Security Council Discusses Action in Aftermath of Temple Mount Clash

Members of the Security Council negotiated here Tuesday over an Arab-proposed resolution that would send a three-member delegation to “examine the current situation in Jerusalem” after 19 Arabs were killed Monday in riots on the Temple Mount.

In Jerusalem, Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told reporters his country would not permit a Security Council delegation to undertake such a mission, a stand Israel has taken in the past.

But Israel has allowed emissaries of the U.N. secretary-general to undertake fact-finding missions in the administered territories.

With this in mind, the United States late Tuesday proposed an alternative Security Council resolution that would “welcome” a decision by Secretary-General Javier Perez de Cuellar to send such an emissary to Jerusalem and the territories.

According to Israeli sources, the American draft resolution also contains language that is more balanced than that floated by the Arabs. It criticizes the Palestinian rock-throwers as well as the Israeli forces who fired on the rioting crowds.

While the behind-the-scenes wrangling over the various proposed U.N. actions was expected to continue late into Tuesday evening, one thing had already become clear on the floor of the Security Council chamber by midday: The events on the Temple Mount have been a boon to the cause of Arab unity.

Arab nations that had been trading bitter remarks over the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait have put their differences aside long enough to blast Israel for its handling of the Temple Mount disturbances.

TOUGH ANTI-ISRAEL RHETORIC

Representatives from Kuwait, Egypt and Iraq all accused Israel of desecrating Moslem holy places. They said the United States should allow the Security Council to act as decisively against Israel as it had against Saddam Hussein.

The Arab representatives extended their rhetoric to blaming Israel for the current strife in the Persian Gulf. Egyptian Ambassador Amre Moussa called Israel’s presence in the administered territories “the source of all ills in the Middle East.”

Iraqi envoy Sabah Kadrat declared that “the main reason of the lack of security in the Middle East is Zionist expansionism.”

The Kuwaiti foreign minister, Sheik Sahal al-Alhamad al-Jaber al-Sabah, repeatedly compared the plight of his country under Iraqi occupation to the Palestinians.

Overlooking recent expressions of Palestinian support for Saddam Hussein, the Kuwaiti official pledged that although his people were “passing through a very similar experience, through a brutal occupation,” they “will never let down the Palestinian people.”

The sharpest anti-Israel rhetoric during Tuesday’s debate came from Syria, which charged that the Israeli “massacre” on the Temple Mount was “arranged very carefully.”

In addition to addressing violence against Palestinians, the Security Council should take action to “put an end to the mass immigration of Soviet Jews,” said the Syrian envoy, Dia-allah el-Fattal.

The Security Council session on the situation in the administered territories was first convened, at the request of Yemen, last Friday, before the incident at the Temple Mount.

U.N. sources said the meeting had been convened to bring the Palestinian issue out of the shadows of the Persian Gulf conflict and back into the international spotlight.

Monday’s clash on the Temple Mount succeeded in doing that at the United Nations, and not only in the Security Council chamber.

Perez de Cuellar issued a statement saying he was “shocked and greatly dismayed by the bloodshed and by what appears to have been an excessive use of force by the Israeli authorities.”

The secretary-general said the incident was “a tragic illustration of the dangers inherent in the stalemate that has far too long characterized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

(JTA correspondent David Landau in Jerusalem contributed to this report.)