The United Nations and Israel

August 4, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

10:15 a.m.	Registration
10:30	Panelists:	Tal Becker, Israel's Permanent Mission to the United Nations
		Mark Lagon, U.S. State Department
		Karen van Stegeren, Embassy of the Netherlands (current holder of the EU presidency)
		Ruth Wedgwood, SAIS, Johns Hopkins University
	Moderator:	Joshua Muravchik, AEI
Noon	Adjournment

Proceedings:
MR. MURAVCHIK:  [In progress] --series of panels on issues related to the U.N. that we've been running this year and will continue to run in the fall. We expect that our next session, sometime in September at a date not yet set, will be about the International Atomic Energy Agency and the issues that are facing it now.

Our topic this morning, as you know, is the United Nations and Israel.  Israel is one nation that has a very unique relationship to the United Nations.  Its birth as a nation was ordained by a U.N. resolution and, in recent years, no nation has been the subject of more attention at the U.N. than Israel and no nation has exactly the same structural position within the U.N. that Israel has.  And of course this special relationship has been a good deal in the news lately, in the referral by the General Assembly to the International Court of Justice of Israel's construction of a barrier.

We have four very distinguished speakers this morning, and I'm very grateful to each of them for having agreed to come and participate.  We will hear from our--well, three of them representing governments and one independent academician, we will therefore have the academician speak last and get the last word and we'll hear from our government representatives first.  You have their biographies in the little kits on your chair, and usually, for that reason, I dispense with making any introductions because you can read them.  But this session is being broadcast on several television networks, and the viewers of the television don't have the kits on their chairs.  So I am going to take the time to give brief introductions to our speakers.

The first is a representative of the U.S. government and also a good friend of mine, Mark Lagon, who is deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs.  Prior to that, he served on the State Department's policy planning staff as a senior staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, most dear to my heart, long, long ago as a member of the staff of AEI.  Mark?

MR. LAGON:  It's wonderful to be back at AEI.  At my time at AEI, I worked with the former permanent representative of the United States, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, so many of my views on what Israel has to expect in the U.N. are shaped by lessons I learned from her upon her return from her time, five years, at the U.N.  And unfortunately, not a lot has changed.  We're sort of back to the future two decades later on Israel's status in the United Nations. 

Israel's a democracy and it is a more democratic nation than the other nations of its region, and yet its sovereignty and its right to defend itself are frequently called into question in the U.N. system.  The substantial progress that the United States, the British, and other nations working on building counterterrorism mechanisms within the U.N. system have a hole in them, and that hole relates to terrorism that's aimed at Israel.  Many, many nations in the U.N. system, willing to help work on blocking terrorist financing and fight terrorism, are unwilling to define that violence, that organized activity to wipe Israel from the face of the map as terrorism.  And that makes the counterterrorism system in the U.N. a donut with a hole in the middle.

But a main concern from the U.S. government's point of view is the general imbalance that relates to resolutions adopted on Israel--imbalance in two senses.  Most importantly, the sheer number of resolutions that are devoted to Israel are truly unfortunate.  The U.N. has very important work to be done, whether it relates to human rights, whether it relates to economic development, whether it relates to security affairs.  And a hugely disproportionate amount of time is spent on a single country, a single controversial situation--deserving of some focus, but a distraction from many autocratic governments whose records deserve a serious look and censure, and many problems of development and security as well.

But within any one resolution that one finds related to Israel, there is also imbalance.  Because regularly, resolutions in the Security Council--by proposal of others, especially in the General Assembly, the Commission on Human Rights--look at the responsibilities of Israel, the responsibilities of Israel to restrain itself, but without looking commensurately at responsibilities of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people to restrict terrorism and in fact to create accountability, transparency, and liberal governance on that side.  A vision of two states, as the president has laid out--an Israel and a future Palestine, both accountable, democratic, at peace with each other--is not possible if regularly resolutions are taken up at the United Nations which only look at the responsibilities and only lay out the ostensible sins of one side in that equation.

There are small examples of success or modest improvement in the U.N. on this imbalance.  The United States has made its goal in various U.N. venues to consolidate the number of resolutions on Israel.  It succeeded in one case related to the U.N. program for assisting Palestinian refugees, consolidating a couple of resolutions into one in the General Assembly last year.  And if you look at what happened at this year's spring session, the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva, you see the mixed bag and, if you would like to look at the glass as being half full, the modest success in there not being an explosion of even more anti-Israel resolutions.

One resolution which was not grounded in fact was set aside from the annual ritual of the Commission on Human Rights, a resolution related to Lebanese detainees held by Israel.  That brought the count of the numerous resolutions down by one.  Then there is the funny animal at the Commission on Human Rights of setting up special sittings on urgent topics.  There was one such special sitting when the Israeli government took its security into its own hands and eliminated the leader of Hamas.  A special sitting was pushed for by Pakistan and a resolution aimed at condemning Israel for that act was passed, offered by Pakistan.  But a second such special sitting that might have occurred when a second Hamas leader was killed during the course of the six-week session of the Commission on Human Rights did not occur.

So you have a sort of a wash.  You might have had an explosion of a greater number of resolutions on Israel.  Sadly, you didn't have much of a diminution.

Obviously, now we face the decision of the International Court of Justice in the U.N. system and the reverberations it has in other venues within the U.N. system.  A lopsided resolution in the General Assembly passed despite the fact that the decision of the International Court of Justice is not a binding decision.  It's not one that Israel submitted to as a party, as is normal practice at the ICJ.  We were very disappointed in the small number of nations willing to say no on that resolution.  In fact, we're particularly disappointed with the European Union.  The European Union had asked legal questions at the beginning of the ICJ process about the propriety of the ICJ taking up this case, suggesting that it did not have the jurisdictional claim to take it up.  And yet, the European Union joined with that vote.

