The United Nations Security Council and War:The Evolution of Thought and Practice since 1945 (55 page)

On the back of Resolution 242, the Security Council also appointed (for the second time) a Swedish diplomat to serve as UN mediator in the Middle East. Gunnar Jarring, then serving as Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow, took up the assignment shortly after the conclusion of hostilities. For four years, Jarring engaged in shuttle diplomacy of the kind pioneered in the UN by Bernadotte. At the suggestion of France, Jarring also convened a regular ‘Four Powers’ conference in New York, attended by the US, the Soviet Union, the UK, and France. With Jarring’s work supplemented by the negotiating efforts of US Secretary of State William P. Rogers, the period from 1968 to 1970 saw multiple drafts of proto-proposals floated by both men, though these came to nought. In 1971, Jarring terminated his diplomatic efforts.

US–Soviet diplomacy and conflict management became important again in 1973, when Israel was shocked by a joint Arab attack on the day of Yom Kippur. Here, prevention was impossible, given the surprise nature of the attack. Security Council resolutions during the course of the Yom Kippur war calling for a ceasefire had as little effect as they had had during the 1948 and 1967 episodes. And, once again, the Security Council role took shape in the aftermath of the war.

The course of diplomacy followed the course of the war. Israel was rocked in the early days of the Yom Kippur war by the forcefulness of the Egyptian attack, by Jordan’s decision to join the campaign, and by an effective Syrian assault on their northern flank. Within days, Israel’s armed forces were on their back heels, and
Israeli supplies of heavy armour and equipment were wearing thin. It was only through an emergency airlift of supplies from the US that Israel was able to regain its military footing. Once it did, however, the balance in the field swung rapidly and decisively in Israel’s favour. Within a short period, Israeli troops had crossed the Suez Canal and were threatening the road to Cairo, while in the north, they were marching on the outer suburbs of Damascus. By this time, the Soviets were frantically seeking a ceasefire, before their client states’ armies completely collapsed. Nevertheless, at two stages in late October, Egypt turned down ceasefire proposals that were better for its interests than those eventually adopted. President Anwar Sadat’s biography makes clear his belief that Egypt was winning significant battles right up to the moment of the ceasefire.
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The Soviet reading of the situation was more realistic.

Indeed, even more than in 1967, the end to the war was dictated by the realities of the US–Soviet relationship, whose recent détente was threatened by the prospect of US–Soviet hostility in the Middle East. Faced with the collapse of the Egyptian and Syrian armies, the Soviets signalled to the US that the two great powers should solve the situation together, or the Soviets would have to do so themselves – in effect, threatening intervention. Given the stakes, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger flew to Moscow to negotiate directly with his counterpart. From these negotiations, an agreement emerged that was eventually codified in Resolution 338: termination of hostilities by the parties; recognition of Resolution 242; and agreement to convene, under appropriate auspices, negotiations designed to establish ‘a just and durable peace in the Middle East’.
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Over the following days, the Security Council further specified the terms of the Israel–Egypt truce, and called on the Secretary-General to deploy observers along the Israel–Egypt ceasefire line, the so-called UNEF II operation.
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No such deployment occurred along the Israel–Syria line, and tensions along that frontier remained high. In March 1974, the US, concerned about the effect of continued tensions on the overall stability of the region, brought Israel and Syria into negotiations over an armistice deal. This resulted in the March 1974 Agreement on Disengagement, endorsed by the Security Council in Resolution 350, which also established the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) deployed to this day along a zone of separation on the Golan Heights.
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UNDOF was deployed with an Austrian-led battalion in May 1974.
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The episode serves largely to illustrate the growing importance of the US–Soviet relationship as the basic one that determined the shape of UN action in the 1970s. But one additional note should be made, namely that Israel’s acceptance of a UN peacekeeping operation along both the Israel–Egypt border and the Israel–Syria border (an operation that the Israeli government and armed forces continue to support) suggests that the collapse of confidence in the UN after 1967 was not as deep within the Israeli government as it was among the Israeli public. Moreover, Abba Eban, then Israel’s Foreign Minister and over time perhaps its most acute observer of the UN, accepted in the autumn of 1973 that Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim should play the role of convenor at a US–Soviet–Israel–Egypt–Jordan conference, the Geneva Conference, to which Kissinger and his Soviet counterparts had agreed as a supplement to the elements of Resolution 338. In one of its odder moments, the Security Council passed Resolution 344 on 15 December 1973, endorsing the Geneva Conference and encouraging the Secretary-General to play a constructive role – a perfectly normal Security Council resolution made strange by the vote, which was ten in favour and four abstentions, from France, the UK, the US, and the Soviet Union!

