One Minute to Midnight Dr. Irving Moskowitz NEW MIDDLE EAST? IT'S THE SAME OLD U.N. The Peres government is up in arms over the United Nations report accusing it of deliberately shelling Lebanese civilians at Kana, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations has issued an angry statement blasting the U.N. for its bias. Of course the Israeli government is correct to denounce the U.N., and the Presidents Conference is right on target when it says that the U.N. has not yet "thrown off the shackles of past prejudices and political biases," and is still "seeking any pretext to condemn Israel." But the irony is that until the Kana incident, the Peres government and the Presidents Conference, faithful follower of the Peres line, were insisting that the United Nations had thrown off the shackles of prejudice and bias. Along with the "New Middle East" that Peres has propounded, a "new United Nations" had supposedly emerged, one in which Israel was now accepted as a partner, not a pariah. Even when the U.N. persisted in passing anti-Israel resolutions, Peres and his loyalists refused to concede that there was a serious problem. Even when the U.N. General Assembly overwhelmingly supported resolutions calling Israeli administration of Jerusalem "illegal" and demanding unilateral Israeli surrender of the

Golan Heights, earlier this year, Peres and thePresidents Conference were silent. And sometimes they were worse than silent. Last year, Morris Abram, chairman of the Geneva-based group "U.N. Watch," issued a critique of the U.N.'s continuing anti-Israel behavior. Reaction from the Peres government was swift and angry. An unnamed "Israeli official at the U.N." contacted reporters to blast Abram as "a one man show" and a "member of the old school." The press secretary for Israel's Mission to the U.N., Avner Tavori, declared that "his portrayal of the U.N.'s response more closely resembles the situation in 1975 than 1995 and certainly does not reflect the improvement in relations between Israel and the U.N. since 1993." And the Israeli ambassador to the U.N., Gad Ya'acobi, joined the attacks on Abram, insisting that "There are encouraging signs that the relationship has already undergone a dramatic improvement." The mirage of "improvement in relations" and "encouraging signs" has vanished with the U.N.'s unfounded Kana report. The U.N. assault on Israel's self-defense action in Lebanon --without any mention whatsoever of the Hezbollah attacks that provoked it--is vintage U.N. Israel-bashing, circa, say, 1975. It is understandable that Labor Party officials and appointees felt obliged to defend the United Nations. After all, the idea that the world now accepts Israel was a crucial selling point in the marketing of the Oslo accords to Israeli Jewry and the Diaspora. But at Kana, the illusion has crumbled. There is no new Middle East, no new United Nations, just the same old hatred of Israel that will surely persist as long as Israel simply exists.

Americans for A Safe Israel
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Outpost               - 12 -               May 1996