There may be action at the U.N. Security Council following on to this General Assembly resolution focused on the ICJ decision.  We'll look at the text.  We need to assess the text.  But you can be assured that the United States will be willing to do what it takes, if need be, looking at the merits of the text, to prevent a thoroughly imbalanced resolution from in fact passing.

A couple more things I'd like to touch on, if I might.  Connected to Israel is the subject at the U.N. of antisemitism.  There have been those who have resisted citing antisemitism as a form of hatred in resolutions at the U.N.  We've had some modest successes in increased references to antisemitism as a scourge in U.N. venues.  At the last U.N. General Assembly two resolutions passed making references to antisemitism--one, a resolution of the Brazilians about the incompatibility of racism with democracy, which added a reference to antisemitism; and one resolution which is a follow-on to the horrendously mutated Durban conference on racism, about its implementation.  The United States could not join in supporting that resolution, the follow-on from the Durban conference, but was pleased, in one sense, that a reference to antisemitism was added.

At the Commission on Human Rights in the spring, not only were two resolutions--which were counterparts to those two resolutions on racism and democracy and racism--passed, but also a resolution on religions intolerance, which included a specific reference to antisemitism.

At last year's U.N. General Assembly, the Irish, in the presidency of the EU, expressed great reservations about mentioning antisemitism among the forms of hatred in a resolution on religious intolerance--very eager for it to be "clean" and not cite forms of hatred, ostensibly so that all sorts of other forms of hatred not be listed in a laundry list in the resolution.  And there was a brief discussion about a stand-alone resolution on antisemitism.  European nations expressed some support, but Arab and Islamic nations were dead-set against such a stand-alone resolution.  We've been pleased that, since then, a resolution on religious intolerance passed at the Commission on Human Rights included antisemitism, and it's our hope that, working with the European Union this year with the Dutch in the presidency, that antisemitism should be mentioned specifically among forms of religious intolerance.

I guess the last thing I'd refer to is how Israel, more broadly, is not treated as a normal nation with the same rights as other nations in the U.N. system.  The Asia Group, where Israel would normally belong within the caucusing system of the U.N. and the system by which nations run for positions on U.N. bodies, has rejected Israel as a member, despite the fact, again, that Israel is the most democratic nation within its subregion of the Middle East and is in fact significantly more democratic than many, many nations within the Asia Group.  So the Western group--the Western European and Other Group, as it is called--has allowed Israel to join it in the New York venue of the U.N. for the purposes of running for elections.

But Israel is still denied a role in that Western group in other venues of the U.N.--in Geneva, in Vienna, in Nairobi, where other bodies and agencies of the U.N. do their business.  The United States has had to lay down a marker repeatedly suggesting that Israel should be let into those other venues of the Western and Europe and Other group for caucusing.  When we began our effort of six weeks at the Commission on Human Rights this spring, the very first intervention by the American head of delegation, Richard Williamson, at the Western European and Other Group, was not to talk about resolutions before the Commission on Human Rights, but to say Israel should be sitting here at the table with us.  And in fact, he then, and at many other times, has been rebuffed by the suggestion of the European Union that they cannot come to consensus about letting Israel in--by which they mean that several nations within the European Union do not think they'd like Israel to be with us in the Western European and Other Group.  Many of them believe that Israel is a human rights problem, not a partner at the Commission on Human Rights for dealing with human rights.

Israel is a nation like every other.  It has the right to exist, it's sovereign, it has a right to defend itself.  And it should at least be able to consult with other nations and belong in the normal regional bloc system of the U.N.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you very much, Mark.  And now, speaking of Israel, we will turn the floor over to Tal Becker.  Tal is the legal advisor to the Israeli mission to the U.N. in New York.  He also served as vice chairman of the Legal Committee of the General Assembly, and he's been a legal advisor to the Israeli negotiators in the Middle East peace process.  Tal.

MR. BECKER:  Thank you very much.  It's a pleasure to be here.  Most people start their talks by saying it's a pleasure to be here, and you never really believe them.  You tell them, Go on and start talking already.  But if you can have any kind of inkling, and Mark perhaps started, of what it might be like to represent Israel at the United Nations, you know that I really mean it when I say it's a pleasure to be here.  I take any opportunity to get out.

[Laughter.]

MR. BECKER:  I'd like to make five general points, but before doing so, because a lot of them are critical, I want to say something positive to begin with.  The first is that Israel firmly believes in the ideals of the United Nations.  We were both founded on the ashes of the Holocaust.  And Israel, although you don't hear about it in the press, makes a lot of--takes great effort and great strides to be involved in the other things that the United Nations does.  And our partial membership in WEOG has helped that--in the Western European group has helped that.

Israel's taking a leading role, for instance, in negotiating the Rights of People with Disabilities Convention.  Through our membership in WEOG, we're taking a leading role in the United Nations environmental program, the Commission for Sustainable Development, Commission for Narcotic Drugs, and other things.  And despite the effort of too many nations, we feel, at the U.N. to kind of pigeon-hole us into just dealing with the conflict, we do have a broader agenda and I just wanted to say that first off.

The problem we find, however, is that too often those noble ideals of the United Nations are exploited.  Sometimes they're exploited by member states; sometimes, unfortunately, we feel the Secretariat is complicit or facilitates that exploitation.  And I'd like to take a step back and give you some more personal impressions of someone who spends just about every day at the United Nations.

