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Dear New Resources,

Clement Henry (chenry@mail.la.utexas.edu) wants you to see this article on Economist.com.

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Here is a "must" read that focuses on a problem of concern to many Muslims and other inhabitants of the Middle East - the issue of double standards that undercuts America's efforts to demonstrate the urgency of changing the regime in Iraq, or at least of disarming it of WMDs.

************************************************************************************************************************************************************
IRAQ 


Israel ignores the United Nations and has weapons of mass destruction. So why
all the fuss about Iraq?

SOON after invading Kuwait in 1990, Saddam Hussein realised that he had made a
mistake. Contrary to his expectations, the world would not after all allow his
land-grab to stand. The United States was girding for war. He therefore began
to cast around for a face-saving exit. One of the first ideas he came up with
was "linkage". Why not trade a withdrawal from Kuwait for Israel's withdrawal
from the territories it had occupied in 1967?

Linkage got nowhere. But as the world debates the merits of another
American-led war against Mr Hussein, the idea has returned in a new form.
Israel has violated countless UN resolutions and amassed weapons of mass
destruction, say those who oppose this war. Why then is Iraq singled out for
yet more punishment while the Israelis get off scot-free? 

This question is no longer being asked by Arabs alone. "No war against Iraq,
Free Palestine" has become the slogan of anti-war demonstrators in Europe and
America. The two conflicts have become entwined in the public mind in a way
that the West's politicians cannot ignore. When he sought last week to talk his
sceptical Labour Party into supporting action against Iraq, Tony Blair,
Britain's prime minister, got his biggest cheer for the bit of his speech that
said UN resolutions should apply in Palestine as much as Iraq.

To many of those disturbed by the contrast between the world's treatment of
Israel and its treatment of Iraq, it is rights and wrongs, not details of law,
that matter here. Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza has endured for
35 years, against the will of the Palestinian inhabitants, who dearly want, and
in the eyes of the world have long deserved, a state of their own. But whereas
Israel is supported economically and diplomatically by America, America is the
prime mover against Iraq. Simple justice, or so the argument goes, requires
even-handed behaviour by the superpower in the two conflicts. 

That may be so. But a quite distinct sort of claim is also made in the "double
standards" debate. This holds that Israel stands in breach of Security Council
resolutions in just the way Iraq does, and therefore deserves to be treated by
the UN with equal severity. Not so.WHAT THE LAW SAYS

The UN distinguishes between two sorts of Security Council resolution. Those
passed under Chapter Six deal with the peaceful resolution of disputes and
entitle the council to make non-binding recommendations. Those under Chapter
Seven give the council broad powers to take action, including warlike action,
to deal with "threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, or acts of
aggression". Such resolutions, binding on all UN members, were rare during the
cold war. But they were used against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. None of
the resolutions relating to the Israeli-Arab conflict comes under Chapter
Seven. By imposing sanctions--including military ones--against Iraq but not
against Israel, the UN is merely acting in accordance with its own rules.

The distinctiveness of Chapter Seven resolutions, and the fact that none has
been passed in relation to Israel, is acknowledged by Palestinian diplomats. It
is, indeed, one of their main complaints. A Palestine Liberation Organisation
report, entitled "Double Standards" and published at the end of September,
pointed out that, over the years, the UN has upheld the Palestinians' right to
statehood, condemned Israel's settlements and called for Israel to withdraw.
But "no enforcement action or any other action to implement UN resolutions and
international law has been ordered by the Security Council."

But what if, for the sake of argument, the main Security Council resolutions on
the Arab-Israeli conflict had been Chapter Seven resolutions? The problem would
then arise that Resolution 242 of 1967, passed after the six-day war and
frequently cited in the double-standards argument, does not say what a lot of
the people who quote it think it says (see - - - - -
articlehttp://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=1378595

		). It does not instruct Israel to withdraw unilaterally from the territories
occupied in 1967. It does not condemn Israel's conquest, for the good reason
that most western powers at that time thought it the result of a justifiable
pre-emptive war. It calls for a negotiated settlement, based on the principle
of exchanging land for peace. This is a very different matter.

