The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (56 page)

UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros Ghali sought to reintroduce the UN into the diplomatic game in the Israeli-Palestinian context in 1994, asking the Oslo mediator Terje Roed-Larsen to open a UN coordination office in the Occupied Territories. The office, the UN Office of the Special Coordinator for the Occupied Territories (UNSCO) had a small staff, and a small role of supporting the aid coordination mechanisms established to assist in the implementation of the Oslo Accords. On the ground in Gaza, Roed-Larsen continued to play a political role in back-channel negotiations and in the back rooms of the formal negotiations that produced the Oslo II Accords, the Paris Protocols, the Wye River Agreements, and the various other subsidiary and complimentary agreements that constituted, over the course of the second half of the 1990s, the
ever-expanding set of partially implemented, constantly renegotiated Israeli-Palestinian agreements.

However, Roed-Larsen’s office in Gaza was not authorized by the Security Council, and neither he nor Boutros Ghali (who was towards the end of his tenure and well into the period of breakdown in his relations with the United States)
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had any ability to mobilize the Security Council in support of diplomatic efforts on the ground. Indeed, much of what Roed-Larsen did in diplomatic terms was done in his personal capacity rather than under UN auspices – a fact that was illustrated by the complete absence of the UN from formal processes in the period from 1995 to 1999 when Roed-Larsen left UNSCO and the office was left in the hands of a UN diplomat with little prior Middle East experience, the Secretary General’s Special Representative Chinmaya Gharekhan.

A re-engagement by the Security Council in the real business of peace-making in the Middle East began after the election in 1996 of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Early in his tenure, Annan worked to restore what by then were deeply corroded relations with Israel. Even prior to his election as Secretary-General, partially under the guidance of one of his principal campaign advisors, Shashi Tharoor, Annan began a quiet campaign – at cocktail parties, receptions, dinners, and events around New York – to reach out to the Jewish community in the United States. Tharoor and Annan understood what Boutros Ghali had not: that maintaining effective relationships with the United States was critical to the effective performance of a UN Secretary-General in the post-Cold War era. Given the Jewish community’s perception of the UN – unchanged since 1967 – and given the community’s influence in US Congress, Tharoor and Annan sought to diminish tensions with this important constituency.

Once elected, Annan worked with member states to reach an agreement for Israel to join the West European Group, given that Israel had been effectively excluded from the Asian Group for the length of its UN membership. Moreover, Annan worked to remove the 1975, ‘Zionism is racism’, resolution from the General Assembly’s agenda. The two efforts significantly improved Israel’s position at the UN and earned Annan support and trust from the Israeli leadership.

These efforts were undertaken at a time during which implementation of the Oslo Accords had faltered following the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995, Hamas had launched terrorist attacks in Israel the same year, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had been elected as Prime Minister in 1996. Between 1996 and 1999, the peace process largely stalled. However, the election in 1999 of Prime Minister Ehud Barak appeared to herald a new opportunity for peace-making. In this context, Annan reappointed Roed-Larsen to the post of Special Coordinator. Once again, the appointment was made by the Secretary-General, but Annan took care to ensure that the appointment had the political support of the Security Council.

The combination of Annan’s efforts to restore relations with Israel and the reappointment of Roed-Larsen to UNSCO rapidly created new political space for the Security Council. In early spring 1999, Roed-Larsen was informed by Prime Minister Barak that he was contemplating a withdrawal from parts of southern Lebanon. Over a period of several weeks, in extensive discussions with Israeli officials, Roed-Larsen convinced Barak of the value of having the Security Council oversee and certify the withdrawal’s compliance with Resolution 425, adopted at the time of the establishment of UNIFIL. Barak ultimately acknowledged the value of working within the framework of UN resolutions as a means of ensuring international support for the withdrawal.
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This created a situation that directly linked the authority and legal standing of the Security Council to concrete peace-making efforts on the ground. A process was launched whereby the boundary to which Israel would withdraw was determined by a UN team of cartographers and geographers.
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Since no formal border existed between Israel and Lebanon, the UN arrived at the formula that they would identify a line that would ‘correspond to the presumed international boundary’, constituting a line beyond which the UN could certify that Israel had fully withdrawn from southern Lebanon. Because the withdrawal was seen as being in implementation of Resolution 425, the appropriate body to certify the withdrawal was the Security Council itself.