Before I came here, I was involved in the peace process negotiations.  And something fundamental to any peace process and certainly to any peace initiative in the Middle East, including the road map, is a perspective of this conflict as a conflict between two peoples.  Both have rights and both have responsibilities.  Israel recognizes that the Palestinian people have rights.  The Palestinian people in turn recognize, or need to recognize that Israel has rights.  And when you have two sets of rights, the only thing you can do is to talk, to find an accommodation between those rights.

If you have the questionable privilege that I have of sitting in lots of debates at the United Nations, you would not get that impression, that this is a conflict about two sets of peoples, two sets of rights, two sets of responsibilities.  The fundamental impression you get is totally different.  When you sit in the General Assembly, you will that, fundamentally, the perspective is this is a conflict about injustice.  There is a victim in this conflict, there is a villain.  If you want to end the conflict, you need to end the injustice.  And the injustice is presented as Israel's presence in the West Bank and Gaza since '67, and it's that simple.  One side has rights, one side has responsibilities.  If you want to end the conflict, end the injustice.

Now, for Israel it's not that simple.  We don't think it's black and white.  We argue that if occupation was the sole cause of this conflict, there wouldn't have been hostility toward Israel before '67.  If occupation was the sole cause of the conflict, there would have been a two-state solution in 1937 under the Peel Commission, in 1947 under the partition plan; at Camp David and Ataba [ph] it would have been negotiated rather than rejected.  And if occupation was the sole cause of the conflict, we wouldn't get the message that we get every time a suicide bomber boards a bus or goes into a pizza parlor and blows himself up.  The message sent by that act is very simple, and it goes back to something that is at the heart of this conflict:  the refusal to recognize the Jewish peoples' rights to self-determination side-by-side with their Palestinian and Arab neighbors.

Now, what is the result of a kind of black-and-white perspective of one side rights, one side responsibilities?  The first result is that Palestinian violations of their obligations can be forgiven.  And the second result is that the focus will always be on Israel's compliance.  And I won't bore you or depress you with too many examples, but one classic example, frankly, is the reference to the ICJ opinion.  Here we have a situation about a security fence.  And for all its controversy, few people doubt that the purpose of the fence is to protect lives and it's actually working.  And yet, in the question posed to the Court, the Court was asked about the response to terrorism and not about the terrorism itself.

Last year, as every year, the Palestinians insist on presenting a resolution.  There's one resolution on the welfare of all the world's children, a separate resolution on the welfare of Palestinian children.  Sudanese children don't get a separate resolution, children anywhere else in the world don't.  And yet when Israel suggested that perhaps it would make sense if the Palestinians would present one on Palestinian children, that Israeli children also deserve that reference, that was rebuffed out of hand.

Now, two things happen, I think, as a result of that basic drive you have across the U.N. system in many areas.  The first is a negative impact on the peace process, and the second is a negative impact on the United Nations itself.

As far as the negative impact on the peace process, that perspective of putting the response to terrorism on trial but not the terrorism itself, and so carefully scrutinizing the responsibilities of one side, is fundamentally at odds with the road map.  If you look at the road map, the road map is based on an idea which is inherent in any peace process, that both sides have to step up to their responsibilities.  There is no monopoly on rights, no monopoly on suffering, and no monopoly on responsibilities.

The consistent trend of these resolutions and initiatives one after the other is also a disincentive for Palestinian compliance.  Why, after all, should the Palestinians sit at the negotiating table taking it seriously if they are able to achieve more or less their maximalist demands?  To the extent that the Palestinian initiatives succeed at the United Nations, that is the extent to which they will not feel a need to sit face-to-face with Israelis and come to terms, one with the other.  And it's also, frankly, a disincentive for Israel. Because if we know that, no matter what we do, the international community, through the U.N. process, is going to focus on and criticize Israel but not put any focus on Israeli rights or on Palestinian responsibilities, it becomes politically impossible, for one thing, to push the peace process forward when you don't have a partner.  And I think part of that resulted in the disengagement plan.

But my personal view is that whatever damage or whatever harm that kind of perspective does to Israel, the harm to the United Nations itself is far greater.  Let me make one thing clear, and that is that Israel is proud to be held to the highest standards.  We're a democracy.  It is right to criticize us, it is fair; it's legitimate to criticize us.  The standards which we should be held up to are absolute standards.  They're not relative standards; they don't depend on compliance by others.  But if you're going to hold only Israel to that standard and not hold any of the great democracies in our neighborhood to the same standard, then what you effectively do is reveal not a genuine concern for justice and for law, but an agenda of using law and justice and humanitarian law and all the kinds of things that Israel is accused of violating, as a weapon.  And when you law as a weapon, when you use the institutions of the international community as a weapon, the first damage you do is to the law itself and to the institutions themselves.

Mark mentioned the Commission on Human Rights, the idea, for instance, that there is--I can give you so many examples, it's quite mind-boggling.  But there is--if you go to the Web site of the Commission on Human Rights, you'll see Agenda Item No. 9 is the situation of human rights in the world; Agenda Item No. 8 is the situation of human rights in Israel.  There is a division for Palestinian rights within the Secretariat itself, a supposedly neutral body required by the Charter to be neutral.  And their agenda is to advance the interests of one side to a conflict.  We have 20 resolutions on Israel a year in the General Assembly.  Israel is the only body that has not one committee, not two, but seven different bodies within the U.N. system that are monitoring its activity.  We don't have any kind of questions about human rights violations in countries such as Syria, Iran, China; but this massive enterprise of disproportionate focus on Israel.

