The UN and the Mideast: History As Tragedy

The Middle East will be a topic for discussion at the 26th session of the United Nations General Assembly which opened today, but it will not be the priority topic. The United States has seen to this by injecting the admission into the UN of the Peoples Republic of China as the focal issue to preoccupy the various delegations. This move by the US, historically progressive and based on a multitude of economic and political considerations, is also a stratagem to keep the Middle East question in the background and in the back rooms for as long as possible to avoid a headon collision at the General Assembly between the involved parties.

The efforts to achieve a genuine and lasting peace in the Mideast will receive the divided attention of the delegates to the Assembly. Prospects that peace in the Mideast will be achieved by any Assembly action is as remote now as it was in the past. In fact, even more remote. Within a week of the opening of the Assembly, a number of developments transpired that reinforce this prospect. Jordan launched an attack in the Security Council against Israel for “Judaizing Jerusalem” as part of a plan to establish an “expanded Zionist empire.” Egypt downed an unarmed Israeli transport plane killing seven of its crewmen. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home visited Egypt where he declared that Israel should return to its mandatory boundaries as a prerequisite for peace.

Maurice Schumann deplored the latest Israeli-Egyptian clashes along the cease-fire lines and was expected to renew his demand for a Big Four intervention in the Mideast. At the same time, it was learned that an important diplomatic reshuffle in the ranks of France’s Foreign Ministry is expected to further weaken Israel’s positions and increase the influence of the pro-Arab lobby. UN General Secretary U Thant, in his annual report to the Assembly, said American efforts in the Mideast appeared to be a failure and warned that unless Israel changes its position on withdrawal there would be little purpose in reactivating Ambassador Gunnar V. Jarring’s peace mission.

ISRAEL ALONE HOLDS PRINCIPLED POSITION

It appears that the approach to any effective and lasting solution to peace in the Mideast will again take the form of pat formulas, stale platitudes, diplomatic maneuverings, backroom politics and long-winded rhetoric. Once again, Israel will have only itself – its eloquent and capable spokesmen, Foreign Minister Abba Eban and UN Ambassador Yosef Tekoah – to express and defend a clear and principled position for genuine Mideast peace. France and Britain, as usual, will be on the scene with too little and too late advice. Neither of these two nations can play an independent role in helping resolve the Mideast crisis. Both can be counted on to offer a few esoteric statements about the value of Big Four activity and/or the Jarring mission. But in the final analysis, they will remain junior partners in the US-USSR combine and acquiesce to whatever the two superpowers decide to do.

The Arab-African-Asian bloc will foam and bluster but they too will abide by whatever decisions are arrived at between the US and USSR. For this bloc, least of all, has the power to play an independent role in the Assembly deliberations especially if the Soviet Union appears amenable to a compromise with the US on a Mideast peace course. Jordan is already isolated from the other Arab states as a result of its military actions against the Palestinian terrorists. Egypt is trying desperately to show that it can go it alone if necessary. The downing of the Israeli transport plane was one more effort to prove this. But this escapade and Egyptian President Sadat’s this-is-the-year-month-week-day-of-decision rhetoric has failed to convince anyone that Egypt is ready and capable of launching an independent full-scale war against Israel.

US-USSR HOLD KEY TO MIDEAST PEACE

The key to resolving the Middle East crisis is the behind-the-scenes efforts by the US and USSR to reach a detente in the Middle East. The US is anxious to regain its economic and political foothold in the oil and natural gas economies of the Arab nations which have threatened or have actually embarked on an economic boycott. The US views the Arab nations as a vast potential market for regaining and expanding its international trade and thereby shoring up its own domestic faltering economy. The USSR, beset by economic and political troubles at home caused partially by a balking working class rebelling against the inordinate expenditures for Russian aid to Egypt, and internationally by the ever increasing role of mainland China in the sphere of international politics, desperately wants to head off an incursion by its giant neighbor into the politics of the Middle East.

ISRAEL FACES ANOTHER BETRAYAL

Two developments point to the possibility that the US and USSR are preparing another Yalta-Potsdam agreement to carve out spheres of influence in the Mideast to their mutual benefit as they did in Europe at the end of World War II. The US has, so far, refused to sell Phantom jets to Israel despite bipartisan support for the sale of jets, and continues to make political and economic inroads into Egypt through the office of its unofficial ambassador Donald C. Bergus. The Soviet Union is unofficially wooing Israel by permitting a trickle of Jewish emigration and by inviting Israeli scientists and intellectuals to Soviet scientific congresses. In short, the US appears to be less benign toward Israel and the USSR less bellicose. But each is cynically disregarding the needs for a real peace in the Middle East that will assure Israel’s Security.

There is an old bromide that history repeats itself twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. As the 26th session of the General Assembly gets under way, the tragic element dominates. Now, as before, Israel’s plea for peace will be dissolved and ignored in the geopolitics of the superpowers. Israeli lives hang in the balance as the US and USSR play out their game of international charades. The end result may very well be that the two superpowers will impose a solution by compelling Israel to withdraw to its pre-June 1967 borders. Once again the UN General Assembly will be an impotent debating society in the sphere of international politics. And once again, Israel will be caught in the squeeze play between the US and USSR. All out war may be averted at least for the immediate period ahead, but so will all out peace. In this kind of unstable situation Israel will once again be the real loser.