AJC Issues Annual Report On Unfair Treatment Of Israel At UN - A Subject Of Talks With More Than 50 Countries

American Jewish Committee
Friday, 1 October 1999

Israel over the past 12 months remained the object of "obsessive" and "relentless" criticism in the United Nations, undercutting the Arab-Israeli peace process and undermining UN credibility, according to the American Jewish Committee's annual report on discrimination against Israel at the UN.

The report, One-Sided: The Continuing Campaign Against Israel at the United Nations, provides a detailed review of the more than 20 resolutions adopted by the General Assembly this past year regarding Israel, as well as tables of how each member country voted on each resolution.

"The General Assembly continues to serve as a forum for one-sided criticism of Israel in its approach to issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict," said AJC President Bruce M. Ramer. "The relentless focus on Israel remains unparalleled in its size, scope, persistence and intensity."

Mr. Ramer, who testified in July before Congress on the treatment of Israel at the UN, added: "There is barely a body in the UN system that has not been co-opted or terrorized into adopting a resolution, special procedure, agenda item or mechanism that singles out Israel and Israel alone."

Mr. Ramer's testimony, in which he sets forth a six-point plan to reverse the UN's unfair treatment of Israel, is included in One-Sided.

In addition to One-Sided, the American Jewish Committee published a full-page ad in The New York Times on September 22, to highlight the fact that Israel is the only one of 188 member countries that is ineligible to serve on the Security Council because of its exclusion from one of the five regional groups in the UN.

The AJC has spearheaded the campaign to secure temporary membership for Israel in the Western European and Others Group to rectify this longstanding injustice.

U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, addressing a meeting of national Jewish organizational leaders in New York earlier this week, applauded the AJC effort to press for fair treatment of Israel at the UN, adding that she has brought the recent AJC ad to her meetings with European foreign ministers.

"The American Jewish Committee has advanced the WEOG issue significantly with its outstanding ad. We have used it constructively in our discussions," Secretary Albright said.

In private meetings with heads of state or foreign ministers of more than 50 countries during the past two weeks, American Jewish Committee leaders have raised concerns about the treatment of Israel at the UN.

According to One-Sided, "States outside the Middle East and supportive of the peace process, were, in the main, acquiescent in or approving of thesingularly discriminatory and divisive measures adopted by the General Assembly in its 1998-99 session."

AJC's comprehensive review of UN General Assembly activity concludes that, notwithstanding an active Arab-Israeli peace process, the world body "remains the political forum of choice for the Palestinians," writes Jason Isaacson, Director of AJC's Office of Government and International Affairs, in the report's foreword.

As in previous years, the General Assembly in its 1998-99 session "continued to disregard the spirit of the 1991 Madrid peace conference on the Middle East and the 1993 Oslo accord between Israel and the Palestinians - a spirit of direct bilateral negotiations in which the region's disputes are to be settled without international interference," the AJC report states.

The AJC report includes an analysis of this year's session of the UN Commission on Human Rights prepared by Felice Gaer, director of AJC's Jacob Blaustein Institute for the Advancement of Human Rights, who has served as a public member of the US delegation to the UN Commission on Human Rights since 1994.

"Over 30 years of effort have left nearly every UN body with a special resolution, procedure or agenda item dealing with Israel," observes Ms. Gaer. "The 1999 Commission on Human Rights itself passed five. Israel remains the only country in the world with its own agenda item at the Commission."

The Commission, which met in Geneva earlier this year, adopted overwhelmingly, as it has since 1983, a resolution that refers to UN Resolution 181, the 1947 partition plan unconditionally rejected by the Arab nations who instead chose to go to war, but makes no reference to UN Security Council resolutions and other agreements that have been the basis of the current Arab-Israeli peace process.

"The real setback for those who seek to protect the Arab-Israeli peace process from undue international indifference was that for the first time the member states of the European Union voted in favor of this resolution rather than abstaining, as they had for years," writes Ms. Gaer.

The American Jewish Committee, one of 42 organizations invited by President Roosevelt to advise the U.S. delegation at the founding of the UN, has long been supportive of the world body, but also has pressed for the UN to fulfill its Charter by treating all member states equally. Through AJC headquarters in New York and an office in Geneva, the 100,000-member organization monitors UN activities.

For more information, or to contact American Jewish Committee, see their website at: www.ajc.org