And what does that do?  Well, first of all, it makes it very difficult to take the U.N. seriously and to take the rule of law seriously.  Because if you're going to apply it to one and not to the other, what lesson are you meant to grab from that?  It makes it difficult for the U.N. to focus on far greater problems.  Pushing issues like the crisis in Sudan, which is now coming to the Security Council, it's a difficult process.  There's so much time taken up by this focus on Israel.

Now, I think the International Court of Justice opinion reveals that damage to the U.N. in a real, crucial way.  The Security Council on this occasion was asked to deal with the security fence, and it said, well, this is an isolated issue and there is a body of responsibilities, a body--it's a complex conflict.  And it said we can't isolate just the fence issue.  The General Assembly didn't feel that problem and thought it was all right to ask a question to the Court that put on trial the response to terrorism rather than the terrorism itself.  The secretary general then presented the Court with a dossier of information and relevance about the fence, which did not mention the terrorism that made the fence necessary.  And then the Court went ahead to issue an opinion from this distorted question that did not mention the terrorism which has necessitated the fence, that presented the history of the conflict as if conflicts between Israel and its neighbors materialized out of thin air and made what--if we read it the way it reads, the way it appears--what seems a preposterous charge that there is no right of self-defense against terrorism, against non-state actors.

Now, if that's the way the Court is going to be read, the implications are far greater than for Israel.  Any state that's interested in defending itself against terrorism is challenged by that opinion.  Any state that's interested in the United Nations ideals protecting them, ensuring their fair application is challenged by an agenda led sometimes by the greatest human rights violators who are pushing this forward.

Now, how does this happen?  I won't go into too many details.  But let me say I spent some of my childhood in Australia--hence this accent.  In Australia--I don't know whether you have it in America, the saying If you want to eat sausages, don't find out how they're made.  I think, unfortunately, the same can be said very often with respect United Nations resolutions.  If you want to believe in the legitimacy of lots of U.N. resolutions, do not find out how they're made.  Don't come and ask me, certainly.  The number of times we have delegates telling us, listen, you know, we realize--including European delegates--that the advisory opinion was a little wacky, it was a little strange to focus so much on the response to terrorism and not the terrorism itself.  Or those who will tell us, you know, we'd like to not support this Palestinian resolution, but we've got to get elected to the Security Council, we've got to get--we want a diplomatic position, we don't want complaints from 22 Arab countries, from 56 Muslim countries, from 114 [inaudible] countries.

Unfortunately, we feel that the European Union plays too much into that game.  Instead of refusing to engage in all these extremist initiatives, they engage.  Instead of saying the focus is on the road map and the responsibility of both sides, they instead tinker with the resolution, putting references with great difficulty--and sometimes we appreciate those efforts--to refer to terrorism to some extent.  But that's not the issue.  The European Union comes back to us and says, oh, it would have been a lot worse had we not engaged.  That's not the point.  We prefer an extreme resolution that doesn't have the backing of the EU and that shows and reveals the extent to which the United Nations needs to look at this issue seriously, than one which is a little bit less worse but perpetuates this fundamental problem of looking at the process as one of rights to one side and responsibilities to the other.

I'll end, very quickly, by trying to tell you one last thing.  You might wonder why I'm not in a mental asylum after three years at the United Nations.  And the truth is, after a year and a half there, I was pretty depressed. Two things happened.  The first was that I was in Israel and I was at a cafe, in March 2002, and a suicide bomber entered it.  And he had a black detonator in his hand and pressed it and nothing happened.  So I've been in a good mood ever since.

[Laughter.]

MR. BECKER:  The second thing that happened is that, because of Jewish history and because of Israel's experiences, one of the deep things we feel is that even though the United Nations refuses to see us as a victim, our response to that is to refuse to be a victim. And everything that happens, everything that the Court, for instance, said to us, or the United Nations said to us, sends us that message.

Now, I hope some of you are happy that I was not wounded or killed in the suicide bombing, but you may have reasons to question whether you should be happy about the second thing, whether the goal of the United Nations, of the International Court of Justice in sending the messages that it sends should be to reinforce the feeling that we have to rely on ourselves and nobody else, not to put our faith in international institutions.  The message sent by the ICJ was that no matter how noble an international court of justice might be, it can be politicized and manipulated.  And that has implications for the ICC as well.

What should the U.N. role be in that dynamic?  Should it be to reinforce the negative, or find a way to bring both sides to focus on their rights and their responsibilities and see the suffering of each other?  And I would just put it to you in closing that on the Palestinian side we have a serious problem, that victimhood by the leadership has been turned from a condition into a strategy.  Peace will not move forward unless we are serious about both sides living up to their responsibilities and rights, and the U.N. has to play a role in that.

Thank you.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you, Tal.

Now, with remarkable lack of gallantry and now that all three males have spoken, we will turn to the ladies.  We've heard about the EU, so now we have a chance to hear from the EU  The Netherlands holds the presidency of the EU this half year, and Karen van Stegeren--I'm sorry, the Dutch G's are very hard for me to learn the pronunciation of--is a career diplomat of the Netherlands who currently serves as first secretary in the Embassy of the Netherlands here in Washington and is its resident expert on Middle Eastern issues.  Karen?

MS. van STEGEREN:  Thank you very much.  And good morning.  I want to thank you, Josh, for introducing me.  I am really delighted to be here today and I feel honored to sit behind one table with four distinguished experts on today's topic.

In particular, I'd like to thank Josh and the American Enterprise Institute as a whole for extending this invitation to me and thus giving me the opportunity to represent my country, the Netherlands, in its capacity as EU president, on issues that are close to our heart--the United Nations and Israel.

