Israel is resisting a proposed United Nations inquiry into what happened in Jenin refugee camp. It is quite right, says Tom Cooney, who argues that it suits the UN to blame Israel as it deflects from its own culpability in being an accomplice to Palestinian terrorism
For Israel, the Jenin operation was a necessary and proportionate response to deal with terrorism. The Palestinian Authority (PA) says there was a massacre there. Israel has agreed to allow a United Nations fact-finding team to collect "accurate information" about the operation, because it has nothing to hide. Israel should be wary of the UN's intervention.
The UN has rushed to judgment. Key UN officials have already found Israel guilty of war crimes. The UN Human Rights Commission (under Mary Robinson) condemned Israel for "mass killings" of Palestinians. Terje Larsen, the UN's Middle East special envoy, said: "What I saw is unbelievable. This is a sad, shameful chapter in Israel's history." He also described the scene as like "an earthquake". Peter Hansen, the director general of the UN Relief and Works Agency, declared: "It was hell in the camp, and we will not exaggerate if we say that a massacre was carried out there."
Larsen and Hansen should have examined both sides of the case and avoided exaggeration. From aerial photographs of Jenin it is obvious that the "refugee camp" is a small part of the city, and that the part of the camp which was destroyed was about 100 metres square. Larsen acknowledged the Palestinians' description of Jenin as their "suicide bomber capital", but he spread the allegation that Israel engaged in wanton killings and destruction.
The UN's moral rhetoric is perverse. Take this UN Human Rights Commission's assertion: "The international community cannot permit the indiscriminate killings of Israeli civilians or the wanton killings of Palestinian civilians." You would get the impression that there is a moral equivalence in the conflict.
When Palestinians massacre Israelis, their violence is "indiscriminate", as though more discriminate killings of Israelis are fine. But when Israelis defend themselves, as they are entitled to do under international law and basic morality, they perpetrate "wanton killings" and "wage war on civilian populations". One might as well say that a serial killer and a victim who defends herself against him have moral parity. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, showed an anti-Israel bias in how he organised the fact-finding mission to Jenin. At the outset he did not consult the Israelis on the composition of his fact-finding team. Then he implied the team would have a roving commission to investigate with a focus on Jenin to begin with, despite the fact that UN Security Council Resolution 1405 (2002) states that the team is "to develop accurate information about events in the Jenin refugee camp".
Next, he said that the team would arrive at conclusions in light of "accepted norms of international law". This arbitrary enlargement of the team's remit flies in the face of the resolution. It prepares the ground for a UN kangaroo court.
Annan appointed Cornelio Sommaruga, the former president of the International Red Cross, to the team. Sommaruga opposed admitting Magen David Adom (MDA), the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross, even though the Muslim Red Crescent was recognised.
When the head of the American Red Cross objected to this discrimination, he retorted: "If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?"
Annan has an animus against Israel. In 2000, he suppressed video evidence his staff had about the seizure and murder of Israeli soldiers by Hizbullah.
IT SUITS the UN to blame Israel in order to deflect attention from its own culpability in being an accomplice to Palestinian terrorism. The UN has responsibility for providing relief and social services to the Jenin camp. It allowed the camp to become the centre for suicide bombers. The terrorists use young people as bombers in violation of Article 38 of the UN Convention on Children's Rights. Yet neither Terje Larsen nor Peter Hansen spoke out.
The UN Human Rights Commission has failed to make the Palestinain Authority answerable for this abuse. Under the very eyes of the UN, Jenin became a terrorist military base, and jeopardised its status as a refugee camp. This quietism is complicity. It's not surprising, then, that the UN would fund a Palestinian map on which Israel does not exist.
The UN's title to be Israel's judge is questionable. The UN's complicity with Palestinian terrorism means that it is acting as a judge in its own cause. Its malice towards Israel is incompatible with the qualities an impartial fact-finder requires.
