacy.
It takes a two-thirds majority to be elected to the Security Council. There were 47 ballots and neither candidate won. However, the average vote for Guatemala was 103, compared to 50 for our side five months earlier. Venezuela’s average vote was 79, down from 121 five months earlier. Both candidates finally gave up and Panama was then elected, a clear win for our side.
Admittedly, we cannot expect the entire leadership of the Executive Branch to be involved on every batch of resolutions at the UN. That is why a group of us, including Rabbi George, have come together to do the necessary spade work to help interested members of Congress help line up UN votes by reaching out to the heads of government of friendly states. It will take time to change a system that has been in place for about 35 years, but we believe it can be done. If any of you want to join the effort, you would be most welcome. The name of our organization is American Jewish International Relations Institute, AJIRI.
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