I want to say one thing, which--I really want to react on what Tal Becker just said and I want to make one thing very clear.  The EU does put terrorism against Israel on trial.  We reject it in all shapes and forms.  Whenever there is a terrorist attack in Israel, you will see a declaration from the EU  We make no difference between terrorism anywhere in the world.  So that's just as a start.

I'm neither a U.N. expert, as Mark Lagon is, nor a legal expert, as Tal Becker is.  My expertise lies maybe more with Israel or the Middle East as a whole.  Josh, however, convinced me that it would certainly fit into the discussion of today to have the EU represent its views on some of the issues that have attracted a lot of attention lately, and I am glad to do that.

Now, I know you're all eagerly waiting to hear me speak to the EU approach in the General Assembly on the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice.  The issue has been raised already.  I want to take, however, a minute or two to say something about the say we look at the U.N. and that multilateral system as a whole.  Because this is crucial for better understanding the way the EU has dealt with the advisory opinion.  And it will also help you understand that we see the U.N. as a crucial partner for peace-making in the Middle East.

The 25 members of the EU--we represent now 450 million persons; that's almost double the American population--share a fundamental commitment to the multilateral system and a staunch support for the U.N. and other international organizations that promote peace, security, and development.  We are committed to upholding and developing international law, and we consider the United Nations Charter to be the fundamental framework for international relations.  There is, in our view, no alternative to the U.N. as a guarantor of a rule-based international order.

Thus, the EU won't fail the multilateral system.  But we are, of course, not blind to the fact that the multilateral system, on some issues, has started to fail us.  No wonder, seeing that the organization was created under totally different global circumstances.  For the EU, this has not been a reason to abandon the multilateral house or to live in it only when it fits us.  On the contrary, the EU has committed itself to renovate this house and to strengthen it in a way that it can weather the heavy storms and rains of our time.  The U.S. committed itself to help create an effective multilateral system and the U.S. is pursuing that very same goal, and we're working very closely and constructively together.

So while this process has been set in motion, and while we clearly see the flaws in the system, we remain faithful to the U.N. and its affiliated organizations.  So when the highest body of international law, which is the International Court of Justice, speaks, we don't ignore it.  Our respect for the Court simply wouldn't allow us to ignore it.

So this brings me to the issue of the advisory opinion.  I think the key point of the criticism that has been leveled against the EU in recent weeks has been that the EU has acted inconsistently.  I will today make the case that the EU has acted perfectly consistent on three levels--consistent with its approach to toward the multilateral system, consistent with its approach to the Middle East peace process it firmly believes in and wants to protect, and consistent with it position regarding Israel's legitimate security concerns.

I think the heart of the difference in views can be easily explained.  I tried to put myself in the shoes of our critics and it helped me to see it from a different angle.  I will ask you to do the same for just one short moment--I won't ask more than that from you, and I know that for most of you it is real hard.

[Laughter.]

MS. van STEGEREN:  Since the EU had abstained in the General Assembly resolution that referred the question of the legal consequences of the barrier--we call it "barrier" in EU language--to the ICJ, there was apparently an expectation that the EU would, as a consequence, ignore the ICJ's conclusions.  This could have been true if the EU's abstention would have been based on the position that the ICJ was not competent to deal with the issue.  That was, however, not the case.  I read you from the statement that was issued by the Italian EU presidency at the time to explain the EU vote.  It said, The EU believes that the proposed advisory opinion from the ICJ will not help efforts of the two parties to re-launch a political dialogue and therefore is inappropriate.

It was thus for political and not for legal reasons that we deemed a referral to the ICJ inappropriate.  And that makes a difference of night and day.  Against a background of our general approach toward the ICJ, as I just explained, you will understand that once the ICJ had spoken, this was a given for the EU  Or to put it in other terms, it has never been our preference to put this issue to the ICJ, but the ICJ, as the competent body, didn't consider our arguments to be weighing out other considerations.

Many have argued that the EU should have ignored the advisory opinion, or at least not have started negotiations about a resolution text put forward by the Arab Group, for precisely the political reasons the EU had brought to bear in its explanation of vote.  I quoted that explanation of vote.  But I want to turn that argument around.  It is precisely because it has been the consistent EU position that the political process, as laid down in the road map, is of overriding importance that we thought it vital to start negotiating a text that didn't include that notion.  Our objective while conducting the negotiations were threefold.  First of all, we wanted a good balance in the resolution, meaning that rights and obligations of both parties--of both parties--in the conflict would be included.  We wanted to ensure that the UNGA would limit itself to simple acknowledgement of the advisory opinion.  So no endorsements, no opening for future measures against Israel.  This is, by the way, completely in line with the position of my foreign minister, Minister Bot, who has made clear that he wants to keep all channels open with Israel and doesn't want to go down the path of measures against Israel.  And I can assure you that there are regular contacts with Israeli Foreign Minister Shalom.  The third point was that we wanted to include the importance of the political process in an operational paragraph.

We believe that the EU has done a good job in bringing important principles--like the right of all states to protect the life of their citizens--and substantial text on the political process and the road map into the resolution.  The fact that resolution was adopted by as many as 150 members speaks volumes.

We know, of course, and it was just confirmed, that Israel would have preferred not to have a resolution at all.  But that was no option.  A resolution, good or bad, would have been adopted anyhow.  For us it remains puzzling that Israel would rather prefer a bad resolution condemning Israel, threatening it with future measures--which indeed wouldn't get the support of the EU--over a good resolution which does get EU's support.  In our logic, that is not logical.

