"Baseless Comparisons": UN Security Council Resolutions on Iraq and Israel

[A message to the Chicago-area Americans for Peace Now e-mail list, responding in part to a piece by Doni Remba. --Jeff Weintraub]

Friends,

Regarding the key UN Security Council resolutions that address the Arab-Israeli conflict, Dore Gold and Doni Remba are of course completely correct. The key points are buried, a bit too hurriedly, in this (excessively legalistic) passage from Dore Gold's piece.:

Two chapters of the UN Charter clarify the powers of the UN Security Council and its resolutions. Resolutions adopted under Chapter VI of the UN Charter - that deals with "Pacific Resolution of Disputes" - are implemented through a process of negotiation, conciliation, or arbitration between the parties to a dispute. UN Security Council Resolution 242 from November 1967 is a Chapter VI resolution which, when taken together with Resolution 338, leads to an Israeli withdrawal from territories (not all the territories) that Israel entered in the 1967 Six-Day War, by means of a negotiated settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The resolution is not self-enforced by Israel alone; it requires a negotiating process.

It is widely believed in the Arab world, and uncritically repeated by too many other people, that UN Security Resolutions 242 & 338 (the fundamental post-1967 resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict) simply require that Israel withdraw from lands seized in 1967. But this is just a myth--or, to put it more bluntly, bullshit. What these resolutions require is that Israel should give back territories seized in 1967 (with small adjustments) as part of negotiated peace agreements. That is, these requirements come into effect only if the relevant Arab countries formally make peace with Israel, on the basis of agreements--achieved through negotiations--that recognize Israel's right to exist and assure its security. (And, of course, it's worth remembering that Israel has already given back most of the land it seized in the 1967 war, as part of the peace treaty with Egypt.)

This is, of course, a totally different matter from the UN Security Council resolutions, back in 1990-1991, condemning Iraq's invasion of Kuwait as an act of aggression and demanding unconditional Iraqi withdrawal. The same holds for the terms of the peace agreement accepted by the Iraqi government after losing the war in 1991 (and codified in successive Security Council resolutions). No comparison.

Legality aside, the substantive moral issues are also completely different. But that's a much bigger discussion ....

=> A recent NYTimes op-ed piece by George Fletcher of the Columbia University Law School elaborates some of the relevant issues further ("Annan's Careless Language", NYTimes 3/21/2002, p. A37).

Shalom,
Jeff Weintraub

P.S. It should go without saying (but, just to avoid possible misunderstanding, I'll say it anyway) that none of this amounts to a blanket endorsement of Israeli policies since 1967, let alone the lunatic and self-destructive policy of permanent occupation of the West Bank & Gaza pursued by Likud governments for the last several decades. But it's important to separate the real issues from phony ones.

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Doni Remba wrote:

Friends,

While Dore Gold, the author of this brief article, is a right-winger, his analysis of the difference between UN Security Council resolutions on Israel and Iraq is entirely correct, and reflects points I've been making in response to this old Arab propaganda argument for some years now. I recently re-discovered that the claim that Israel is violating UN resolutions just like Iraq is was made by Edward Said in the NY Times eleven years ago before the original Persian Gulf War--I responded in a letter to the Times, which was published, but the points that Gold makes in this piece make the case even more effectively. The difference between UN Security Council resolutions, which are binding, and UN General Assembly resolutions, which are not, is critical, but Gold goes further by showing how radically different the resolutions are: the resolutions on Iraq (he neglects to note) often called for immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait, or immediate compliance with Security Council resolutions requiring elimination of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, or the immediate re-admittance of arms inspectors. They never involved a second party with whom Iraq was expected to negotiate, and no other party owed Iraq any special duties which had to be fulfilled as a condition for Iraqi compliance. This is not the case in the Arab-Israel conflict, where the Arab parties, including the Palestinians, have obligations under these resolutions (and under treaties they signed) to respect in practice the security and sovereignty of Israel, and to negotiate the terms of a peace agreement with it.

The deeper objection from the Arab side is that the reason for this difference in the way the UNSC treats Israel and Iraq has simply to do with the fact that the US is Israel's ally, whereas it is about as far from that as possible in the case of Iraq. There is of course truth in this, and Gold doesn't take up that debate. However, the difference in the nature of the resolutions pertaining to each country also reflects a fundamental difference in the issues. There's more to say about what those basic differences are, but I'll save that for another time. Gold's article refutes an all-too-common argument being raised against Israel by some, perhaps many, Arabs; I encountered this argument yesterday in a column by Chicago's Ray Hanania in the Daily Herald, a column in which Ray devotes considerable space to denouncing Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. Even moderates in the Palestinian and Arab communities raise this objection: it's worth knowing why the objection fails. Gold's article lays it out well.

