An intensive campaign by Israel, which was aided by the United States, Holland, Norway, Britain, Nigeria and Uganda, to exclude an anti-Israel document form the World Conference of the UN Decode for Women in Copenhagen next July, failed here last week.
Ambassador Ovodia Soffer, head of the International Organization Division of the Israel Foreign Ministry, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in a special interview that he came here from Israel in an effort to have the Preparatory Committee for the Women’s Conference reject a request by the Palestine Liberation Organization to include in the conference anti-Zionist measures linking the treatment of Palestinian women by Israel with apartheid.
He said that he “struggled here for four days” last week to thwart the PLO efforts — but to no avail. “The PLO is running the show at the UN, and despite the support we received form the U.S. and some West European countries we could not defeat them,” Soffer said.
According to Soffer, who represented Israel at the UN for a few years prior to assuming his new past in Jerusalem, the Preparatory Committee accepted a request by the PLO to include in the Copenhagen conference two documents adopted by the Economic Commission for Western Asia (ECWA) — an anti-Israel body that accepted the PLO as a member but refused to accept Israel — last December. One document, Soffer said, calls for measures to assist Palestinian women. The other ECWA document calls for a new review of the “political situation” of the Palestinian women.
Noting that the international conference in Copenhagen is an extremely important conclave that will be attended by such notables as Aliza Begin, Jihan Sadat and Rosalynn Carter, Soffer warned that unless “the Western world will mount a meaningful opposition to the politicization of the Copenhagen conference it will play into the hands of the PLO, which will drag it into the complexities of the Mideast conflict and hamper the tremendous work that was invested by the entire international community to work out modalities for the improvement of the status of women.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