There followed an exhaustive process of consultations with the Security Council to lay the foundation for the certification. On the ground, Roed-Larsen and UNIFIL monitored the border to ensure full Israeli compliance. In May 2000, Secretary-General Annan wrote to the Security Council establishing the line for withdrawal, and in June 2000, he wrote to the Council noting that Israel had indeed withdrawn precisely to this line. On both occasions, the Security Council responded with Presidential Statements that together constituted certification of full Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon.
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This episode constituted a significant re-entry of the Security Council into the process of peace-making in the Arab–Israeli theatre. Indeed, arguably not since 1948 had the Security Council had such a direct diplomatic role in creating the conditions for an easing of tensions between parties in the Middle East.

However, in September 2000 the outbreak of what became known as the Second, or Al Aqsa, Intifada presaged a return to the old role of the Security Council – as a forum for diplomatic manoeuvre between increasingly hostile Israeli and Arab representatives, as the site of repeated US vetoes or threatened vetoes, and as a space within which to articulate the basic principles for future peace-making.

As violence flared on the ground, Middle East discussions in the Security Council became heated. The first major Security Council discussion during this period concerned a Palestinian initiative to gain Security Council backing for an international inquiry into Israel’s actions. The US signalled on several occasions that it would veto any such resolution. However, the US was simultaneously attempting to resuscitate final status negotiations, which had temporarily abated after intensive talks in Camp David in June 2000, and was coming under increased pressure from the Arab world to moderate its strong support for Israel.
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Under this pressure, on 7 October 2000, the US decided to abstain rather than veto Resolution 1322, which condemned Israel for its excessive use of force in suppressing the Intifada and called for an international commission of inquiry into the violence.
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The subsequent months saw intensive final status negotiations between the parties, which ended without a full agreement. Such progress as did occur was then overshadowed by Prime Minister Barak’s failure at the polls and the election of Likud leader Ariel Sharon. Though Annan and Roed-Larsen remained active at the diplomatic level, repeated Security Council meetings on the Middle East produced no action.

In the period after Sharon’s elections a number of issues, debates, and events contributed to an erosion of relations between Israel and the Security Council. At the same time, however, US diplomacy vis-à-vis the Arab world led to the passage of two important Security Council resolutions that once again played the role of establishing the basic principles for Middle East peace.

One significant issue was that of a potential Security Council role in authorizing an observer or protection force for the West Bank and Gaza. This emerged as a key Palestinian goal during the first months of the Intifada, and the idea had gained considerable international support. A resolution to establish an observer force was vetoed by the US in March 2001, given strident Israeli objections to any perceived ‘internationalization’ of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a position that fuelled Arab anger towards the new Bush administration’s Middle East policy.

Progress towards more extensive consideration of the topic was halted by a scandal that broke in October 2001 involving video evidence held by UNIFIL relating to the kidnapping of three Israeli Defence Force soldiers by Hezbollah in October 2000. Israel reacted furiously to the news, claiming that the incident provided clear evidence of the bias of the UN against Israel. The Secretary-General launched an investigation and determined that indeed ‘serious mistakes were made’ by UNIFIL.
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The report, however, did not forestall a widespread perception within Israel that the Security Council could not be considered a reliable forum for managing the conflict with the Palestinians.
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The tenor of debate within the Security Council was also temporarily transformed by the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. These attacks ultimately created new tensions between the US and the Arab world but initially also created new support for the US in moderate Arab capitals. This support, or sympathy, helped facilitate the rapid Security Council response to the attacks in the form of Resolution 1373, which created a new international framework for states’ efforts to combat terrorism.
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Although addressing a global issue, Security Council action related to terrorism had particular salience in the Middle East and became part of the context of the overall balance of relations between the US and Middle Eastern states, especially the moderate Arab states – from whom the US, with the support of the Security Council, now expected a range of actions against domestic Islamist groups.

