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The UN System as the Major Deterrent to an Israeli/Palestinian Peace
Richard Schifter, Chairman, Board of Directors, American Jewish International Relations Institute, at a Webinar sponsored by the Endowment for Middle East Truth, September 16, 2020.
Yesterday a truly historic event took place at the White House. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates joined with Israel in signing agreements that herald a truly warm peace between these two Arab countries and Israel. The word from the leaderships of quite a number of other Arab countries appears to welcome that development. We are witnessing a truly profound change in the relationship between Israel and its Arab neighbors.
But there is one exception. There is no positive change in the relations of the Palestinians with Israel. On the contrary, Palestinian leaders have been vehemently critical of these recent developments, declaring the action of Bahrain and the UAE to be “stabs in the back.”
For all people of good will, for all those that are hoping that now that 72 years have expired since Israel declared itself an independent state, it should be able to live at peace, the Bahrain/UAE news was indeed encouraging. But the Palestinian reaction was greatly disappointing. The question remains: what can be done to attain a genuine Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement?
Israel has offered a series of peace proposals. The Palestinian side has not put forward a proposal of its own. A careful analysis of the Palestinian performance in the field of international relations has, however, made it quite clear as to what its position is: It is not prepared to recognize the existence of a majority-Jewish state in the region. Its goal is the one-state solution: a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
Rejection of the existence of a majority-Jewish state in the Levant was, of course, the position of the Arab League in 1947, when the UN General Assembly adopted the Resolution calling for the creation of an Arab state and a Jewish state in the Mandate of Palestine. It was the League’s position when it went to war against Israel in 1948, and again, in 1967 and 1973. The League’s basic approach was spelled out in its 1967 “three no’s of Khartoum” declaration. Meeting in September of that year in the capital of Sudan, it declared: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”
We are now witnessing a profound change in the Arab world. In recent decades, as new generations of leaders took charge, the goal of ending Israel’s existence and ending a Jewish presence in the region began to fade out. Given that reality, what holds the Palestinians back from joining those Arabs who want peace? There is a very regrettable answer to this question: the Palestinian demand for the so-called “right of return”, the demand for Israel to admit the mass immigration of 5.5 million so-called “Palestinian refugees” has for many decades had the support of the United Nations system. Given the UN system’s support of an end to the existence of the State of Israel, how can one expect the Palestinian leadership to change its position and be prepared to accept the two-state solution?
Under its Charter, the United Nations very purpose is to “maintain international peace and security.” What is worth remembering is that it was in keeping with that key reason for the very existence of the United Nations that the UN General Assembly (UNGA) adopted Resolution 181 in 1947, by a vote of 33 to 13, with 10 Abstentions. Res. 181 called for the partition of the United Nations Mandate for Palestine between an Arab state, a Jewish state, and a corpus separatum for Jerusalem. It was done in the hope that partition would assure a peaceful future for the area.
As we know, that is not what happened. The Jewish Agency accepted the partition resolution and proceeded with the establishment of Israel. But the Arab side refused to accept the existence of a Jewish state. When the State of Israel was established on May 14, 1948, the neighboring Arab states went to war against it. Israel prevailed and in 1949 a series of armistice agreements were signed. The armistice demarcation lines became later known as the “1967 borders”.
It was the 1948 War that created the problem with which we are dealing today. In the months prior to the war, Arab broadcasts to Israel, anticipating a military conflict, urged Arab residents of what was expected to be the State of Israel to seek refuge in predominantly Arab-populated territory. Other Arab residents fled in the course of the military conflict. When the armistice agreements were signed in 1949, there were about 750,000 Arab refugees from Israeli territory who were refugees in territory on the Arab side of the armistice demarcation lines.
In the years immediately after the end of World War II it was the United States that took the lead worldwide to deal with humanitarian problems. In many instances the United States decided to use the United Nations system as an appropriate vehicle to provide help. By the time the problem of the refugees from Israel’s War of Independence arose, the United States had already been heavily involved in European refugee issues, including the resettlement of about 12 million Germans, who had fled or been expelled from their homes in Eastern and East-Central Europe.
It was in 1949 that the United Nations started to deal with the humanitarian problem created by the 1948 War in which Israel was attacked by its Arab neighbors. Not surprisingly it was the United States that took the lead in creating a UN agency that would be responsible for help for the refugees from the 1948 Arab/Israeli War. The new agency was named the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). As its name implies, UNRWA was to meet immediate needs, relief. But it was also to provide longer-term help, works.
The relatively small number of refugees on the Israeli side of the armistice demarcation lines, both Arabs and Jews, were quickly resettled. It was the large number Arab refugees on the Arab side of the demarcation lines that presented the major problem.
