The UN uncut

The series of lectures that concluded last week at Tel Aviv University was the first academic event of its kind in Israel. Few such events, if any, have taken place in academic institutions anywhere in the world. About 20 students convened once a week, for an entire semester, and heard lectures from the representatives of all the UN agencies that are active in Israel. This is especially noteworthy considering the blatantly negative attitude usually demonstrated towards the UN in Israel, not only in public opinion and in the media, but also, and mainly, on the part of officialdom.

The students who hosted the UN officials are master's degree students in a program for diplomatic studies that operates in the context of the Hartog School for Government and Policy at TAU. Dr. Avi Beker, their teacher in this seminar, is also the head of a research project on UN-Israel relations that is being carried out in the school. Between 1977 and 1982, he was a member of the Israeli delegation to the UN. He introduced the students in the seminar to the senior representatives of all 10 professional UN agencies operating in Israel - including UNRWA, the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees, which operates the Palestinian refugee camps and helps their residents; OCHA, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which coordinates the UN assistance to the Palestinian population in the territories; WHO, the World Health Organization; OHCHR, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNICEF, the UN Children's Fund - each of which operates in its own sphere in the areas of the Palestinian Authority, as well as the representative of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the representative of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.

`No horns'

"Israeli public opinion has developed a negative attitude towards the UN, and I thought it was very important for students of diplomacy to become familiar with the work of the UN as it is," replies Beker, when asked to explain why he initiated the participation of UN representatives in the seminar. Last November, the school held a large conference that dealt with the question: "Can the UN and Israel cooperate?" The guest of honor was Terje Roed-Larsen, the Norwegian diplomat who until recently served as the representative of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan to the Middle East peace process. "In his speech at the conference, Larsen sent a large number of positive signals," says Beker, "which led me to dare to suggest to the UN that they cooperate with us in organizing the seminar. They picked up the gauntlet."

In his opinion, the UN response to the university's invitation is part of a new direction that the organization is trying to take. "Secretary General Annan is interested in leading processes in the context of the arrangements to be achieved between Israel and the Palestinians," explains Beker. "This is reflected in UN involvement in the Quartet [the four bodies involved in the road map peace plan - the United States, the UN, the European Union and Russia], as well as in a series of steps taken by Annan, such as UN participation in the opening of the new museum at Yad Vashem, in order to try to reinforce Israel's confidence in the UN."

However, some of the students who participated in the seminar came holding the prejudices against the UN that are prevalent in Israeli society. These views, along with the fact that almost all the agencies whose representatives participated in the seminar are involved in providing assistance to the Palestinian population, aroused a fear both among the organizers of the course and among their guests from the UN, that the atmosphere in the classroom would be tense and hostile towards the guest speakers. Both sides agreed that what happened over the course of the 10 sessions was the exact opposite. "My feeling," summarizes Beker, "is that the students saw, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that the UN doesn't have horns. They saw dedicated and professional people, and they also discovered, apparently to their surprise, that these people do not take sides regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that here and there they even demonstrate some sympathy towards Israel.

"There were a number of lectures in which some difficult questions were asked, and some debates ensued, but there was always attentiveness, there was always a willingness to understand the substance of our work and the polite atmosphere was always maintained," says Henriette Von Kaltenborn-Stachau, Larsen's adviser and the coordinator of the guest lecturers on behalf of the UN. Kaltenborn-Stachau, who attended all the lectures, and also gave the final lecture to the students last Monday, says their polite and serious attitude surprised her. "That's not the attitude that the UN people are used to seeing from the Israeli public," she explained.

"We are of course aware of the unfavorable image of the UN in the eyes of many Israelis, and we think that it stems, at least in part, from the fact that many Israelis don't really understand how the UN works," replies Kaltenborn-Stachau to the question as to why the UN agreed to accept the university's invitation. She said that many people don't distinguish between the UN agencies, which carry out professional work in the field, and the Security Council and the General Assembly, where political decisions are made in accordance with the political will of the member nations.

Political power play

In addition to explaining this difference, she said, they also tried to explain what these agencies do all over the world, not necessarily in connection with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and to emphasize the fact that it is impossible to claim that the UN is against Israel, because Israel is a part of the UN.

