Obama and Israel: Showdown at the UN?

16 April '10
Anne Bayefsky interview to FOX NEWS.com

QUESTION: Should we believe the administration that they are not pursuing a change in US policy towards Israel voting at the Security Council?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The issue of the Obama administration’s use of the United Nations as a tool to blackmail the state of Israel is not confined to the Security Council. The Obama administration's affinity with an organization that is systematically focused on the demonization and delegitimization of Israel means that the issue is UN-wide. Whenever Israel is threatened by another UN resolution, or report, or meeting that adopts or discusses a condemnation of anything and everything Israel does, the U.S. is faced with the question as to how to respond. This has always been true, but the situation has been greatly magnified under the Obama administration.

For example, President Obama jumped on board the UN Human Rights Council within months of taking office, knowing full well that the Council is one of the worst - if not the worst - example of Israel-bashing across the UN system (as well as being completely disreputable in terms of its membership and lack of interest in the vast majority of human rights violations around the world). U.S. membership gives increased credibility to this UN body and its production-line of anti-Israel resolutions, sessions, and reports, notwithstanding their poisonous consequences. And every time another anti-Israel move is generated by the Council - which happens almost round the clock - the U.S. must decide how far it will go in standing up to the condemnations. Or from another perspective, as a Council member the administration is handed one more diplomatic sword to dangle over Israel.

At the same time, given that it is the Security Council alone that has the authority to make international law and take action - even military action - to implement that law, the five veto-wielding members have considerable influence. The track record of Obama’s foreign policy for the past year indicates that the administration is prepared to use any leverage at its disposal to boss Israel around, whatever the stakes to Israelis. At bottom, the Obama administration has swallowed the lethal fiction that deems Israel responsible for the Arab-Israeli conflict. This fiction originated with Arab-rejectionists of a Jewish state and has been cultivated at the United Nations over six decades. Such a position is a U.S. first, and it is why many now understand Obama to be the most anti-Israel president in the history of the US-Israel relationship.

Until now, American presidents have stuck by the fundamental principle that Israel is a sovereign state whose democratic government has responsibility for its own national security and the welfare of its citizens and, hence, that peace will only come through direct negotiations between the parties. Direct negotiations are key because the process of negotiation itself scuttles continued Arab and Islamic resistance to Israel’s existence. The UN approach, however, has been to impose a solution on the parties – a solution drafted in Riyadh, Cairo, Damascus and Ramallah. Myriad numbers of UN resolutions demand that Israel agree to indefensible borders, accept the return of millions of Arab refugees and their non-refugee descendents to Israel – a development that would make Jews a minority in their own land, and prevent any Jew from living on land that Arabs claim for themselves; that is, they demand the immediate creation of what is in effect “apartheid Palestine”. Every resolution, report, and session of the Security Council, now and in the future, is intended to implement in one form or another that scheme – an imposed outcome crafted to Israel’s serious disadvantage. Now these efforts will be coupled with the Obama administration’s own embrace of the same UN ideology: imposing on Israel whatever America wants (even on unrelated fronts) regardless of its disadvantage to Israel. From the Obama administration’s perspective, therefore, UN fora will facilitate its new foreign policy agenda. The United States can play good cop to Israel at the UN, with the bad cop consisting of the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), and the Non-Aligned Movement, which the OIC controls.

So no, I believe this administration is hell bent on bending Israel to its will, regardless of the fact that Israel is a democracy on the front lines of a war where the enemy threatens liberty and freedom for all. And the administration is very likely – unless Congress stands up now – to use the United Nations to do its dirty work.

QUESTION: What signal would it send to Israel’s enemies that the US is no longer vetoing anti-Israel resolutions?

ANNE BAYEFSKY: The Obama administration may imagine that the threat of withholding the veto at the Security Council, or the failure to oppose vigorously any one of a constant stream of anti-Israel UN concoctions, will be good for the United States. It will be dead wrong. First, Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies. And second, an effort by the Obama administration to use the UN as a tool to blackmail Israel or undermine Israel’s independence and security is a double-edged sword.

The use of the US veto did not only send a message that the United States was standing by the legitimacy, welfare and security of the Jewish state – whose citizens are surrounded by non-democracies who have no regard for their own peoples’ human rights. The veto also sent a message that the best interests of the United States could not be dictated by the Security Council and the UN.

Sitting on its hands and refusing to exercise the veto, while the likes of Russia and China and Lebanon (which is currently a member of the Council) revel in a hate-filled denunciation of Israel, will diminish respect for the United States. The refusal to exercise the veto will be read as weakness, as will any attempt by the Obama administration to deflect criticism by claiming “the UN made me do it.” True, the Obama administration is closer to the UN – and to the UN’s fictional narrative of why there is no peace and democracy in the Arab world – than any previous US administration. But if the Obama administration lets the Security Council do its dirty work, Americans will feel cheated. The spectre of non-democratic thugs writing American foreign policy will appeal to very few on these shores. The good cop-bad cop routine will be transparent and the idea that the real friends of the United States are the non-democratic bullies at the UN won’t hold water.

For more United Nations coverage see www.EYEontheUN.org. .