We truly believe that the resolution works to the benefit of Israel.  The EU worked hard to ensure that the message of the resolution would be clear.  As explained, it had to contain an acknowledgement of the advisory opinion--which to a large extent coincides with the EU position on the legality of the barrier; but more importantly, it had to point a way back to the work that would make any future U.N. action superfluous--a real peace process, as laid down in the road map, which will eventually lead to the two-state solution embraced by President Bush.

A very emotional point of criticism has been that the EU has no eye for the effectiveness of the barrier and the feelings of security and stability it therefore brings to Israeli citizens.  I use the word "emotional" here on purpose, because this is an emotional issue for the EU as well.  I'm sure this audience will appreciate, and it was already mentioned before, that the EU and Israel, though in a very different way, are both products that grew out of the horrors of World War II.  The EU will never sell out Israel's security interests.  Israel's right to exist is not in doubt.  And I can assure you that this EU presidency, with its records of assisting hundreds of thousands of Soviet Jews to make aliya to Israel and of sending patriots to Israel during the Gulf War, won't act against Israel's security interests just for the sake of having an EU consensus.

This allegation has been made, and is real shocking.  In the EU's explanation of vote, it was explicitly stressed that we recognize Israel's security concerns and its right to act in self-defense.  The EU clearly sees and appreciates that there is the broadest possible support in Israel for the barrier, and that is understandable.  We therefore don't object to the barrier as such, though for obvious reasons we'd rather not see it built.  What we do is to object to its route.  There cannot be any misunderstanding about that, since we have been demanding for months that Israel stop and reverse the construction of the barrier.  So there is simply no ground for allegations that the EU has asked Israel to break down the barrier just like that.

Actually, I think the question I was supposed to answer is whether the U.N. has disqualified itself from making any contribution to peace in the Middle East.  I know that my time is almost up, so I want to say one more thing about the issue that was raised by, well, both speakers that preceded me, and that is about the host of resolutions that is adopted every year in the UNGA and the Human Rights Commission, et cetera.  And we do understand that the long list of resolutions on Israel and Israeli practices, both in the U.N. and its affiliated organizations, is perceived by Israel as Israel-bashing and an anti-Israel bias in the U.N.

But let's take a step back here.  Do we think these resolutions do something to solve the conflict?  The answer is clearly no.  Are the UNGA and other resolutions the cause for the political conflict?  There also, the answer is clearly no.  Would it help in the U.N. if there would be a real peace process going on on the ground?  There, the answer is clearly yes.  Action in the U.N. is simply a reflection of a lack of action elsewhere.

The EU has done and will continue to do everything that is within its powers to help the peace process gain speed again.  Please realize that we're talking about our direct neighbors.  Prime Minister Sharon's disengagement plan is an important and courageous first step to break the deadlock, and the EU stands ready to support the plan, together with its Quartet partners-- U.S., U.N., and Russia.  But we see it as paramount that the plan become a two-way street, a process that the whole international community will be able to support.

Thank you.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you very much, Karen.

Now, I'll turn the floor to Ruth Wedgwood, who is the Edward B. Burling professor of international law and diplomacy at Johns Hopkins University.  She has been a member of the security of state's advisory committee on international law.  She's also served as an advisor to various U.N. bodies, and she's written prolifically on issues of international law.  I think you'll see in your packets a couple of her articles.  Ruth?

MS. WEDGWOOD:  Thank you very much.

Well, I'm also glad to be here and I'm glad to meet Karen van Stegeren.  The Hague is one of my favorite cities in Europe.

MS. van STEGEREN:  Good.

MS. WEDGWOOD:  Great bookstores.  And it's the international-law vacation capital of the world now, so I consider myself binational, at least.

And I have to say, I spend a lot of my time now on U.N. things.  I sit for nine weeks a year, to the distress of my deans at Johns Hopkins, on the Human Rights Committee.  I speak in a purely personal capacity, and there I'm an independent expert.  And we have, actually, issued a majoritarian consensus view on the wall as such.  Majoritarian consensus.

But let me just say where I worry about the present state of play.  Again, as a public international lawyer, I have great reverence for the past and the future of the International Court of Justice, not always the present.  And I worry for its future, I worry for the United Nations.  I don't worry for Tal Becker; he can take care of himself.  But I do think that a lot of different important bodies have gotten themselves into a tremendous pickle in the present mood of political excitement.

Let me just start, if I may, with the resolution.  One of the interesting dilemmas of the Security Council in the present age of civil conflicts and civil wars is that, increasingly, they have to-- [tape change].  --they call upon all manner of folk to obey humanitarian law and to try to obviate existing threats to international peace and security.  The major agenda, frankly, of the Security Council nowadays is civil conflicts.  So you don't just talk to states.

If you look at the operative language of the resolution just passed by the U.N. General Assembly--she said in her personal capacity--it demands that Israel comply with its legal obligations, it calls upon all state members to comply with their legal obligations in the advisory opinion--which means operationalize this condemnation of the fence, and it does call upon both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to immediately implement their obligations under the road map.  It doesn't call upon any non-state actor, however, to cease and desist from their violations of international humanitarian law.

So I think, in this case, the General Assembly has not taken the lesson from the Security Council, which is that one has an obligation to address all actors in a conflict and do it in an even-handed way even if the formal personality of statehood is not yet present.  So that's just on the GA resolution.

