Chairman, United Nations Watch

Geneva, April 12, 2001

When I was in college in the late 1960s, one of my favorite movies was King of Hearts.

Released in 1966 and starring Alan Bates, it told the story of Private Charles Plumpick, who, toward the end of World War I, was ordered to enter the French town of Marville and locate and defuse a bomb reportedly planted by the departing German army. Plumpick, however, was spotted by some Germans and sought refuge, ultimately ending up in the local insane asylum.

For some reason, the inmates were convinced that he was the “King of Hearts” and treated him accordingly. Knowing that there was a bomb somewhere in the vicinity set to go off, Plumpick tried to lead the inmates away, but they resisted, choosing instead to frolic in the otherwise abandoned town and savor their new freedom.

To fast forward, at the end of the movie the inmates, having witnessed firsthand the tragedy of war, return of their own volition to the insane asylum and want no further contact with the “normal” world. In the very last scene, Plumpick seeks to join them.

Thoughts of the movie kept coming to mind over the past few weeks as I witnessed the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (“Commission”) in action. What’s normal and what’s abnormal? Have truth and fairness been turned on their heads? Is the world going nuts, or am I?

Given the foretaste we had at the Special Session of the Commission in October, when Israel was accused of committing “a war crime and a crime against humanity,” it was abundantly clear that this gathering of the 53 member nations would be rough as well. But the truth of the matter is that, no matter how many times one witnesses the exercise, it still comes as a shock to the system.

Opportunities to assail Israel abound, for example under Item 5 of the agenda (“The right of peoples to self-determination and its application to peoples under colonial or alien domination or foreign occupation”), Item 6 (“Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and all forms of discrimination”), Item 8 (“Question of the violation of human rights in the occupied Arab territories, including Palestine”), and Item 13 (“Rights of the child”).

Not only does the construction of the agenda create endless opportunities to take the floor and attack Israel, but, more importantly still, the political makeup of the UN, of which the Commission is a mere reflection, almost inevitably ensures that Israel will find itself with few supporters.

Start with the 22-member Arab League. To be sure, the group is far from monolithic. There are radical, centrist, and moderate factions. Even so, as the friendly ambassador of one moderate country confided to me after I questioned his diatribe against Israel: “I had no choice. The pressure on me from other Arab countries was intense and unrelenting. Had I acted differently, there would have been negative consequences.”

Nabil Ramlawi, the Palestinian permanent observer at the UN in Geneva, often sets the Arab tone in the Commission and elsewhere. Ramlawi has always been among the shrillest of Palestinian voices, far removed from those in the Palestinian leadership committed to peaceful resolution of the conflict. It was Ramlawi, for example, who declared at the 53rd Session of the Commission, held in March 1997, that Israeli doctors had deliberately infected 300 Palestinian children with HIV. The Israeli ambassador described this at the time as “a modern-day form of the blood libel – anti-Semitism at the state level.”

Usually, though, in the Arab group Egypt plays the key role. Egyptian diplomats posted abroad tend to be particularly well trained and skillful, whether in Washington or Geneva, and they are determined, whenever and wherever possible, to assert Egypt’s primacy in the Arab world.

Assessing the Egyptian role here at the UN regarding Israel can be difficult. In truth, the Egyptians almost inevitably tend to be both part of the problem and part of the solution, and that’s exactly the way they like to play it. They want to make Israel’s life as difficult as possible, and they often succeed; and then they want to be, and be seen to be, the address for last-minute diplomatic compromise and exit strategies.

As if the Arab bloc didn’t create enough headaches for Israel, consider the 56-member Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Here, again, groupthink works quite effectively. Malaysia, as the current chair of the OIC, speaks on behalf of the entire group, and then, just to make sure the point is clear, many individual members, such as Iran and Pakistan, also request the microphone to lambaste the Jewish state.

