Time to Reopen the Palestine File at the UN? Not Yet!

Several Arab officials intimated after the unanimous UN Security Council vote for resolution 1701, intended to stop Israel's unjust war on Lebanon, that it was time to build on this rare Arab "diplomatic triumph" by reopening the file of the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the question of Palestine. This logic is faulty and imprudent, despite all its luring appearance. Not every old man with a white beard is wise, after all.

Most Arabs, Palestinians included, have vied for years to snatch the Palestine question away from U.S.-Israeli clenching claws and return it to where it formally started: the United Nations. From their perspective, so long as the U.S. is allowed to control "99% of the cards," as the late Egyptian president Anwar Sadat notoriously believed, there is no chance for a just and enduring peace. That much has become obvious to most. However, the UN of yesteryear is not the same organization we have today. The new realities of a unipolar world have abrasively reflected themselves in the US-imposed positions and interventions of the international organization, more than in any other "theater of operations." Increasingly, Arabs along with many in the global South view the UN, especially its all-powerful Security Council, as little more than a tool of American hegemony. This bitter dismissal of the UN, though exaggerated, is amply justified by its record since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Not that the UN in the bipolar phase was ever a sincere representative of the common interests of the world's nations, but at least the cold war between the two dominant blocs allowed weaker nations some room for maneuver, for fighting for their rights and occasionally attaining them. With hindsight, those were the good old days, as gloomy as they seemed at the time. Ironically, a world under the continuous threat of nuclear annihilation from two opposing, more or less equivalent powers, experience tells us, is a far more secure and peaceful place than a world subjugated to the whims of a single, fat, ruthless and criminal empire intent on trampling international law and monopolizing the use of force worldwide to further its dominion and control of world resources. With the U.S. in effect controlling the UN, and in the lamentable absence of any viable, alternative international forum capable of arbitrating and settling conflicts as well as maintaining a reasonable level of world peace and stability, nations of the South are compelled to create new, evolving and effective means of resistance and solidarity that take into consideration contemporary conditions in striving to wrest control of the world's fate from the bloody hands and the demented minds of the new Rome and its no less hubristic partners. The frantic processes that led to the latest UN resolution on Lebanon may give some insight into one, some say unique, way of doing just that.

The first draft of the US-French UNSC resolution looked very much like a "declaration of surrender" of the Arab side, as a discerning Hizbullah official commented. "If this is what they're suggesting after Israel lost the military confrontation, what would they have proposed if Israel had won?" asked the witty speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, echoing a widely held view among Arab and international observers alike. Only a few days after that draft was first made public the text underwent dramatic changes to the extent that its final version was seen by many, with some embellishment, as a declaration of Hizbullah's victory over Israel. What on earth could have compelled America's most undiplomatic, arrogant and viceroy-ish ambassador to the UN to make such an uncharacteristic U-turn? While Arab officials on the delegation that negotiated the outcome are likely to take credit for their claimed deftness and newly discovered diplomatic skill, the truth is that this relative triumph was created on the ground in South Lebanon, from Bint Jbail to Aita ash-Shaab and Khiyam, where the able Lebanese resistance inflicted upon the Israeli invading forces in less than a week massive losses including tens of destroyed or impaired fortified tanks and other armored vehicles, a badly damaged state-of-the-art military vessel and dozens of dead soldiers, quite a few among them from the army's elite units. The radical shift of the balance on the ground in Hizbullah's favor, the political steadfastness in Beirut and the resulting loss of direction and embarrassing wobbling among Israel's political and military leaders together painted a picture of what can be accurately perceived as the very first Arab military victory over Israel's much feared, "unbeatable" army.

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