The GA, I have to say--I used to collect UNICEF nickels and dimes on Halloween in my little red carton, my little orange carton, and then I hung around New York, in and around the U.N. for about three or four years when I was at the Council on Foreign Relations.  And indeed, the sausage never tastes quite the same after you watch it being made.  The U.N., I hate to tell folks, is a deeply political place.  International law can't be taught as a matter of deductive logic.  You have to look at the politics that underlie each decision.  There are some issues that are never brought to the U.N.--no Tibet, rarely Kashmir, no Chechnya--and it matters who's asking the question and of whom it's being asked.  So don't suppose that this is the Kantian universalism come to Earth.  This is a Sturm und Drang, it's World Wrestling Federation, and you have to read the outcomes in light of that fact.  Nonetheless, I have the hope that is shared by every public international lawyer of having a set of norms that are constraining on states and are internalized in the very identity of states, and therefore one endures.

But let me worry about how the case was brought to the Court and what the outcome was.  First, it was a phenomenally hurried process.  The resolution was voted to seek an advisory opinion in early December, briefs were due at the end of January.  When I used to take my kiddies at law school through ICJ opinions, they would wonder that the ICJ often took years to handle even urgent matters, like the Bosnia vs. Serbia genocide suit.  So this kind of two-month rush is most unusual.

The ICJ has real troubles with fact-finding.  They don't appoint special masters.  They simply find what they can where they can--often, I fear, in too much of a magpie fashion.  Here there was no attempt at fact-finding.  There was no impulse to appointment a special master to seek facts on the ground.  I don't know whether Israel would have consented or not.  But if you're doing a balancing of relative harms and relative goods, it does matter, perhaps, what the relative burden on two peoples may be.  Could the Court have written a decision that demanded there be a gate every half kilometer?  That the waiting time be reduced to 10 minutes?  That the gates be opened 24 hours a day?  Sure.  Instead, they worked with what they chose to have, and that's the opinion you've got.

Third concern is that I think, in my opinion, personally, that the rush to judgment was heedless of the road map process, heedless of the Geneva Accords, heedless of the welcome offer by Israel to withdraw from Gaza.  And just one thing as we're going good, so to say, the Court, I think, as an apolitical organ, has chosen to intervene and issue a universally binding pronunciamento, which I don't think they had to do.  They have the right under their existing case law to decline requests for advisory opinions.  They can set their own schedule.  They have declined, as the Permanent Court of International Justice, the old League court, has in fact declined requests for advisory opinions.  So it didn't have to be issued this spring in the teeth of the Gaza withdrawal.

Fourth, I do think that consent-based jurisdiction is deeply important to the future of the Court.  The Court has no police authority.  What it does is rely upon the willingness of states to submit their disputes on the surmise that they'll get a fair hearing.  And the fundamental source of jurisdiction for the Court is consent-based, either in particular treaties or in so-called general or compulsory jurisdiction where you agree to send everything to the Court, or in so-called compromis--that's "compromise" without the E--where you and an adversary say we're going to frame a question and choose to answer it together.

And that, I think, is a very important axiom for the future success of the Court disregarded here.  The GA, the General Assembly, voted for an advisory opinion.  A huge number of states abstained from that vote.  And that vote for an advisory opinion can cut in the teeth of every consent-based premise.  It's something that could be used against the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, or the U.S.  There's no veto in the General Assembly.  It simply is the will of the majority, which now is the G77, more familiarly known as the G133, which is almost the two-thirds you need for important questions.

So one should be aware of what fireworks are being sent into the air and where they will land next time.  Essentially, this methodology, this use of a GA request for an advisory opinion, is a way around the veto.  Article 12(1) of the U.N. Charter says that the General Assembly is disabled from even making a recommendation where a matter is before the Security Council, where the Council is seized of the matter and it's a matter of international peace and security.  The Court now has reached back to 1950, to Dean Acheson, to the North Korean invasion of South Korea, to the old Uniting for Peace Resolution and said Ha-ha, this is rewritten, Article 12(1), and [inaudible] it "Evolving Practice."

But nonetheless, whether it's strict law with no exceptions or the occasional exception in an advisory opinion, it seems to me that the Court should be aware that the role of the Council as the primary organ for peace and security--and the role which often the U.S. is criticized for not being sufficiently respectful of--if you're in favor of the U.N.'s central role in international security matters, then you should not willy-nilly be stripping the Council of its authority.

So I think how the case got here was troubling.  The Court had discretion to treat it in a different fashion.

On the actual decision, I mean, it is clear there are two peoples who both have rights.  From the U.S. perspective, I think what I find most troubling about the opinion is that it says that the right of self-defense is limited to international states, that if you have a non-state actor who is even over a line that the General Assembly and the Court want to find to be quasi-territorial, i.e., over the green line, that there's no right of self-defense, even though Article 51 says nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations.  The Court simply puts to one side the suicide bombings by saying, hey, they weren't done by a state, they were done by non-state actors, by terrorist groups, and therefore they don't count under Article 51.  Well, it's not the language of Article 51, it's not what was voted by the Security Council after 9/11 in Resolution 1373, when the Council said that an attack by a non-state actor such as al Qaeda amounts to an armed attack under Article 51.

So I think as a matter of doctrine what's deeply troubling about this is the hamstringing of the right of self-defense.

On proportionality, because there are rights, of course, that the Palestinians have here.  It seems to me that in treating proportionality as a serious norm, you do have to look at facts on both sides--studies of where the suicide bombers come from, questions of where the fence could or could not be placed, perhaps drastic ways of obviating the burden on the Palestinian people to make sure that people don't have to wait in line for hours at a time that impedes their access to medical care or to their farmland or to their families.  One could put heavy burdens on the person building the fence as part of that weighing.  But to say simply that facially we have decided ex ante a priori that we know what's inadequate, that you have other ways of protecting the people, I don't think that's justice to the fact-finding for which courts are designed.