The UN has given the Palestinian Authority its apologia for its vicious campaign of terror against Israel. It has done this by distorting international legal principle to promote the notion that Israel is an occupying power in Palestinian territory. This enables Arafat's apologists (including those European states who allowed Europe's own Jewish civilisation to be liquidated) to assert that Israel's presence on the West Bank and Gaza is an offshoot of a desire to exert colonial power over Palestinian people.
This assertion is false. Israel's presence in those lands is the outcome of the 1967 war in which several Arab states set out to liquidate Israel and its people. Israel entered those areas lawfully in self-defence. Consider the West Bank area. Jordan occupied it from 1948 to 1967 as the outcome of an unlawful invasion. It acquired no title to the lands. When Jordan attacked Israel in 1967, Israel drove Jordan out of the West Bank and took control of the area. Under international law, Israel is entitled to hold those lands so long as the dictates of self-defence require.
Israel is entitled not to withdraw from the lands until proper measures are set in train to ensure that the area will not be used as a base to use force against it.
So Israel has a right to remain in control of the disputed territories involved, pending negotiation of a treaty of peace. UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 confirm a requirement for settlement by "negotiations between the parties". Israel has tried to negotiate such a treaty. Israel has transferred land to the Palestinians so that most Palestinians live under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. In July of 2000, at the Camp David Summit, Israel was prepared to go further, extending an offer that would have transferred virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians. Arafat rejected the offer and launched a terrorist war that continues to this very day.
THE UN has been racist in its approach to Israel. It persists in denying Israel full membership of the UN. Israel is the only state that cannot serve on the UN Security Council and is denied participation in pivotal UN committees. In September 2001, the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban was allowed to become a vicious hate-fest against Israel and Jews.
Moreover, the UN has enabled Arafat apologists to also claim that the settlement of Jews in West Bank and Gaza violates Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949). That provision forbids an "occupying power" from deporting or transferring part of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. Technically, the convention does not apply to the situation because the territory in question does not belong to any state party to the convention. But, substantively, Article 49 does not prohibit Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Jews have lived in settlements in the West Bank since ancient times. Their presence has not injured Arabs ethnically or economically. The appeal to Article 49 of the convention, which was adopted in response to Nazi policies to make their towns and cities judenrein, is now made at the UN to make the West Bank judenrein. The idea that Israel has an international legal obligation to "cleanse" the West Bank of Jews isan inversion of human rights values. (Jordan made it a death-penalty crime to sell land in the West Bank to Jews.) What is ignored is Israel's willingness to trade land for the settlements. What is most disturbing is the idea that the UN accepts that a new Palestine state should be free of Jews.
The UN has become the mouthpiece of Arab fascist regimes, who, although they have no conception of human rights, invoke human rights in their zeal to destroy Israel.
There is no evidence whatsoever of mass or wanton killing of civilians in Jenin camp. The Palestinian claim of hundreds of dead is a lie. The most intense house-to-house combat between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian terrorists took place in a confined area (about 100 metres square). The terrorists had rigged homes, alleyways, and the street with booby-trap bombs. The Israeli soldiers used bulldozers when the Palestinians were exploding entire three-storey buildings on the soldiers.
The anxiety must be that for the UN the truth of what happened at Jenin does not matter. Since the UN cannot base its findings on the lie about a massacre, its next option is to accuse Israel of "the excessive use of force", even though Israel showed remarkable restraint in its operation.
The UN's fact-finding should be stringently scrutinised. Will the team examine the build-up of a terrorist network in Jenin under UN eyes? Will it investigate the terrorist operations carried out against Israel from Jenin camp? Will it examine Arafat's failure to tackle terrorism in Jenin?
Israel is fighting for its life. On January 30th, 2001, Sakher Habash, on behalf of Arafat, said that the Jews "must be citizens in the state of the future": Palestine.
Arafat's terror tactics are intended to liquidate Israel. Only four weeks ago, Arafat said on Arab television: "To Jerusalem we march martyrs by the millions." This conflict is not about colonial occupation; it is about Israel's very right to exist.
Tom Cooney is a law lecturer in University College, Dublin, with an academic interest in international law and human rights issues