Small steps at the UN

Editorial

Jews, perhaps more than other groups, have reason to be disappointed by the lost opportunities and failed directions of the United Nations. Founded in the aftermath of the Second World War, the UN was once believed to be a bulwark against the sort of inhumanity that bred, among other catastrophes, the attempted annihilation of European Jewry.

The hopes for the UN seemed justified in 1947 when the body voted for a partition that would see the creation of a Jewish state. Since then, the UN has been far less responsive to Jewish concerns, to put it mildly. The United Nations is the world's forum for positive multilateralism but, conversely, has provided fertile soil for exactly the sort of Jew-hatred and scapegoating it was founded, in part, to confront. This is most obvious in the volume and pitch of hateful resolutions targeting Israel to the total or near-total exclusion of criticism toward countries whose human rights records make Israel's pale in comparison. The singular obsession with Israel seems to stem, at least in part, from the assumption that the UN created Israel and so has more right to judge Israel than it might to judge other countries.

A complete reading of history would indicate the false premises of such an assumption. The Jewish state was the result of decades of blood, sweat, toil and tears by Jews. Zionism took on an air of inevitability following the First World War and the fact that Zionism didn't reach fruition until after it was too late for the six million who perished in the Holocaust has allowed the world to incorrectly paint the 1947 partition vote as an act of guilt by western powers for not having done more to prevent the Holocaust or save its victims. No, the state of Israel was built stone by stone on the lives of Jews who were given next to nothing by the world community, despite the false construction of the partition process as having handed Zionism victory on a silver tray.

With the exception of that one vote, which even then would lead to a state only after a bloody mass invasion by Arab countries that claimed the life of one per cent of the Yishuv's population, the UN has done little or nothing for the Jews of Israel (or for the Jews of the rest of the world, for that matter). The partition vote seems to have been the beginning and the end of the UN's commitment to Jews.

Since then, but with an orgiastic fervor since 1967, the UN has been almost unanimously opposed to everything Israel has done, including continuing to exist. Though occasional, rare lip-service is given to Israel's right to exist, the UN has overwhelmingly gone on the record again and again, in rote annual condemnations that isolate Israel more than any of the countries in the world where human rights affronts are exponentially worse than Israel's.

If it seems that Jews and other Zionists are the ones most concerned by the UN's slide into ideology and irrelevance, that may be a natural outcome of the investment the postwar Jewish community placed in the world body. The United Nations originally represented a new, possibly last, hope for the surviving Jews that the world might learn from their experience the need for fellowship between peoples, lasting peace, respect for freedom and life. But the lessons of the Holocaust, which should have defined a cautionary approach to global intolerance, were ignored, denied, corrupted and actually turned against Israel itself in rhetorical condemnations that have themselves taken on an air of unmistakable Jew-hatred.

Now, as many of the world's Jews feel we may be at the top of the second hill on the roller-coaster, the UN itself is a chanting, near-universal chorus of derision and vilification. Prime Minister Paul Martin's opening of a discussion on major reforms to the UN's operating structures should therefore be welcome news, as should the subtle shift in policy represented by Canada's decision to vote against a few of the massively anti-Israel resolutions that absorb so much of the UN's time. Half-measures are better than no measures. Still, the challenges facing the UN may prove as insurmountable as anti-Semitism itself has been for millennia. Trying to fix the UN may prove fruitless, but it is an effort that should be applauded and encouraged. If this becomes a centrepoint of the Martin government's foreign policy, we may just be heading back to the track we were on in the 1960s and '70s, a time when Canada was respected in the world for giving more than lip-service to the right of people to live in peace.

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