Delegitimizing Israel
What the Mideast conflict has wrought.
NRO
— Saul Singer is editorial-page editor of the Jerusalem Post and author of Confronting Jihad: Israel's Struggle and the World After 9/11.
The words "collateral damage" bring to mind laconic American or Israeli military briefers lamenting the unintentional victims of their operations. Rarely considered, however, is the collateral damage not of a missile, but of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a whole. It is vast, and unlike its military counterpart, its victims are largely responsible for inflicting it.
For example, the world has come to accept the U.N.'s undisguised bias against Israel as a normal part of the political landscape. It is assumed that this quirk of international relations is a problem only for its intended victim, Israel. "Unfair perhaps," the nations of the world say to themselves, "but all for a good cause — to help those downtrodden Palestinians."
That indulging terror has hurt, not helped, the Palestinians should by now be fairly obvious. Less clear is how the international community can be so oblivious to the terrible impact the anti-Israel obsession has had on the causes of human rights, freedom, and world peace.
The most extreme case of this was the recent decision by the U.N. General Assembly to refer the case of Israel's security fence to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The question at hand was not really the fence, but whether the Arab bloc, having transformed everything from the U.N. Human Rights Commission to the Durban anti-racism conference into anti-Israel vehicles, would be able to do the same to the ICJ.
Luckily, a quasi-rebellion was sparked among the usual suspects, so that instead of the typical near-unanimous vote, the measure failed to receive an absolute majority among the 189 member states. In what Israel termed a "moral victory," the vote was 90 in favor, 8 against, with 74 abstentions, including most of Europe.
While the European community mumbled something about the ICJ not being the appropriate forum to duke out the Arab-Israeli conflict, it was left to Singapore and Uganda, of all countries, to say what many nations evidently believed. To establish his bona fides, the Singaporean ambassador began by pointing out that he had voted for the Palestinian position on all 17 anti-Israel resolutions that had passed in the last U.N. session. But "as a small state," the ambassador explained impudently, "we rely upon the integrity of international law, of which the ICJ is one of the most important pillars... This should be settled by negotiation among the parties concerned."
Similarly, the Ugandan ambassador said that rather than going to the court, the road map "should be given a chance." Resolutions that "condemn one side would only harden attitudes" and "would not serve the cause of peace." Finally he warned against "politicizing the court" and accused resolution proponents of "forum shopping when there is already a mechanism to address the issue."
It is a measure of how corrupted such forums have become that so many countries — even those clearly opposed to the politicization of yet another international institution — could not bring themselves to lift their hands to stop it, even when their own interests were at stake. But what explanation is there for the silence among the non-governmental community, which claims to care about international law and human rights?
In southern Sudan, for example, over two million people have died in a civil war raging since 1983. Over the years some 40 aid agencies have operated in the region to help the five million people who live there, some 80 percent of whom have been displaced by the war. The agencies have begged someone — the U.N., Europe, anyone — to get involved in resolving the conflict rather than just sending food. In one such call in late 1998, for example, the U.S. Committee for Refugees warned that the Sudanese government was systematically blocking food shipments in a "deliberate strategy...to depopulate large parts of southern Sudan."
Yet even with these very real human-rights abuses, who gets hauled before a "special emergency session" of the U.N., the U.N. Human Rights Commission, and now the ICJ? Israel, for building a fence to stop suicide bombers. Israelis, naturally, tend to focus on the unfairness of this. But where are Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch as all the air gets sucked out of international aid institutions, which have almost no time for anything but Israel-bashing?
The primary collateral damage of the Arab-Israeli conflict is that it has given tyrants the world over a breather, and disenfranchised millions who look to the international community for survival and defense. By helping the ICJ to punt rather than decide against Israel, NGOs and governments have a rare chance to save one limb of the international body. Those who miss this opportunity are complicit not only in a campaign by tyrannies to delegitimize a besieged democracy, but also in an effort that, by gutting the international system, creates a convenient distraction for human-rights abusers the world over.
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