Doni

Institute for Contemporary Affairs
founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation

JERUSALEM ISSUE BRIEF
Vol. 2, No. 7 24 September 2002
Baseless Comparisons: UN Security Council Resolutions on Iraq and IsraelDore Gold

Since Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the 1991 Gulf War that followed, Arab diplomats at the United Nations have charged the international community with a policy of "double standards" regarding UN actions against Iraq for failing to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. Thus, in the debate leading up to the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 1435, concerning Israel's presence in Ramallah, the representative of the Arab League charged on September 23, that the UN was pressing Iraq while ignoring Israeli violations of UN resolutions.1 Last May, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz complained that sanctions were imposed on Iraq for non-compliance but not on Israel.2

The effort by some Arab diplomats to draw comparisons between UN action on Israel and Iraq misses the fundamental differences between the different kinds of resolutions in the UN organization. First of all, there are UN General Assembly resolutions, non-binding recommendations that reflect the political currents in the world body. Then there are UN Security Council resolutions, which have their own hierarchy.

Chapter VI and Chapter VII Resolutions
Two chapters of the UN Charter clarify the powers of the UN Security Council and its resolutions. Resolutions adopted under Chapter VI of the UN Charter - that deals with "Pacific Resolution of Disputes" - are implemented through a process of negotiation, conciliation, or arbitration between the parties to a dispute. UN Security Council Resolution 242 from November 1967 is a Chapter VI resolution which, when taken together with Resolution 338, leads to an Israeli withdrawal from territories (not all the territories) that Israel entered in the 1967 Six-Day War, by means of a negotiated settlement between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The resolution is not self-enforced by Israel alone; it requires a negotiating process.

The most severe resolutions of the UN Security Council are those specifically adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter - that deal with "Threats to Peace, Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression." When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the UN Security Council adopted all its resolutions against Iraq under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. The implementation of those resolutions was not contingent on Iraqi-Kuwaiti negotiations, for Iraq engaged in a clear-cut act of aggression. Moreover, UN resolutions on Iraq are self-enforcing, requiring Iraq alone to comply with their terms. However, the UN recognized, under Article 42 of the UN Charter, the need for special military measures to be taken if a Chapter VII resolution is ignored by an aggressor.

It is noteworthy that in 1967, no UN body adopted a resolution branding Israel as the aggressor in the Six-Day War, despite Soviet efforts, for it was commonly accepted that Israeli actions were the result of a war of self-defense.

The debate over compliance with UN resolutions, however, has called attention to flagrant violations of Chapter VII resolutions on Iraq by Syria, which is ironically a member of the UN Security Council. Currently, all of Iraq's oil trade is under UN sanctions. UN Security Council Resolution 661 provided that no state was to trade in Iraqi oil; subsequently, the UN created, for humanitarian reasons, the oil-for-food program, which permitted Iraqi oil sales as long as the UN could strictly control the expenditure of any resulting oil revenues for food and medicine.

However, in the last two years, Syria has agreed to illegally pump Iraqi oil through its pipeline to the Mediterranean in violation of UN Chapter VII sanctions on Iraq. Syria is earning approximately $1 billion per year from this illegal trade that circumvents the UN oil-for-food program. Additionally by harboring known international terrorist organizations, like Hamas, Hizballah, and the Islamic Jihad, Syria is violating the specific terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted under Chapter VII of the UN Charter after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

The present effort to draw comparisons between Iraqi non-compliance with Chapter VII UN Security Council resolutions and UN Security Council resolutions on Israel under Chapter VI is baseless. This campaign may have been launched to divert attention away from other states like Syria, violating Chapter VII resolutions with respect to Iraq or with respect to the current American-led campaign against international terrorism.

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Notes

1. Julia Preston with James Bennet, "At U.N., U.S. Calls for End to the Siege of Arafat," New York Times, September 24, 2002.
2. Ewen MacAskill, "Iraq Hits at UN for Hypocrisy on Israel," Guardian, May 2, 2002.
3. Meir Rosenne, "Legal Interpretations of UNSC 242," in UN Security Council Resolution 242: The Building Black of Peacemaking (Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 1993), pp. 29-34.
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Dore Gold, Publisher; Lenny Ben-David, ICA Program Director; Mark Ami-El, Managing Editor. Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (Registered Amuta), 13 Tel-Hai St., Jerusalem, Israel; Tel. 972-2-5619281, Fax. 972-2-5619112, Email: jcpa@netvision.net.il. In U.S.A.: Center for Jewish Community Studies, 1515 Locust St., Suite 703, Philadelphia, PA 19102-3726; Tel. (215) 772-0564, Fax. (215) 772-0566. Website: http://www.jcpa.org/. © Copyright. The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.