The Frequent Abstainers Club

The UN’s relentless anti-Israel bias, so aptly described by Anne Bayefsky in these pages last Friday, sometimes appears as inevitable as death and taxes. Yet a survey of the Security Council’s voting record over the last 15 years reveals that there has in fact been a slight, but potentially significant, improvement. And that improvement is largely thanks to a new policy adopted by U.S. President George Bush.

For years, the U.S. has vetoed resolutions that it deemed too biased against Israel. But during the late 1980s and 1990s, Washington was unable to sway any other council member to its side: With monotonous regularity, such resolutions failed by a vote of 14-1.

Over the last four years, however, there has been a shift: While no country has yet joined the U.S. in voting “no,” there have consistently been two to four abstentions – usually from Europe, occasionally from Africa as well. Since Security Council resolutions need nine votes to pass, this means that the council has been inching toward a situation in which anti-Israel resolutions could be defeated even without an American veto.

Bush achieved this shift by setting a clear, consistent standard for what constitutes bias: Condemnations of Israel are biased unless the resolution also condemns anti-Israel terror. And, more importantly, vague condemnations of “all violence against civilians” do not qualify: The resolution must explicitly condemn Palestinian perpetrators such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

That is such a simple and reasonable demand that some countries have found it impossible to ignore. Yet the Palestinians, and hence the Arab countries that sponsor Security Council resolutions on their behalf, have never once been willing to agree. The result is that a handful of nations that once voted consistently against Israel – England, Germany, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria and Cameroon – turned into frequent abstainers.

John Danforth, Washington’s current ambassador to the UN, provided an eloquent example of how the new system works during last week’s debate on the latest anti-Israel resolution, which would have condemned Israel’s current military operation in Gaza and demanded that it cease immediately.

Danforth did not say that the U.S. was unwilling in principle to condemn the operation, which began after Hamas killed two Israeli children in Sderot with a Qassam rocket launched from Gaza on September 29. That would have been unacceptable to every other Security Council member, and therefore counterproductive. Instead, he explained in detail why the resolution was unbalanced as it stood and what would have to be added to make it acceptable to the U.S.

The resolution, he said in addresses to the council on Monday and Tuesday, “tends to put the blame on Israel and absolves terrorists in the Middle East – people who shoot rockets into civilian areas, people who are responsible for killing children, Hamas. Nothing was said in this resolution about that problem.”

Specifically, he said, “it does not mention even one of the 450 Qassam rocket attacks launched against Israel over the past two years … It does not mention the two Israeli children who were outside playing last week when a rocket suddenly crashed into their young bodies. It does not mention the undisputed fact that Qassam rockets have no military purpose – that they are crude, imprecise devices of terror designed to kill civilians. It does not mention that Hamas took ‘credit’ for killing these Israeli children and maiming many other Israeli civilians … It does not mention that the terrorists hide among Palestinian civilians, provoking their deaths, and then use those deaths as fodder for their hatred, lawlessness, and efforts to derail the peace process. It does not mention the complete failure of the Palestinian authority to meet its commitments to establish security among its people. It does not mention any of these facts, nor does it acknowledge the legitimate need for Israel to defend itself.”

Bluntly accusing the council of acting “as the adversary of the Israelis and cheerleader to the Palestinians,” he charged that the resolution “would be a very terrible statement for the Security Council to make,” because it effectively acquiesced in terror against Israelis by failing to condemn it. “Silence indicates consent,” he said. “The silence here today is deafening.”

In essence, all Danforth asked was that the resolution not implicitly condone terrorism by failing even to mention the specific terrorist act that sparked the Gaza operation. That is a demand that would be difficult for any civilized nation to reject – and Britain, Germany and Romania, acknowledging its justice, therefore decided to abstain.

There are, as Saul Singer noted in these pages on Friday, other steps that the U.S. could and should be taking in an effort to reshape the UN’s attitude toward terror – and not only with regard to terror against Israel. Indeed, one need only look at the list of countries that had no qualms about voting “yes” on last week’s resolution to realize just how much remains to be done: They included two key European nations, France and Spain; two countries, Russia and the Philippines, that have themselves suffered devastating terror attacks, and could therefore be expected to understand how much is at stake; and two Latin American countries, Brazil and Chile, that, as democracies, could also have been expected to uphold basic standards of decency.

Nevertheless, Bush has made an important start with his new policy on anti-Israel resolutions. And for that, he deserves full credit.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post on October 12, 2004