Nations United Against Israel

Clifford May

Egypt, Bahrain, and Yemen are in turmoil. In Libya, Col. Moammar Gaddafi is using mercenaries to slaughter peaceful protestors. Hezbollah is staging a slow-motion coup in Lebanon. Iran’s rulers are executing dissidents daily, developing nuclear weapons, and sending warships through Suez. The response of the United Nations to these many threats to global peace and security? Condemn Israel! Is there anything else the U.N. does as often or as well? Here’s how it went down this time: At the urging of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, temporary Security Council member Lebanon — a nation, as noted, increasingly ruled by Hezbollah, the Iranian-funded terrorist group that in 1983 murdered 241 American servicemen in Beirut — sponsored a resolution condemning Israel for constructing “illegal settlements.”

In other words, the issue that the U.N. considers most critical in the world at this hinge moment in history is that Israelis have been building homes on land the Palestinians want — and might be able to have if they were prepared to negotiate a peace treaty with Israelis.

On Thursday, 110 members of Congress sent a letter to the Obama administration asking that it veto this latest attempt to delegitimize Israel, a democratic ally that has taken serious steps “to bring peace to the region.” Those steps included a ten-month moratorium on new housing in the West Bank, which Israelis hoped would bring Palestinians back to the negotiating table. But why should Palestinians negotiate if they can get the U.N. to force Israel to make concessions in exchange for nothing?

In the end and to its credit, the Obama administration did veto the resolution. But Ambassador Susan Rice did not even attempt to suggest how hypocritical, counterproductive, and just plain deranged it is for the U.N. to ignore the crimes being committed by Islamist terrorists and Arab despots while demanding that Israelis surrender territory — taken in a defensive war — to those who remain committed to their extermination.

Instead, Rice meekly conceded that the U.S. agrees “about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,” adding that the resolution was nevertheless “unwise.”

A more honest and courageous U.S. ambassador to the U.N. — John Bolton, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan spring to mind — would have stated clearly that this resolution is a shameful attempt to deflect attention from real crises while enhancing Abbas’s position within the Arab and Muslim worlds. He can take America’s money and spit in America’s eye? What a guy!

Perhaps Ambassador Rice would benefit from spending more time on these issues and less, as my FDD colleague Claudia Rosett has reported, lecturing Americans on “Why America Needs the United Nations.” Since when did the job description of an American ambassador to the U.N. including marketing the U.N. to the taxpayers who subsidize the U.N.?

But I digress. The more important point is this: The U.N.’s leadership and most of its members are not remotely interested in securing peace anywhere. And there is no Palestinian leader who will or even can make peace with Israel so long as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Arab League, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and similar groups are calling the shots — in many instances literally.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and the theocratic rulers of Iran have been candid: Creation of a Palestinian state is, at best, a secondary goal. Their primary objective is the defeat and destruction of the world’s only Jewish state. No serious person can still believe the core issue is housing in the West Bank, also known as Judea and Samaria, territories that have never been part of a Palestinian state — because there has never been a Palestinian state — territories occupied by Jordan from 1949 until 1967, when Jordan, Egypt, and other Arab nations launched a conventional war intended to wipe Israel off the map.

Islamists cannot accept the existence of a nation led by infidels in a part of the world targeted for religious cleansing, the imposition of sharia, and the establishment of a modern caliphate — one that is to be oil-rich, nuclear-armed, and dedicated to diminishing American power globally and permanently.

Were Arab and Muslim nations willing to tolerate Israel’s existence — not love Israelis, just tolerate them — negotiating borders would be a piece of cake. In the absence of such tolerance, it would be a mistake for Israel to surrender another square inch of soil — as its earlier withdrawals from southern Lebanon (where Hezbollah has installed thousand of missiles under the noses of U.N. “peacekeepers”) and Gaza (from which thousands of missiles have been launched at Israeli villages) have demonstrated to all but the delusional (a substantial percentage of the international foreign-policy community).

Israel also turned over the Sinai to Egypt in return for a peace treaty signed by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat. His assassination at the hands of a Muslim Brotherhood splinter group soon followed. Three decades later, that peace treaty may be scrapped by whichever government comes to power in Egypt in the days ahead. That does not imply that another war with Egypt is imminent or even inevitable. It does imply that Israel cannot depend for its survival on pieces of paper signed by dictators. How often do free peoples need to be taught that lesson?

— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism and Islamism.