United Nations Report

Jesse Helms Personified the Confluence of Mideast, Domestic American Politics

By Ian Williams

August saw yet another debate on the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As usual, however, it was full of sound and fury but signified nothing, except to show how isolated the U.S. position in support of Israel is. While paying lip service to the Mitchell report, Israel balked at the question of observers and the cessation of settlement activities recommended in it. Since when Israel balks, Washington vetoes, the resolution, after days of open debate, was not put to the vote.

Not only is the Middle East standoff tragic for the participants, it also poisons the whole system of global diplomacy, hindering efforts to establish a more secure world. At times it seems there is hardly a diplomatic conference or issue immune from its baneful influence.

The August announcement by veteran North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms that he was not going to run again is good news for the United Nations and bad news for the Israel lobby. It also illustrates dramatically how the Middle East issue intrudes upon the most insular and parochial backwaters of politics—like the tobacco fields of Carolina.

Helms was never a friend of the Palestinians or the Arabs—or, come to think of it, of many other foreign peoples. In fact, there were many Americans he never expressed much liking for either, ranging from African Americans to gays and liberals. Not many people suspected him, therefore, of harboring warm sentiments for Jews.

At least Helms was consistent, however: he opposed pretty much all foreign aid bills. Inevitably, this ran him up against the Israel lobby—which, of course, is not desperately concerned about foreign aid in general, but sees it as a useful camouflage for its subventions to Israel.

In 1990, the lobby saw its chance—and took it. That year Helms was almost defeated by Harvey Gant, a liberal African-American who drew a lot of liberal money for his campaign, much of it Jewish. After a few words, the senator changed his otherwise obdurate and obstinate stand and became the lobby’s most fervent attack dog in the Senate.

One thing Helms always shared with the lobby, however, was a deep suspicion of the United Nations and all international organizations, which he saw as a threat to American sovereignty and the lobby saw, equally, as a threat to Israel’s right to defy international law and resolutions with impunity. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms used his position to poison relations between the U.S. and the U.N.—effectively, thus, with the rest of the world. From 1990 onward, He proved properly grateful for the support of the lobby, which, with equal loyalty, supported Helms, even though his reactionary views on almost every domestic issue were anathema to most American Jews. In his 1990 and 1996 Senate elections he received $26,000 in pro-Israel PAC contributions.

Helms proved properly grateful for the support of the Israel lobby.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, Washington’s refusal to honor its legal obligations as a U.N. member first surfaced around Middle Eastern issues, when Congress refused to authorize U.N. estimates of the cost of its Palestinian program. Beginning with that ominous precedent, Congress has expanded its bilking habits to include a much wider range of issues. While Helms’ real aim was to destroy the U.N., or at least to withdraw American participation in it, he made “reform” a condition of paying U.S. dues, and found that lots of people who should have known better were prepared to go along.

So while the U.N. still exists, and the U.S. is still a member, Senator Helms and his friends in many respects have had their way. Starved of funds, the U.N. cannot take initiatives, and both it and its member states often tend to defer pre-emptively to what they think Washington’s wishes will be. In some ways even America’s friends treat it carefully, like an eccentrically acerbic neighbor who may fly off the handle at any random incident. The Secretariat itself also has learned the same lesson, deferring far more to Israeli sensibilities than the state’s behavior merits, in the hope of charming at least some members of Congress.

Some of that deference was obvious on several recent issues, where the eccentricities of American conservatism combined with pro-Israel solicitude once again to isolate American diplomacy. One exception, however, was Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton’s assertion of the U.S. position that the proposed non-binding convention on small arms trade was somehow a threat to the Second Amendment right of every American to own an anti-aircraft rocket launcher. Looking over his shoulder at the National Rifle Association, a lobby that outguns even AIPAC, it was a small and almost unprecedented defiance of Israeli positions.

An Uncharacteristic Defiance

That someone who spent many years heading the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation’s U.N.-baiting operation should be addressing the world body at all would be surprising, were it not that Bolton was assistant secretary of state to James Baker with responsibility for U.N. affairs in the previous Bush administration. Since then Bolton actually was on the U.N. payroll as Baker’s assistant in the latter’s capacity as Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special representative for the Western Sahara.

The Israelis were appalled by Bolton’s speech.“We do not support measures limiting [small arms] trade solely to governments. This proposal, we believe, is both conceptually and practically flawed,” said Bolton. “Perhaps most important, this proposal would preclude assistance to an oppressed non-state group defending itself from a genocidal government. Distinctions between governments and non-governments are irrelevant in determining responsible and irresponsible end-users of arms.”

