oldie but a goodie.

UN drops debate on Zionism

Correspondents Report - Sunday, 2 September , 2001 8:13

Reporter: Tim Palmer

HAMISH ROBERTSON: After frantic moves by UN leaders - including Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson - as well as threats from Israel and the United States, the UN's Racism Summit in Durban has, as expected, dropped a debate over whether Zionism equals racism.

It's the issue that, in the past, helped generate a widely held view in Israel that the United Nations is anti-Israel and, for some time, anti-Semitic. Killing off the contentious debate may stop immediate friction, but as Tim Palmer reports, the United Nations is still battling Israeli antipathy to its involvement in any peace moves in the troubled region:

TIM PALMER: In the past few weeks, the United Nations has watched one of its great successes - East Timor - and watched one of its most long running disappointments - its involvement, or lack of it, in the Middle East, continue.

Even as voters filed in excitement into voting booths in Dili, in Israel there was nothing but hostility towards the UN. There were more complaints about the United Nation's handling of the Israeli-Lebanon border - specifically, what Israel says is the UN's decision to dismantle a peacekeeper force checkpoint in a disputed part of the frontier, where Hezbollah is moving in.

Many Israelis are angry at what they say was a botched investigation and a cover-up by the UN in its knowledge of the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah last year. Right wingers have even accused UN forces of being directly involved in that kidnapping. Jewish settlers have attacked and beaten UN workers driving on West Bank roads, accusing them of being anti-Semitic.

And Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has ignored the United Nations Middle East peace envoy, Terje Larsen, refusing to meet him in seven months in office.

Part of the history of Israel's antipathy to the UN lies in the number of anti-Israel resolutions passed in the United Nations. Included in those, of course, are the key resolutions cited by the Palestinians now about the return of lands occupied by Israel, and the rights of Palestinian refugees.

But the single resolution that has cemented Israeli mistrust of the UN was passed in 1975 - and equated Zionism with racism. It wasn't dropped until 1991, and the UN knew exactly the harm that would be caused if a similar debate was resurrected at this week's Durban racism conference.

So too did the Palestinian Authority, it seems. In Durban, Yasser Arafat may have accused Israel of ethnic cleansing - but in a statement put forward by a Palestinian minister, Nabil Sha'ath, it was made quite clear that the authority wasn't going to support attempts to drag the founding philosophy of Israel, Zionism, into the racism arena.

A renewed "Zionism equals racism" debate would have united Israelis against the UN. Even left wingers who support Zionism, like those in the Rabbis for Human Rights group, say the suggestion that Zionism is inherently racist is wrong.

Yes, Israel has simply taken land from Arab Israelis to give to Jews, and yes, Arab Israelis are discriminated against in education, employment, health and many other areas of Israeli life. And yes, Israeli police are looking increasingly unable to explain why they shot dead 13 Arabs in riots last year.

But that's the conduct of government, says Rabbis for Human Rights' founder David Forman, it's not rooted in the idea of Zionism itself.

That argument won't convince Palestinian proponents of the "Zionism equals racism" move, and they point to the practical outcome of Zionism in present day Israel. Tens of thousands of Russian Jews with no previous contact with Israel can simply come to live there under the Zionist Law of Return, while millions of Palestinian refugees - those who lived on that land before the last century's wars - and their children - are locked out.

And of course, that anger and ignorance of the difference between the political philosophy and religion and race means that the argument in some Palestinian and Arab sectors then extends from "Zionism equals racism" to the intolerable argument that "Judaism equals racism."

Not that their opponents are asleep in that area - an equally odious petition - that "Islam equals racism" is alive and kicking on the Internet, timed to match the planned debate against Zionism at Durban.

In the end, the removal of the Zionism/racism debate from the agenda at Durban may stop some Israelis concluding that the UN is anti-semitic. But most will still see it as anti-Israel. Kofi Annan remains here a tolerated but largely ignored and mistrusted figure.

Right now, few Israelis would accept the idea of the UN or other international observers entering the Palestinian conflict - even if the Security Council were ever to back such a move. They think the UN's conduct in Lebanon is pointless and suspicious, and further ahead, most would rather Israel keep the Jordan valley under its control, than see an international force patrol the border with Jordan under the kind of land for peace deal being discussed at Camp David last year. And without some level of trust in the UN emerging in Israel, those practical steps needed to reach peace will be hard to put in place.

In Jerusalem, this is Tim Palmer for Correspondents' Report.