United Nations

Good place to be expelled from

Maurice Samuelson

It was sadly preditable that, having applauded Mr Yasser Arafat on its rostrum, the United Nations General Assembly would eventually get round to throwing out Israel. After last week's block vote by 40 Moslem countries, the

anti-Jewish bandwagon is beginning to roll. The next stages will be the non-aligned nations' conference at Lima on August 25 and the special UN General Assembly on development on September 2. At each of these, the bandwagon will stop to take on more supporters for the "Juden raus" rabble for the Assembly proper which opens in the autumn.

As with the case of South Africa at the last session, no amount of vetoes in the Security Council will be able to prevent the Assembly from suspending one of its members or refusing to recognise its credentials.

Already, the implications of such a scenario are getting through to the older members of the UN. Dr Henry Kissinger warned Third World countries last week that they "may well inherit an empty shell." A British Foreign Office Minister has said Israel's exclusion would gravely damage the UN's credibility. The nine EEC countries, including pro-Arab France, have said they will resist Israel's removal.

The damage to the UN will be both practical and symbolic, The UN is not only sited on American soil but the US supplies a quarter of its budget. Dr Kissinger's tough remarks at Milwaukee suggest that it would no longer do so. On the political level, Israel's exclusion would deprive the world body of any real ability to mediate in the Middle East.

Far more serious, though, would be the impact on an organisation founded on universal ideas rather than on political realities. The Middle East conflict has been the most deep-rooted and persistent problem on the UN's agenda. To regurgitate one of that conflict's protagonists at the behest of the other will show that the UN is stricken with a fatal disease and that its end is nigh.

The 1947 decision to recognise an independent Jewish State in a partitioned Palestine was arguably the United Nations' finest hour. In the aftermath of the Second World War it represented an act of historic justice by the Allies to the holocaust's most tragic victims.

But the UN's role in Israel's emergence should not be exaggerated. In the face of Arab intransigence, the UN immediately began to vacillate and to cast around for other solutions, such as a trusteeship for Palestine. It was helpless in implementing its own decision on Jewish statehood. Had Israel left its defence to the UN it would have been slaughtered in its cradle. It should not be forgotten, either, that the states who sought to destroy Israel had themselves got into the UN only by the skin of their teeth. Egypt qualified to be a founder member by declaring war on Germany in 1945 only four days before the deadline set by the allies at Yalta.

As the years went by, the UN created agencies to treat the symptoms of the Palestine conflict but never its cause. UNRWA has catered for the original Arab refugees and their descendants for twenty-five years. And a series of emergency forces has policed the various truce and disengagement lines after each successive war. But the UN has never attempted to enforce Arab recognition of Israel, which to this day remains the heart of the issue.

Indeed, the UN has been less an active factor in the region than a political weapon for which Arabs and Jews have continuously struggled.

For the Jews, admission to the UN in 1949 set the. seal on Israel's sovereignty. They also hoped the UN's corridors would lead to peace with the Arabs. In Israel's early euphoric days, she even voted for the independence af Libya, against the advice of Britain and the United States. (Did you know that, Mr Gadaffi?) The Arab aim, on the other hand, has been to ensure that Israel remained a member of the UN in name only. They prevented her election to any of the UN's council's. At the same time, pro-terrorist countries, which actively endangered world security, automatically gained seats on the Security Council as if nothing could be more natural.

Thanks to the continual growth in Arab nationhood, the Security Council has failed to pass a single pro-Israeli resolution since 1951. Whenever circumstances merited one, it has usually been vetoed by the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Council has — more often than can be remembered — condemned Israel for some reprisal action without specifying the act of terror which preceded it.

Since 1967, the Security Council has pestered Israel over Jerusalem, despite her progressive and open administration of the reunited City. But in the previous fifteen years, it never, ,admonished Jordan for excluding Jews from the Old City and desecrating their shrines.

Last week's Moslem move to expel Israel from the UN was portrayed by its Syrian and PLO sponsors as a reply to Israel's 'Persistent violation of UN resolutions'. This blithely ignores the far more serious Arab action of trying to destroy a fellow member of the United Nations.

It was, after all, a Syrian representative who told the UN in 1948, that "recommendations of the General Assembly are not imperative on those to whom they are addressed." He was echoed by an Egyptian representative who said: "We do not choose to comply with the General Assembly's resolutions on Palestine. This is our privilege under the Charter."

It is not recorded, however, that anybody attempted to exclude the seven Arab member states of the day from United Nations. In retrospect, though, such a threat might well have had a salutary effect.

It would certainly have been far less damagingto the UN than the current prospect of Israel's departure. Once the principle of universal representation is forsaken, no small country will be safe from the effects of mob rule. The potential victims are the rank abd file of the Afro-Asian world now running blindly with the Arab pack against Israel. Israel's own reaction, however, is a measure of its political maturity and stamina. It recognises that exclusion or suspension from the UN would be a severe blow to its diplomatic status. At the same time, as her Foreign Minister told his European ambassadors in I London, it would be an even graver blow to the principles on which the UN is founded.

Israel was originally created because Jews no longer wanted to be the passive victims of other people's whims. For that reason, she will fight hard to retain her presence at the UN. But if the worst happens in New York this autumn, Israel — and others too — may yet find that outside the air is fresher.

Maurice Samuelson, the writer and broadcaster on Middle East affairs, was formerly editor of the Jewish Observer and Middle East Review