The Geneva Conference was the first of what would become a steady diet of multilateral diplomatic conferences over the Middle East peace process, none of which has ever resulted in a political agreement. It did, however, establish a Military Working Group which, under the chairmanship of the UNEF II force commander, negotiated the further implementation of Israeli withdrawals in the Sinai to agreed ceasefire lines.

The Israel–UN relationship would alter more deeply and in a more lasting way in 1978. That year, following a rise in activism by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO, established in 1958) in its camps in Lebanon, and a number of significant attacks by the PLO against Israel from those camps, Israel invaded southern Lebanon on 14–15 March 1978 in Operation Litani.

Immediately, the Lebanese government called for Security Council action. On 19 March, the Council adopted Resolutions 425 and 426, calling for Israeli withdrawal and establishing the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The first UNIFIL troops arrived in the area on 23 March 1978. Israel’s local proxy force, the South Lebanon Army (SLA) clashed with UNIFIL on 19 April, leaving eight Irish members of UNIFIL dead.

What is striking about UNIFIL is that it was created with the support of the US, despite Israeli objections. This was a reflection of a deeper rift between the US and Israel over Israel’s actions in Lebanon. Eventually, it was intense pressure from the United States that led Israel to withdraw its forces from southern Lebanon. UNIFIL remained in place, however, deployed both within southern Lebanon and along the
Israel–Lebanon armistice line. The episode, however, certainly deepened Israel’s sense of isolation from the UN.

Israel’s sense of isolation from the UN would be further fuelled at the end of 1978 and in early 1979, by Arab reaction in the UN to the dramatic breakthrough in what, for the first time, could be referred to as the Arab–Israeli peace process: the signing of the Camp David Accords on 17 September 1978.

The signing of the Camp David Accords reflected a series of fundamental political shifts in the region. Most important, as recounted by Henry Kissinger,
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was the decision by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to break from the Soviet Union in 1972. Sadat effected this decision by expelling Egypt’s Soviet military advisors.

In his autobiography, Sadat recalls that his decision to expel the military advisors was read by many as indicating that he would not risk military action in the region.
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Of course, the following year witnessed the Yom Kippur war. According to Henry Kissinger, it was in the aftermath of this war that the real change occurred in US–Egyptian relations. It would take years of patient shuttle diplomacy, with all the ups and downs associated with this kind of negotiation, but Sadat’s shift would ultimately lead to negotiations at Camp David, to the Accords, to Sadat’s dramatic visit to the Israeli Knesset in Jerusalem – and to his assassination in 1981.

As further evidence of the fact that, in the period to the end of 1978, the Israeli government was still willing to accept a UN role in conflict management in the region, in the Camp David negotiations both the Egyptians and the Israelis accepted the notion of a UN force to be deployed along the eventual Israel–Egypt border.
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However, at the UN, the General Assembly – now, after two decades of decolonization, a much larger body in which the US could no longer command a majority, and dominated politically by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – there was no support for a UN force. Arab opposition to the Camp David Accords led to Arab hostility at the UN to the concept of a UN force. In a significant shift (compared with the situation in 1948, when an Arab walkout was inadequate to block passage of the Partition Plan), this opposition – voiced through proxies on the Security Council – was adequate to block any possible movement on a UN peacekeeping force. Eventually, the US, having mounted an interim Sinai Monitoring Force, proposed and created a non-UN option: the Multinational Force and Observers Sinai (MFO Sinai). The force was governed by a US–Israeli–Egyptian decision-making body and comprised US, Canadian, Italian, and other troops. The deployment of MFO Sinai to the Middle East, which for the first thirty years of the UN’s existence had been the primary location for UN peacekeeping, marked the real collapse of the Security Council’s role in the Arab–Israeli context.