Let me note here that a related problem arose in the following years, when about 800,000 Jews, whose families had lived in the Arab world for centuries, were forced to leave. They were all resettled long ago, a majority in Israel.
Returning to the issue of the Palestinian refugees of 1948/1949, providing immediate relief was relatively easy. Rehabilitation, the longer-term solution proved to be a challenge. On the Israeli side, resettlement had been completed by 1954. But on the Arab side it became increasingly clear that the Arab refugees from Israel did not want to be resettled, nor were the Arab states in which they now resided prepared to agree to their resettlement. What needs to be noted is that these “refugees” were living among people most of whom were of the same ethnicity, the same religion, and spoke the same language. About 40% of them were in the Gaza Strip and what we now call the West Bank. But both the refugees and the Arab states were committed to ending the existence of the State of Israel, so they continued to insist on arranging for these Palestinian refugees to live a segregated life and be available for a return to Israel. They claimed a right to that effect, which became known as the “right of return.”
The United States was a dominant force in UNRWA in its early years. After a brief service by a Canadian Executive Director of UNRWA, a series of U.S. Executive Director followed. The U.S. commitment to the “works” part of the UNWRA mandate was made quite clear. The professional background of the U.S. Executive Directors was in the field of economic development. The task they were to perform is help integrate the refugees into the economies of the territory in which they now resided and resettle there.
They tried, but they failed. The refugees did not want to be resettled and the Arab countries in which they resided did not want to accept them. Significantly, under the Eisenhower Administration there was also a change in the U.S. position. Given concerns regarding the Arab position in the Cold War, the United States was less inclined to continue to advocate resettlement over the opposition of the Arab states. A 1960 Report issued by UNRWA’s Executive Director, John Davis, a U.S. appointee, had this to say: “Ten years of UNRWA history bear out the fact that major development projects designed with the specific purpose of resettling refugees are unacceptable to refugees and host governments alike. It is the Director’s opinion that major development projects in the Middle east should proceed independently of UNRWA and without direct reference to the resettlement of refugees.”
There was no formal action taken by the UN General Assembly to modify the text of the UNRWA legislation to eliminate the word “works” and thus end the resettlement effort. The change in UNRWA’s mission to limit itself to maintaining a segregated existence for refugees from what had become the State of Israel applied even in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, territories that had been part of the Mandate of Palestine.
To make sure that UNWRA would stay in business until the “right of return” was realized, Palestinian refugee status was first granted to the children of the original refugees and then to all descendants along the male line, indefinitely. That is why we are dealing today with 5.5 million so-called Palestinian refugees claiming the right to migrate to Israel, including great-grandchildren of the original refugees.
As the years passed, education became the most important service provided by UNRWA. It was an education system that segregated the descendants of refugees from all other residents of the region in which they lived. In the UNRWA schools they were to be indoctrinated with the ideology developed by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin Al-Husseini. They were taught to hate Jews, to hold to the position that Jews had no rights to a national home in the region, that it was, therefore, the responsibility of all those who are classified as Palestinian refugees to make it his/her life’s goal to migrate to Israel, and thus help end the existence of a Jewish state.
We need to note that UNRWA is the largest agency in the United Nations system. Close to half its budget is allocated to education. And, as I have just noted, all those who have researched the UNRWA education system have been truly shocked by the commitment of that education system to hatred of the Jews and to the goal of extinction of the State of Israel. There is no doubt that any effort to advance the cause of an Israeli/Palestinian peace needs to deal with an end to the UNRWA education system and the placement of the students in schools that do not seek to instill hatred.
As noted, the change in UNRWA came about around 1960 without the engagement of the UN General Assembly. It was handled administratively, with U.S. officials concurring. It is since 1960 that UNRWA has played a critically important role in helping maintain the vehemently anti-Israel frame of mind of the so-called Palestinian refugees. UNRWA’s commitment to the cause of segregating persons of Palestinian ancestry from all other Arabs in the region and instilling in them the commitment ending the existence of Israel is the original basis for the outlook reflected in the current statements emanating from Ramallah that Arab states that recognize Israel are stabbing Palestinians in the back.
The bureaucratic steps that changed the nature of UNRWA in 1960 were only the first measures undertaken by the UN system to take steps to end the existence of Israel A basic change in the UN General Assembly followed in 1974. That change was no longer limited to bureaucratic rearrangements. It was a matter of the United Nations’ principal policy-making body adopting resolutions that institutionalized an anti-Israel position.