In the case of Iraq, the Security Council has instructed Mr Hussein to take
various unilateral actions that he is perfectly capable of taking. Resolution
242 cannot be implemented unilaterally, even if Israel wanted to do so. 

Why? First is the question of borders. Some of the diplomats who drafted
Resolution 242 said afterwards that they intended to allow for some changes in
the armistice lines that separated Israel and its Arab neighbours before the
war of 1967. There has been a dreary argument for three decades over the
meaning of the absence of a definite article (in the English text) before the
phrase "territories occupied in the recent conflict". The Arabs maintain that
the resolution requires a complete withdrawal from every inch. But even if this
were so, the resolution cannot be implemented without arriving at a negotiated
agreement. 

For example, the resolution calls for a "just" settlement of the Palestinian
refugee issue. Meaning what? The Palestinians say that a UN General Assembly
resolution, 194 of 1948, gives all the Palestinian refugees of 1948 the right
to return, or to get compensation. Israel, denying responsibility for their
flight, says that the same resolution stipulates that these refugees had to be
willing to "live at peace with their neighbours" and that the Palestinians,
having rejected the UN-sanctioned partition of Palestine, were not prepared to
live in peace with the new Jewish state. More than half a century later, the
refugee population has grown from about 700,000 to at least 3.8m, making the
return of all of them an impossibility, says Israel. It may be possible to
negotiate a compromise on this issue, as Yasser Arafat and Ehud Barak attempted
without success at Camp David in 2000. But there exists no Security Council
blueprint to solve it. 

Israel says that it has already implemented much of 242, and that it stands
ready to implement the rest of it. It returned land to Egypt and Jordan in
return for peace. Two years ago, when he was prime minister, Mr Barak offered
the bulk of the Golan Heights in return for peace with Syria. All the
agreements made between Israel and the Palestinians under the Oslo peace
process were predicated on Resolution 242. Israel subsequently withdrew from
the main Palestinian population centres (although it has returned to them since
the INTIFADA) pending negotiation of a final settlement. And though there are
strong grounds to question his sincerity, Israel's new prime minister, Ariel
Sharon, claims to accept George Bush's peace "vision", set out in June, of an
Israeli withdrawal and a free Palestine based on the borders of 1967. 

It is commonly asserted that Israel's occupation is "illegal". This is
questionable. In March, for the first time ever, Kofi Annan, the UN's
secretary-general, called Israel's occupation illegal, but it is no accident
that he has not repeated this claim. In the view of Sir Adam Roberts, professor
of international relations at the University of Oxford, it was a "serious
mistake" to describe the occupation itself, as opposed to some of Israel's
actions as an occupier, in this way. In a subsequent letter to the NEW YORK
TIMES, Mr Annan's spokesman admitted as much. The secretary-general, he said,
had not intended to refer to the legality of Israel's occupation of the
territories during the war of 1967, only to breaches of its obligations as an
occupying power.

This is where Israel has put itself squarely on the wrong side of the Security
Council. Since 1967, the UN has rejected all Israel's attempts to change the
legal and demographic status of the captured territories, by annexing
Jerusalem, applying Israeli law to the Golan Heights and planting Jewish
settlements in the West Bank and Gaza (see - - - - -
articlehttp://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_ID=1378588

		). How can vigorous attempts to colonise the occupied territories be
reconciled with Israel's claim to accept 242 and the principle of land for
peace that underlies it? 

They can't. The plain fact is that Israel, citing history ancient and modern
(Jerusalem has had a Jewish majority since the 19th century), decided after
conquering its Jordanian half in 1967 to make the city its eternal "unified"
capital. The Labour governments of that period also began to dot the Jordan
valley and Golan Heights with Jewish settlements, ostensibly in order to guard
the new borders against a still hostile Arab world. After 1977, the Likud
governments of Menahem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir set out frankly, for
religious-ideological reasons, to make the occupied territories part of a
Greater Israel, in defiance of the UN and of the logic of 242. Here Israel
cannot plead innocence. All it can enter is a plea of mitigation. 