For the next two decades, the Security Council’s role was negligible. Unlike the previous three decades, when crises erupted in the Arab–Israeli theatre, the Security Council deployed neither troops nor diplomats, framed neither the principles of peace-making nor even the parameters of demilitarization. There were innumerable resolutions, and almost as many vetoes, but little result.

The first crisis in Arab–Israeli relations in the 1980s took the form of the Israeli air force strike against the Iraqi nuclear capacity at the Osirak reactor. This attack received overwhelming international condemnation, and the US did not veto a condemnation in Resolution 487, adopted on 19 June 1981. The Security Council resolution, coming after the attack had accomplished its aims, had no practical effect on realities on the ground.

The less active stance of the Security Council was manifest the following year, when Israel in June 1982 once again invaded southern Lebanon.
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Notwithstanding the presence of UNIFIL on the ground, the Security Council’s response was tepid. The Security Council passed twelve resolutions in the period between 5 June and 18 October, but these had little or no effect on the ground.

In large part, this reflected an important change in the US–Israeli relationship, occasioned by the election of President Reagan. The vetoes provide one clue explaining the nature of Security Council impotence during this period. These reflected a decisive shift in the US stance towards Israel, and a decision to treat Israel as a critical ally, warranting diplomatic protection. This was, moreover, the era in which Cold War tensions resumed after the partial easing of those tensions in the 1970s. The Middle East was not the only issue in relation to which Cold War tensions translated into gridlock between the Permanent Members of the Security Council, but it was the most visible. Between 1980 and 1991, the US cast twenty-four vetoes on the question of Israel alone, out of a total of 51 vetoes cast in the Council during the period.
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The Middle East diplomacy of the 1990s had a very different tenor from that of the 1980s, though still not one that significantly engaged the Security Council. The diplomatic response was shaped by two critical international political events of the period: the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War. The later of these events, the Gulf War, is crucial to understanding the shape of international politics in the 1990s and the evolution of the Security Council in a range of areas. Nevertheless, it is not precisely germane to this chapter, not having an Arab–Israeli component (except for the brief instance when Saddam Hussein’s army fired Scud missiles into Israel – had Israel responded, the situation would have been radically different, but it did not).

As to the end of the Cold War, numerous scholars writing on the Security Council and peacekeeping have correctly noted that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the consequent change in the relationships of the Permanent Members created fundamentally different conditions for the UN from those that had prevailed during the Cold War. These conditions led to the tremendous surge in UN peace operations in the early 1990s in places as far-flung as Cambodia, Mozambique, and Guatemala, then later in West and Central Africa, and the south Balkans. It is notable that this engagement encompassed places in Asia, Latin America, Europe, and Africa – but not the Middle East.

Indeed, for all that the Security Council was instrumental in the diplomatic campaign of President George Bush Sr. and Secretary of State James Baker around the 1991 Iraq war, and for all of the new UN political space liberated by the end of the Cold War, there was no new engagement by the Security Council in the Arab–Israeli conflict management and peace-making theatre. UN isolation from events in this arena was vividly illustrated in 1993 by the dramatic breakthrough in the negotiation of the Oslo Accords under Norwegian mediation, and the subsequent signing of those Accords in the presence of Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn – events from which the UN was entirely absent. The UN was absent too when, in the following year, Israel and Jordan concluded the second major Arab–Israeli peace treaty.