What had happened in late 1973 was that Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi had decided to join in an effort to use their lead positions in the Non-Aligned Movement to take control of the Movement (NAM), a major grouping at the UN, and then use NAM to take control of the United Nations General Assembly. Qaddafi brought the Organization of Islamic Cooperation to this joint endeavor. Although the Soviet bloc was not formally associated with NAM, Castro was able to coordinate the coalition’s work with the Soviets. As it is, Cuban diplomats played the most effective role in reorganizing the UN system under Castro-Qaddafi leadership. Qaddafi provided the financial help used by Cuban diplomats in vote-buying exercises.
The Castro-Qaddafi alliance was created to support the principal goals of the two leaders. They were distinct. Castro’s main objective was to use the UN system to weaken the international position of the United States and to embarrass the United States whenever possible. Qaddafi’s principal goal was to have the UN bring about the end of the existence of the State of Israel. The two leaders agreed to support each other in their efforts to attain their goals.
The new coalition went to work at the 1974 session of the UN General Assembly. The issue of Israel had been put high on the agenda of the coalition’s leadership. It took the unusual step of inviting the leader of a movement directed against a UN member state to deliver a major address to the Assembly. It was in November 1974 that Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, addressed the Assembly at great length. It was at that same session that the new coalition got the UN General Assembly to adopt as UN policy the claim that UNRWA had come to espouse: the “right of return.”
It is UN General Assembly Resolution 3236, adopted on November 22, 1974 that declares it to be “the inalienable right of the Palestinians to return to their homes and property from which they have been displaced and uprooted, and calls for their return.” It goes on to say that “full respect for and the realization of these inalienable rights of the Palestinian people are indispensable for the solution of the question of Palestine.”
Adoption of Res. 3236, which made it clear that a majority of the General Assembly supported the claim of a “right of return,” served to strengthen the Palestinian position against the two-state solution. The General Assembly did not stop there. In 1975 it created the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People (CEIRPP), a committee which exists to this very day and has 25 members. It is a committee that makes a point of arranging conferences across the globe at which speakers are provided with an opportunity to deliver highly critical talks against Israel.
CEIRPP does not operate alone in the UN system. In 1977, the General Assembly took another step in support of the claim of the “right of return.” It created an office in the UN Secretariat, now known as the Division for Palestinian Right, that is empowered to do the staff work for the Committee. Operating from within the staff of the Secretariat, it is able to get the Palestinian Authority’s message out to the general public not as a Palestinian message, but as a message disseminated in the name of the United Nations. It is a message directed to interested media, to nongovernmental organizations, and to people holding public office, a message that denounces Israel profoundly and calls for support of the claim of a “right of return.”
I have mentioned that the resolutions at issue here were adopted in 1975 and 1977, respectively. That is indeed the case but note should be taken that the General Assembly adopts annually resolutions that renew the mandate and the funding authorization of the Committee and the Division. The next time these resolutions will be voted on will be in late November or early December of this year, 2020.
There is no doubt that there are member states of the United Nations that strongly oppose the existence of Israel, so that their votes in the UNGA on these resolutions correctly reflect their foreign policy. There are other states that vote for the resolutions not because of their opposition to Israel, but because they make it a practice to cast their votes in a manner that expresses opposition to the United States. The latter may in some cases be done not as a matter of national policy, but as a result of submitting to pressure brought to bear by countries opposed to the United States.
But these two groups, whose UN votes against Israel reflect the position of their governments don’t constitute a majority. Where do all the other anti-Israel votes come from? To answer this question, one has to lay out one of the very sad aspects of the United Nations system: votes cast by ambassadors in New York do not necessarily reflect a well thought-through national policy. Many governmental leaders have to many other issues on their agenda and don’t find the time to study resolutions that have no real direct effect on their national concerns. So, the decisions are left to ambassadors to the UN.
And that is why we need to focus on problems posed by the UN culture. Differing groupings with different causes have operatives at work at the UN, whose task it is to put ambassadors under peer pressure. The anti-Israel operatives are in the lead on this. Some ambassadors are interested in committee chairmanships. Others would like support for one of their favorite proposals. And some, very regrettably, accept financial benefits for the votes they cast.
The points that needs to be emphasized is that the resolutions with which we are here dealing are obstacles to an Israeli/Palestinian peace agreement. Given the influence of the UN, the Palestinians are not prepared to give up the claim of a right-of-return. That claim, if implemented, would end the existence of Israel. Are there heads of government that vote Yes on these resolutions or Abstain on them, who are not aware of the fact that they are going along with or not opposing resolutions that call for an end to the existence of the State of Israel? Regrettably the answer to this question is in the affirmative. There are a great many of them. That is why it is so important that heads of friendly governments be made fully aware of the true meaning of the resolutions and be urged to vote No. That is the task to which AJIRI has devoted itself.
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