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Articles: The UN's blinkers

Posted by admin on Thursday, July 22, 2004 - 12:50 AM

Israel has long been the United Nations' favourite punching bag. About a quarter of the denunciations issued by the UN Commission on Human Rights focus on Israel. In the UN General Assembly, each year sees a ritual lineup of resolutions condemning Israel for oppressing the Palestinian people and standing in the way of peace. So it came as no surprise, particularly to Israelis, when the assembly voted 150-6 on Tuesday to demand that Israel comply with an order of the International Court of Justice and pull down its security barrier in the West Bank. Even so, this was an unusually vivid example of the UN's bias.
The World Court's ruling was advisory and non-binding. Many major Western nations, including Canada, argued against referring the barrier issue to the court in the first place, quite rightly insisting that it was a political matter, not a judicial one. The court took it up anyway and delivered a verdict that was breathtakingly one-sided. While condemning the growing system of fences, walls and trenches for impeding Palestinian mobility and effectively annexing Palestinian land, it all but ignored the purpose for which the barrier was built: to stop Palestinian terrorist attacks inside Israel. During nearly four years of Palestinian rebellion, Israel has endured more than 150 attacks. Since the barrier started going up, however, Israel says attacks are down by 90 per cent and deaths from terrorism by 70 per cent. As Israel's UN ambassador Dan Gillerman said last week, "The fence works." The scores of lives the barrier has saved appear to mean nothing to either the court or, now, the General Assembly. Only Israel, the United States, Australia, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau voted against Tuesday's resolution. Another 10, including Canada, abstained. All 25 members of the European Union voted in favour. "Thank God that the fate of Israel and of the Jewish people is not decided in this hall," said Mr. Gillerman. As the ambassador acknowledged last week, no one likes the security barrier, which enforces an ugly and often brutal separation between Israelis and Palestinians, disrupting many lives. Israel's own Supreme Court has ordered the government to reroute parts of it to ease the hardship imposed on Palestinians. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has agreed, and the international community should hold him to his pledge. What it should not do is endorse blinkered court rulings and discriminatory resolutions that condemn the Israeli barrier to terrorism while ignoring terrorism's source. If the members of the General Assembly had been reading the New York papers, they might have seen that there is a spot of trouble on the Palestinian side. In the Gaza Strip and beyond, there have been rallies and violence directed not against Israel but against the Palestinian leadership. Critics of Yasser Arafat are condemning him for failing to reform his corrupt administration and get a grip on his divided security forces, not to mention his utter refusal to rein in terrorism. Mr. Arafat promised to do all this when he agreed to an international road map to Arab-Israeli peace last year. If the General Assembly really wanted to advance the cause of peace, it would not be condemning Israel for responding to terrorism. It would be condemning Mr. Arafat for fomenting it.

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