And if the OIC didn’t create enough headaches for Israel, a third and still larger entity is the 113-member Nonaligned Movement (NAM). Solidarity is also a powerful motivating force in this group of African, Asian, and Latin American nations, especially since the Arab league and OIC member nations are also core constituents of NAM. Thus, when Colombia, currently a member of the Security Council, was facing conflicting pressures from NAM on the one hand and the U.S. on the other regarding a recent Israel-related vote, it went with NAM, despite the close ties with Washington and the substantial U.S. aid package.

In the spirit of the holiday season, dayenu, this would have been enough, but there’s still more, I’m afraid.

As I wrote in my last letter, perhaps most disturbing of all is the posture of the Europeans. Four things, in particular, strike me.

First, the pursuit of consensus within the European Union and among its associated countries allows individual nations to duck responsibility for actions taken in the name of the group.

Second, many of these very same countries have only recently gone through a process of historical self-examination, a kind of moral reckoning, regarding their actions and inactions during the Holocaust. Yet, with the notable exception of Germany, it is painfully clear that no country today sees any real linkage between the wartime period and its contemporary approach toward Israel.

Third, the U.S. and Europe, which should be natural partners and allies, increasingly frequently tend to take different approaches to policy issues, including here in Geneva. This is not a healthy development, to say the least.

And fourth, Europe, though comprised of democracies that share basic values with Israel, has often determined that other interests take precedence, certainly in this forum. Elsewhere, I’ve referred to the commercial and economic interests, the fear of terrorism, and the desire to reach a modus vivendi with an Arab world at Europe’s doorstep. But it doesn’t end there.

A sympathetic ambassador told me of a Scandinavian colleague who was chairing a UN meeting a few years ago and, in that capacity, blocked an Arab parliamentary move. Within days, the diplomat was visited by an Arab delegation with a very clear message: “You will never again be elected to a post within the UN, as we control the majority, therefore your career here is as good as over.” The fact that the story was still circulating a few years later is sobering proof of the mathematical (and political) realities that shape the way the world body works. The European nations, influential though they may be within the UN, are very far from commanding a majority; they need allies to build that majority on any given issue.

To be fair, it’s not that Europe has become Israel’s adversary; it’s far more complicated and nuanced than that.

When the Arab bloc refused to compromise on their tough resolution at the Special Session in October, the Europeans voted against it, and at other times they may abstain if they feel the Arab language goes too far. But, on the whole, there seems to be a growing impatience with Israel, an unwillingness to give it the benefit of the doubt, a desire to counterbalance American support for Israel with a tilt toward the Palestinians, and an openness to international involvement in the conflict despite Israeli objections.

Lastly, there’s one more factor that affects the picture here. The American Jewish Committee has enjoyed consultative status at the United Nations for the past four years. But every time there is a debate on Israel, it is abundantly clear that we are part of an infinitesimally small minority of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) willing to stand up for balance and fairness where Israel is concerned.

In the current deliberations of the Commission, I had the privilege of testifying on Item 8, which is the crux of the Israel debate. (I also testified on two other agenda items.) Of 29 NGOs that spoke, 25 vilified Israel, two were tough on Israel but at least mentioned, if only in passing, Palestinian violations of human rights, and exactly two, including AJC of course, sought to provide an understanding of Israel’s extraordinary dilemmas.

(In this context, it is worth noting that, according to an April 7 article in Tribune de Genève, a number of NGOs from the developing world operating in Geneva are government funded and government controlled.)

To say the least, it’s very difficult to sit through the speeches of government and NGO spokesmen and hear Israel accused of “deliberately starving” the Palestinian population, of “racial supremacy,” of “crimes of war,” of “crimes against humanity,” of “eliminating a whole people,” of “genocide,” of “racism,” of intentionally “murdering children,” of “barbaric massacres,” and of “massive violations of human rights.” Or to hear references to “usurping Zionist gangs,” “occupied territories,” when the speaker has in mind Israel’s 1948 borders, or, for that matter, to suggestions that it’s time to bring back the “Zionism is racism” resolution.

