Hijacking the UN
A Mandate for Terror: The United Nations and the PLO.
by Harris Okun Schoenberg.
Shapolsky Publishers. 570 pp. $19.95.
“To avoid misunderstandings,” writes Harris Schoenberg in the preface to this important scholarly work, “I wish to stress that while I find much that is wrong with the United Nations in the late 1980’s, even beyond its legitimization of international terrorism, I am committed . . . not to its destruction but to its reform.” Schoenberg then devotes almost 600 pages of careful documentation to an overwhelming brief in support of his central point: that nearly all aspects of the United Nations have been “coopted” by the PLO and “petropowered radicals,” and that the provisions of the United Nations Charter dealing with non-use of force have been bent out of shape by reinterpretations legitimizing the use of all means, including terror, in the struggle for liberation from “alien, colonial, and racist” rule—i.e., Israel.
After showing how, by virtue of its own covenant, its origins, and its strategy, the PLO is committed to terror, and after recounting the familiar story of Yasir Arafat’s 1974 arrival and reception in New York, Schoenberg demonstrates in detail the anomalous process by which the PLO, nominally an observer mission at the UN, came to receive better treatment there than a member state. In brief, writes Schoenberg, “Promoting the PLO” “became a UN growth industry.” The Secretariat in particular was turned into the PLO’s “Ministry of Propaganda,” distributing pro-PLO films, staging exhibitions in the visitors’ gallery, convening international conferences on the question of Palestine, holding ongoing seminars, and creating a Special Unit on Palestinian Rights to help orchestrate the entire operation. The industry’s activity extended to the “rape” of the women’s-rights conferences held by the United Nations in 1975, 1980, and 1985, and to the “cooption” of UNIFIL, the United Nations’ peacekeeping forces in Lebanon, which were unable to prevent PLO infiltration because the UN refused to remove PLO camps from UNIFIL territory.
Schoenberg has kinder words for three UN-related agencies—the UN Development Program (under Director Brad Morse), the International Monetary Fund, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Unlike the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which he also discusses, these agencies did not permit themselves to be politicized by the PLO.
When it comes to the international consequences of the UN-PLO “interaction,” Schoenberg takes Castro’s Cuba as his main example. In 1963, hard as it may be to imagine now, two days of national mourning were staged in Cuba on the death of Israel’s President, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. Ten years later, at the Fourth Summit Conference of Nonaligned States held in Algiers, Castro joined those bent on vilifying Israel. Schoenberg speculates that his motives had to do with purchasing “Arab toleration of his role as Moscow’s spokesman” and improving his chances “for Arab support to be chairman of the Nonaligned.” But there were also forces tugging him in this direction at the UN itself, specifically the Nonaligned Movement and the Soviet Union, with their strong predilection for the Arab cause.
Similarly, in discussing the ill-fated efforts of the then-U.S. ambassador to the UN, Andrew Young, to open a “dialogue” with the PLO in New York in 1979, Schoenberg suggests that it was Young’s pacifism that prevented him from seeing the ways in which PLO “violence was often a calculated strategy, not merely the result of ‘desperation,’ as Young often claimed.” Perhaps so—but once again UN institutional pressures must have played a part, in this case inducing discomfort at being out of line with the thinking of the majority.
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From his extensive documentation, Schoenberg draws a series of conclusions, most notably that the UN today is still a “forum for fanaticism.” But he remains hopeful of change for the better, mainly on two grounds. The first has to do with what he sees as the shifting interests of the parties involved. By 1987, he writes,
The petropowers had been weakened and the oil weapon blunted. The radicals had, at least temporarily, lost control of the Non-aligned Movement which they exercised from 1973 to 1983. The Arab states were divided over the Iran-Iraq war, Islamic fundamentalism versus secularism, the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, and acceptance or rejection of Israel, among other issues. The PLO was dispersed and split. And the Western countries, particularly the United States, enjoyed in the first half of the 1980’s stronger economies and more vigorous governments than in the decade before.
This is all true, as far as it goes. But it was not mere political expediency or the clout of petrodollars that was responsible for the PLO’s rise to power at the UN. Throughout the last decade, the vast majority of the world’s nations, including the Western nations, had come to espouse the belief that the PLO held the answer to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It was, for example, France and Egypt—no “petropowered radicals”—that introduced an important 1982 initiative calling for mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and the creation of an independent PLO state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip. And it was a key European representative who told the American delegation at the time: “The PLO has been destroyed militarily. If you allow it to be destroyed politically as well, there will be no chance for peace.”
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Today, far from having broken up, this international consensus is stronger than ever. And that brings us to Schoenberg’s second dubious ground for hopefulness. Schoenberg’s book ends with the decision of then-Secretary of State George Shultz in late fall 1988 to deny Yasir Arafat’s request for an entry visa to address the UN General Assembly, and with the subsequent U.S. vote at the General Assembly session in Geneva to stand alone (with Israel) against recognition of an independent Palestinian Arab state as proclaimed by the PLO. A buoyant Schoenberg concludes: “In the end it was the United States, not the UN, that canceled the PLO’s mandate for terror.” Yet a scant two weeks later, a “dialogue” had been opened between the U.S. and the PLO, and this time Yasir Arafat had it right: it was not the PLO that had changed its policy, but the United States. In the end it did not so much “cancel” the PLO’s mandate as help to legitimize the PLO, not as a terrorist organization but as a putative peacemaker.
The United Nations is neither a religion nor a cause (although many treat it as such), but a forum. It is a reflection—skewed, perhaps—of world views. In the case of the PLO, rather than being the object of a hijacking, the UN played a role that more often ranged from willing partner to instigator. What this portends for the possibility of reform that Schoenberg persists in holding out, or for the capacity of the United States to withstand pressure on behalf of profoundly anti-Western radical movements, is something future historians will have to decide. In the meantime, we can be grateful to Harris Schoenberg for a book which, even if it does not fully explain why things happened as they did, brilliantly illuminates the record of their occurrence.
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