This pressure on the Arab world created its own pressure on the US. As the US began to prepare for its military campaign against Afghanistan, its Arab allies sought to contest the perception, which was growing among Arab populations, that the Security Council was simply an instrument of US power which was willing to act forcefully when a Muslim state had committed atrocities, but was unwilling to rein in Israeli actions seen in the Arab world and other countries as similarly atrocious. Through the Non-Aligned Movement, the Palestinian observers at the UN repeatedly sought to take advantage of this pressure, drafting several resolutions and introducing some of them to informal Security Council discussions. However, the Palestinians encountered significant resistance in the post-9/11 environment. Most members of the Security Council now attached greater importance to maintaining ‘Council unity’, that is, to avoiding a situation in which the US was forced to veto a resolution.

Instead, the US sought to balance its position vis-à-vis the Arab world with declarative support for elements of the Palestinian position. Most importantly, President George W. Bush spoke to the UN General Assembly in November 2001 and affirmed his support for the creation of a ‘state of Palestine’ as the necessary end point of final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.

However, President Bush’s declarative balance was not matched by a US willingness to place pressure on Israel to alter its actions in the West Bank and Gaza. Even as the 2001 war in Afghanistan was underway, with support from moderate Arab states, the US vetoed a resolution that called on Israel to withdraw its forces from Palestinian-controlled areas. Palestinian and Arab anger grew, and Arab pressure on the US continued to mount. Ultimately, faced with both intense Arab pressure and growing European discontent about its policies, the US felt compelled to act. In March 2002, US Permanent Representative to the UN John Negroponte introduced and secured passage of Resolution 1397 which formalized President Bush’s earlier statements and affirmed ‘a vision of a region where two States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side within secure and recognized borders’.
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As soon as it was passed, Resolution 1397 became the new benchmark for peacemaking in the Middle East, with the principle of Palestinian statehood established alongside Resolution 242’s principle of ‘land for peace’ as the presumed end points of the Middle East conflict.

None of these developments served to improve Israel’s perception of the Security Council. Rather, they reinforced the Israeli perception of the UN as an Arab-dominated body. This was further reinforced in January 2002 by the election of Syria to a non-permanent seat on the Security Council.

Given the negative perception by Israel of the Security Council’s role, and US willingness to use its veto to block measures such as the deployment of peacekeeping forces, the Security Council’s role became once again fairly marginal. In a series of statements in 2002, as well as in Resolution 1402,
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the Security Council confined itself to chiding Israel and the Palestinian Authority for their continued use of violence and terrorism, and to lending declarative support for the Quartet, a new mediating body that had been established at the initiative of Roed-Larsen and Secretary-General Annan.
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As violence continued on the ground, the Security Council’s search for solutions deepened, supplemented by that of the Quartet. Most notably, following a speech by President Bush in which he laid out his own vision of the two-state solution, the Security Council adopted two resolutions which, for the first time since 1967, transcended the bedrock principle of ‘land for peace’ laid out in Resolution 242. Although Resolution 1397
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and later Resolution 1402
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refer back to and call for full implementation of Resolution 242, the reference in Resolution 1397 to ‘a vision of a region where two States, Israel and Palestine, live side by side within secure and recognized borders’ signalled a critical political shift towards recognition of Palestinian statehood as the ultimate goal of negotiations. This represented a first, tentative step towards stipulating the content of an eventual final status deal despite the absence of real negotiations between the parties towards that end. Further, in Resolution 1435,
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the reference to the ‘continued importance of the initiative endorsed at the Arab League Beirut Summit’ was a highly coded reference to three fundamental principles first articulated by the Saudis in a major break from their traditional position: that peace between Israel and Palestine would require abandonment of the right of return of refugees to Palestine, in exchange for the establishment of a viable state of Palestine along the lines of the 1967 borders and the sharing of Jerusalem.