By Marcus Gee The Globe and Mail November 28, 2003
Liran Zer-Aviv was getting excited about his approaching fourth birthday party when his family took him out to lunch at a well-known restaurant in the Israeli city of Haifa last month. As they ate, a young Palestinian woman walked into the restaurant packed with other families and detonated a suicide bomb. Liran and his parents were killed. So were his baby sister and his grandmother.
Just days after, far away in New York, Egypt proposed a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly. The resolution decried the suffering of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli military, but said nothing about Liran or the scores of other Israeli children killed and maimed by Palestinian suicide bombers and terrorists.
That gave the Israelis an idea. For years, Israel had sat by as the UN condemned its various sins; it spoke against all the resolutions aimed at the Jewish state but seldom if ever proposed any of its own. Every year, the General Assembly passes about 20 resolutions against Israel, far more than it directs at any other country. This time, Israel decided to fight back. It proposed a resolution, its first since 1976, decrying the suffering of Israeli children in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Israeli resolution closely matched the wording of the Palestinian one, simply replacing the words "Palestinian children" with "Israeli children."
The Palestinians and their allies were outraged. They called the resolution a dirty trick and used their voting bloc in the assembly to attach amendments that emasculated it. So, on Wednesday, Israel withdrew the resolution. Israeli ambassador Dan Gillerman called it "a shameful day for the United Nations, a sad day for humanity."
It is hard to disagree with that. The consistent discrimination against Israel at the United Nations is a dark stain on the reputation of the world body. Whatever its crimes or misdemeanours, Israel draws far more criticism at the UN than it warrants. The UN helped create Israel when it passed a resolution calling for the partition of the Holy Land between Arabs and Jews in 1947. But at least since 1967, when the Six-Day War changed Israel's image from victim to victor, the UN has been consistently anti-Israel.
About a quarter of all the rebukes issued by the UN Human Rights Commission are aimed at Israel, while dictatorial countries such as Iran are rarely criticized and countries such as Libya are even invited to chair the body. Until May, 2000, Israel was kept out of the UN system of clubs known as regional groupings, an exclusion that meant it could not serve on the UN's most powerful organ, the Security Council.
As the Israeli government officially complains: "Israel is the object of more investigative committees, special representatives and rapporteurs than any other state in the UN system." At the height of anti-Israeli feeling at the UN, the General Assembly voted to equate Zionism with racism. Just two years ago, at a UN conference in Durban, South Africa, the anti-Israel lobby again raised that ugly charge.
All of this has consequences. As a result of its consistent prejudice against Israel, the United Nations has played no substantial role in the effort to make peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. Any time anyone suggests a UN intervention in the dispute, Israel quite understandably protests. How could it possibly trust the UN to supervise an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, for example?
Though Israel's resolution on children failed in the end, that very failure brilliantly exposed the UN's double standard in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Until last year, UN resolutions on children had always condemned the suffering of children everywhere, without singling out any particular group. Palestinian diplomats said they singled out Palestinian children because they suffer more, under Israeli occupation, than "any other children in the world." And, indeed, Palestinian children have suffered severely as the fighting has escalated.
But what of the Israeli children? More than 100 like Liran Zer-Aviv have been killed since the start of the latest Palestinian uprising three years ago. Unlike the Palestinians, they were often deliberately targeted for death by bombers who went to places where they knew there would be children, like family restaurants, pizza parlours and discotheques. In one infamous case last year, Palestinian gunmen burst into an Israeli home and killed a five-year-old girl as she hid under her parents' bed.
By rejecting the Israeli resolution, the United Nations General Assembly has declared to the world that that girl's death does not matter. More important, it has declared once again its deep bias against the state of Israel.