Of course, where the U.S. saw Contras and mujahadeen fighting communism, the Israelis saw Hamas, Hezbollah and the PLO. This became even more explicit over language in the preamble to the Convention which quoted the U.N. Charter recognizing the right of peoples to self-determination. Israeli delegates wanted the reference deleted. In response, the Arabs added, “In particular, peoples under colonial or other forms of alien domination or foreign occupation,” and “the importance of the effective realization of this right.”

In its own perverse and unintended way, of course, this was what Bolton’s speech had implied.

There was resentment on the part of many delegates—from countries and continents where small arms have wreaked swathes of havoc—that extraneous issues like the American gun lobby and the Middle East were obstructing the first small steps to staunching the bloodshed. In the end, the bare reference to self-determination remained in the text, with explicit reference to it being a quote from the U.N. Charter. The mention of the Charter made everyone happy, since Israel and most other members have always regarded it as something like the Ten Commandments—to be occasionally recited, but not necessarily practiced.

The Durban Conference

Similar issues arose during August preparations for the World Conference Against Racism held at the end of the month in South Africa. In the draft was language that resurrected the old “Zionism is Racism” declarations of times past at the U.N. The Israelis objected to that, as did the Americans and the Europeans. After all, they must have reasoned, how could a system which denies people born in a land the right to live there, based on their ethnicity, and lets complete strangers immigrate there on the same basis, be racist?

The Arabs and Islamic blocs also introduced language deploring “wars, genocide, holocaust, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities.” While this fairly inclusive set of racist crimes may look broadminded, however, the Israelis objected to the use of “holocaust”—both without an upper case “H” and in any context other than Nazi genocide against European Jews.

The Israelis also objected to a clause that attacked “Foreign occupation founded on settlements, its laws based on racial discrimination,” which constitutes “a new kind of apartheid, a crime against humanity and serious threat to international peace and security.”

Although no country was specified, the Israelis seemed to think the language was aimed at them.The U.S., of course, joined in with the Middle East’s only democracy, even though Washington’s longtime position has been to regard the occupied territories as, well, occupied. In the interest of securing American participation, delegates to the preparatory committee seemed in the process of reaching a compromise.

The hard-liners, however, seemed to be the South Africans more than the Arabs. Declared Dr. Frene Ginwala, speaker of the South African National Assembly,“Slavery, colonialism and Zionism should be included in the upcoming World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination and Xenophobia in Durban.”

He described it as “strange and unacceptable” that the United States, which guaranteed freedom of speech in its constitution, wanted these items excluded from the agenda. As of this writing, the noises suggested that the South Africans were going ahead regardless of American sensibilities, and that there would in the end be an American delegation.

Blue Beret Videos

Last October, three Israeli soldiers were captured on the Lebanese border by Hezbollah, seemingly using fake U.N. insignia on its vehicles. When UNIFIL peacekeeping troops found the abandoned vehicles, they taped the site, and the guerrillas’ subsequent retrieval of them from the U.N. at gun point. The tapes were chucked into the back of a filing cabinet until someone heard about them. Or, as Kofi Annan’s official statement put it in August, “It is clear that serious errors of judgement were made, in particular by those who failed to convey information to the Israelis which would have been helpful in an assessment of the condition of the three abducted soldiers. The Secretary-General regrets this error. He repeats his offer to show to the Governments of Israel and Lebanon an edited version of the videotape made on 8 October.”

Since then the Israelis twice have seen the tapes—with the faces of participants edited out—while the WHO is testing bloodstains on the garments found on the site to see if they came from any of the three captured soldiers. The episode illustrates the difficult position in which the U.N. finds itself. The Israelis hold it responsible for the actions of Indian UNIFIL troops—while, of course, reserving the right if it suits itself to walk all over any contingent of UNIFIL. Regardless of whether one considers Hezbollah to be terrorists or freedom fighters, there is a humanitarian imperative to discover the fate of the three IDF soldiers. Knowing the Israeli self-admitted policy of assassination, however, the U.N. cannot show anything that would identify the Lebanese guerrillas. Finally, there is the damage to Annan’s attempts to build bridges to Congress via Israel, which means that every word used is carefully weighed for semantic significance.

The U.S refuses to sign the Land Mine Convention, but even those who have signed it lay diplomatic landmines in front of U.N. officials!

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.