Legal or not, the occupation has lasted a terribly long time. But this is not
solely Israel's fault. In 1967, it was the Arabs who rejected Resolution 242.
They certainly did not accept Israel's new post-war borders, but nor did they
recognise its pre-war borders. They did not, in fact, acknowledge Israel's
right to exist at all. This posture persisted for a dozen years after 1967,
until Egypt alone made peace. The Palestinians, pledging still to "liberate"
all Palestine and dissolve the Jewish state, waited longer. Not until the late
1980s, some 40 years after Israel's birth and 20 years after the 1967 war, did
Mr Arafat's PLO indicate an interest in a two-state solution. Under the rules
of "belligerent occupation", Israel should not have mucked about during those
20 years with the status of the captured lands. But it is not wholly
surprising, given the continuing rejection and siege, that it did.

When the Palestinians decided that they were no longer bent on its extirpation,
Israel responded. In 1993 it signed an agreement with the PLO under which the
two sides undertook to implement Resolution 242 by negotiation, thus putting
all the contentious issues--Jerusalem, the settlements and the refugees--on the
bargaining table. Two years ago the talks failed, to be followed by a new
Palestinian INTIFADA and the election of the unyielding Mr Sharon. The Israelis
claim that their agreement to negotiate the thorny issues with the Palestinians
supersedes the relevant UN resolutions on settlements and the rest, a view
which the Security Council might accept if the negotiations got back on track.
In the meantime, the council's rulings on Jerusalem and the settlements
stand.THE NUCLEAR SHADOW

Over the past two years, the INTIFADA has given rise to a new batch of
resolutions. Some rebuke the Israelis for using "excessive" force, others make
specific demands. Resolution 1435, for example, calls on Israel to pull out of
the Palestinian cities it has recently reoccupied and back to the positions it
held before the violence started in September 2000. It has been ignored. But
like most recent resolutions, this one cuts both ways. It makes demands of the
Palestinians, too, which have also been ignored. In this case, the Palestinian
Authority is instructed to cease all violence and incitement, and to bring
"those responsible for terrorist acts" to justice. 

In the long and intractable conflict over Palestine, both sides consider
themselves victims. The Palestinians say that their national rights were
usurped by an intruder; the Israelis that the Palestinians never accepted the
Jewish right to self-determination. The UN's approach has been to recognise the
complexity of these respective claims, lay down broad principles, and urge a
negotiated peace. The case of Iraq could hardly be more different. That country
is in conflict with the UN itself, having refused to comply with the clear
instructions, under Chapter Seven, to give up its weapons of mass destruction. 

 What, though, about Israel's nukes? Does its status as an undeclared nuclear
power put it on a par with Iraq, which has tried to become one? No. In 1981,
Resolution 487 scolded Israel for sending its aircraft to destroy Iraq's Osiraq
reactor, which Israel said was being used to manufacture a nuclear weapon,
despite having been given a clean bill of health by inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency. Noting that Israel had not signed the
nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), as Iraq had, the UN called on Israel to
put its own nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards, as the NPT requires. 

Two decades on, Israel has still not signed the NPT. This infuriates the
treaty's supporters, who have been striving to make it "universal". But, as
with any other treaty, governments are free not to sign. What they are not free
to do is sign, receive the foreign (civilian) nuclear help to which signing
entitles them, and then try to build a bomb secretly. This, it is now ruefully
accepted, is what Iraq tried to do, and may still be trying to do. Israel is
thought to possess a large nuclear arsenal, about which it is not being open
and honest, and this is provoking to its neighbours. But it is not evidence of
"double standards". Being a nuclear-armed power is not, by itself, a breach of
international law.  

See related content at http://www.economist.co.uk/world/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1378577

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