I brought my aunt, a native of Poland who left Europe a step ahead of the Nazis, and my wife, a refugee from the Arab world, to attend one of the sessions. My aunt felt physically sick after an hour and asked to leave, and couldn’t manage to sleep that night. My wife was so enraged by the self-righteous comments of the Libyan ambassador – who, incidentally, was elected a vice chairman of this year’s Commission on Human Rights – that I was afraid she might verbally assault the envoy (and, needless to say, risk being expelled from the hall).

The sense of shock and loneliness, though, isn’t limited to the halls of the UN in Geneva.

When I was about to enter the seventh grade, my family rather suddenly moved to Munich. It wasn’t easy for my parents, given their wartime history, but they did it because my father’s employer, CBS, asked him to go. It was there that I first encountered the challenge of being a Jew.

In the U.S. army school I attended, there were few Jews and, as I painfully learned, lots of nasty stereotypes about us. Moreover, it wasn’t easy standing out as the only student in the class who didn’t sing the Christmas songs.

And to this day I still remember my father jumping out of bed late one night, while we were living in a hotel during our first weeks in Munich. I only learned the next morning that it was because he heard a group of beer drinkers in the café below singing Nazi-era songs, and he went down to physically confront them, alone as it turned out.

Maybe because these were the first experiences of their kind for me, or maybe because I was so young and impressionable, or maybe because the setting was Germany and I knew enough at that age to realize that Germany was not just any country, these episodes have stayed with me.

And now, in a way, I see history repeating itself.

Two of our three children are with us. They’ve had a terrific experience in Europe, but not without incidents. They have confronted “gas-chamber jokes” in the locker room, school bake sales for Palestinian children, the numerical isolation of being among only a handful of Jews in the school, and claims that the Holocaust is a “Jewish lie.”

And most recently, our youngest son found himself at school face-to-face with an older Arab student, the son of an ambassador here, I might add. The young man asked my son what religion he was. “Jewish,” Josh replied. “I don’t like Jews,” came the reply. “I’m going to ask you a second time, and I want a different answer.” To his credit, but with trepidation, Josh held his ground and repeated that he was Jewish. The older boy then knocked something over and told Josh to pick it up, at which point Josh ran away. At such moments, it’s nice to have an older brother, and Michael was there for Josh. But, given the student makeup of the school, both our sons were adamantly opposed to our pursuing the issue with officials.

(They’ve also learned that their maternal grandmother, who lives in Rome, recently received an anonymous phone call from a man identifying himself as “Adolf Hitler,” and they’ve heard that the eight Israelis killed by a Palestinian bus driver were standing at precisely the stop in Azor that their aunt, my wife’s sister, uses daily.)

We American Jews sometimes fail to understand the dangers lurking out there, or the consequences of isolation and vulnerability. We are so blessed to live in a land that has embraced us, that welcomes our full participation, and whose politicians often court us, that we may not always understand the challenges faced by fellow Jews who live not in lands of oppression, like Iran, but in lands of freedom.

Being part of a 6-million-strong Jewish community, in a country that defines itself as unabashedly pluralist, is rather different from being part of a statistically insignificant, if historically important, Jewish community of 30,000 amid 58 million Italians or 12,000 among 40 million Spaniards. The sense of place, degree of self-confidence, access to power, and ability to shape events are all of another order of magnitude for American Jews.

With each passing day here, no matter how much I genuinely relish the travel, the languages and cultures, and the daily joys of life, I realize more and more the unique strengths of the United States, the American Jewish community, and the American Jewish Committee. I thought I knew all this quite well before leaving New York last summer, but the perspective of distance – and new experiences – has given me an entirely new level of understanding and appreciation.

This is the fifth in a series of occasional letters from abroad during a sabbatical year. Copies of the previous letters – Sleepless Nights (January 2, 2001), Letter from Europe (January 10, 2001), Letter from Jerusalem (February 19, 2001), and Letter from Geneva (March 12, 2001) – are available by contacting Alina Viera at the American Jewish Committee (e-mail: vieraa@ajc.org; tel. 212-751-4000, ext.203).