She says that the WHO is involved in research for the fight against AIDS, research from which Israel will benefit as well. And the same is true of all the other agencies. Of course some agencies operate in the humanitarian field, such as the World Food Program, and locally assist only the Palestinian population. But she says this stems from the fact that the Palestinians are the only ones in need of this assistance here, and that the Israeli government has never asked the UN for food assistance for its own population.

In her lecture last week, she repeatedly made this distinction between the professional activity of the professional agencies of the UN and the political views of its political institutions. She also emphasized that these political views, which are the source of the UN's prevalent anti-Israeli image, are only the result of the political power play that takes place in the General Assembly, or in the Security Council, among the representatives of the member nations. Anyone who wants to change this situation, she said, has to use his political influence among them. She added that in other places in the world, they actually complain about the fact that it is impossible to pass anti-Israel decisions in the Security Council, because of the U.S. veto. But this is also a political question that is related to the positions of the member nations, rather than those of the UN.

To judge by what some of the students who participated in the seminar told Haaretz, it looks as though the UN has succeeded in transmitting most of its messages to them. Itay Birger, for example, says the lectures he heard changed his attitude toward the UN on two planes. "I met the people who do the UN work in the field," he says, "and I understood that these are people with good intentions, people who really and truly want to change the world. Until the seminar, I always thought of them in terms of black and white. Now I see the intermediate shades as well."

The second change is related to the expressions generally used by the UN workers, expressions that during the first lessons angered him and his classmates. "Why, in all your advertisements, do you insist on calling the territories `the occupied Palestinian territories'?" they repeatedly asked their guests. "Why do you call the separation fence a wall? Why do you speak of armed Palestinians, and not of Palestinian terrorists?"

"Now," says Birger, "I understand that the UN professional agencies are fed by a fixed vocabulary that is created by another, political apparatus, which is composed of the UN member nations. It's important to understand that, because anyone who wants to change the UN terminology must operate in the place where it is created, in other words, among the member nations. Now, I also understand that Israel should not and cannot ignore the existence of the UN. It's a large body, with large budgets, and Israel must find a way to cooperate with it as closely as possible.

"Until the seminar, I related to the UN only in the political, Israeli-Arab context, and I considered it a cynical organization that should be abolished," adds Mia Yaron. "In the seminar I discovered that these are people who travel from place to place in the world, and do holy work; successful 50-year-old lawyers who close their offices in the United States or Europe and go to help the hungry in Africa." Even regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Liron discovered that the UN people were different from what she had thought. "They're not at all naive," she says, "and the encounter with Israelis causes them a great deal of frustration. Member of the WHO, for example, want to send medications to the territories, and cannot understand why they are held up at the checkpoints. And when I saw how much that frustrates them, I also understood why their lexicon doesn't change."

Harsh debate

In spite of that, not all the sessions were conducted amicably. A visual presentation by the UNICEF representative, for example, included a picture of Palestinian children on the backdrop of a wall full of Arabic inscriptions. One of the students, who reads Arabic, asked him if he knew what was written there. The man replied that he didn't, and she told him the inscription praised the activity of Hamas. The UNICEF representative said it wasn't relevant, and the class got involved in a harsh debate.

Last week, too, when Kaltenborn-Stachau made a presentation that described the political department of the UN, the class was on the verge of a dangerous slide into hostility. It emerged that in the political department there is a department that deals with the promotion of the national rights of the Palestinian people. One of the students asked why of all the conflicts going on in the world, only for the Palestinian issue has the UN chosen to establish a separate department. Kaltenborn-Stachau replied that the decision was made by the UN member nations in the 1970s, and that the only way to change it is through political activity among those same countries.

When another student remarked that anyone who isolates Israel in that manner is acting in the same way as anti-Semites did in the past, when they isolated the Jews, it looked as though this time the class was about to get involved in a harsh and ugly debate. The downhill slide was halted when Kaltenborn-Stachau decided, with great diplomatic wisdom, to ignore the comment and continue her lecture.

	Kaltenborn-Stachau speaking at TAU last week. "The polite atmosphere was always maintained." (Guy Raivitz)