Arab representatives lobbied member nations here Monday and Tuesday in order to gather support for calling a special session of the General Assembly to address the situation in Israel’s administered territories.
If such a session is convened, the Arabs are expected to introduce a resolution calling on the United Nations to dispatch troops to the territories to “protect” Palestinians from Israeli forces.
An Arab attempt to send a U.N. observer team to the West Bank and Gaza Strip was foiled two weeks ago when the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution-calling for such action.
The measure would have sent a delegation of three Security Council members to the territories to assess the situation and report back to the council.
The strategy by which the General Assembly session would be called is known as “uniting for peace.”
In order to convene the session, other nine members of the Security Council or a majority of all U.N. members would have to vote in favor.
The U.S. State Department is not commenting directly on whether it would support the convening of a special General Assembly session. “Such a proposal remains hypothetical,” a department official said in Washington.
But the official pointed out that the United States believes the office of secretary-general Javier Perez de Cellular, not the Security Council or the General Assembly, is the proper conduit for dealing with the situation in the territories.
“The U.S. government supports the dispatching of a special emissary of the U.N. secretary-general to check on the situation and report back to the secretary-general,” the official said.
Israeli Ambassador Johanan Bein called the move for a General Assembly meeting “another exercise of the Arab group only intended to coerce Israel and to further inflame the inhabitants of the territories. It is completely counterproductive.”
Asked about U.S. support for sending a representative from the secretary-general’s office, Bein noted that “the government of Israel has accepted special emissaries of the secretary-general in the past.”
He said, however, that each proposal for an emissary was weighed on its individual merits.
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.