So I worry for the ICJ.  I worry, I suppose, for the constitutional architecture of the U.N.--the Security Council has now been subordinated to the General Assembly--I worry for the credibility of the Court's rulings.  I will note that no member of the European Union took part in the oral argument.  Thirteen states took part; nobody from the European Union.  That's a very strange asymmetry to me, if it was so foregone that the outcome would be one that should be abided by--which is indeed, of course, the commitment of every member of the United Nations.  So it seems to me, in light of that the European Union might have wanted to take a different role after the opinion came down.

On the other problem of the U.N. and Israel's membership, again, I always want to believe the best and I am committed to the United Nations.  If we didn't have one, we'd have to invent another one, and it would have many of the same problems that this one does.  But I do think that there's too much privacy, that people who know the institution and its foibles don't like to tell the children, don't share it with the others, because it would be bad for the institution.  Well, I think in fact the only way to make the U.N. that which we all want it to be is to be perfectly frank about often how it operates.  And one thing you can't overlook is that the U.N. is a collection of regional bodies.  That's how elections are held, that's how caucuses are run, that's how seats on the Security Council are allocated.  It's a collection of five or six regions, depending how you count them.  And Israel's unique exclusion from any regional grouping in Geneva means that it can't take part in the very debates where it is the source of controversy, or its actions are to be put in question.  That to me is madness.

Richard Holbrooke worked it out in New York to give Israel a provisional, tentative, don't-run-for-anything temporary membership, which is why it was considered quite amazing that Tal Becker got to be vice chairman of any committee.  Unfortunately, that was not extended to Geneva.  And the WEOG, this funny little group which is not known to prime time--W-E-0-G, Western European and Others Group.  It's the group that the U.S. is a member of--we're an other, Australia's an other, New Zealand's an other, Turkey is an other.  It's not just Europeans.  And yet, WEOG has simply resisted year after year after year any willingness to entertain Israeli membership.  I've been told by a lot of diplomats I know that nothing less than bilateral requests by George Bush--or John Kerry if the election goes the other way--could solve this, that it simply can't be worked out.  And indeed, a year ago last spring, the EU members at the WEOG Conference simply said, well, you know, we're on a different schedule for our caucus so we can't give you an answer this year; ask us next year.

Well, a great many countries whose governments are close to the U.S. have been troublesome on this, countries that don't want to be named, countries that will probably end up ultimately having to be named, have been obstructive on this.  It's not who you think.  It's countries that have universalistic aspirations, that see themselves as good-guy countries, where there has been a kind of passing of the hat to figure out who's going to veto next time.  And ultimately, I think, this is not sustainable.  If Germany and Japan have any ambition to ever become members of the Security Council, this has to be solved, because you can't have an expanded Security Council ever, I think, if the U.S. has to agree to it as a Permanent Five member, unless the problem of universal membership in regional organizations is solved.

Israel may have its problems.  I'm not always a fan of everything it does, shall I say.  But compare it to the competition and there are a great many unattractive governments and unattractive places that do very unattractive things to their people--all of whom have a regional membership.  So I think the WEOG scandal needs to be solved.

Thank you.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you, Ruth.

Karen, there were a couple more sallies at the European Union in that.  Before we open it up to the floor, did you wish to respond to any of that?  Only if you wish to.

MS. van STEGEREN:  Well, yeah, there were a couple, indeed.

MS. WEDGWOOD:  They were friendly.

MS. van STEGEREN:  You're not so bad.  Maybe--I think Mark Lagon mentioned the issue of antisemitism and having a resolution during the General Assembly.  I think indeed that it is our intention to repeat what was done in the Human Rights Commission and do something like that in the General Assembly, meaning a resolution on religious intolerance specifically mentioning the question of antisemitism.

Many of the points that have been made about the ICJ, in a way I have addressed them already in my presentation.  So I actually don't want to repeat them.

On the question of WEOG, the Western and Others Group, I have not enough information to really give you an answer.  As I said, I'm not a U.N. expert, and this is an issue that is, really, dealt with in the U.N. bodies.  I know that the step that has been made to allow Israel in the group until the time that they would be part of the group that Israel says itself it belongs to, which is the Arab Middle Eastern group, that has been a step forward and it would in fact mean that Israel could even sit on the Security Council, although it might be more in theory than in reality.  But it is possible.

I think that all I can say about the WEOG actually right now, and I'm open to answer other questions.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Thank you, Karen.

Okay, we'll open it up to questions.  I prefer questions to comments, but you may make comments provided you keep them brief.  Please, once I call on you, wait for a moment for the microphone to reach you, and then identify yourself.

QUESTION:  My name is Sayed Erekat [ph] from Al-Quds Daily newspaper.  My question is to Mr. Lagon.  Is that, sir, what you gave us today, the official position of the United States government?  And if it is so, isn't that inconsistent with the U.S. traditional position that has voted for Resolution 194 time and again calling for the return of Palestinian refugees, Resolution 242, that calls for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza?  And to the Israeli representative, who also failed to mention that the first suicide bombing happened three decades after the occupation, do Palestinians under occupation have the right to self-defense?

And to you, sir, Mr. Muravchik, why is there not a Palestinian representative, since this is about [inaudible] Israel, and the flip side of that is the Palestinian?

Thank you.

MR. LAGON:  Well, I'll just respond briefly that I think the positions that I laid out are indeed consistent with our policy, that they do not represent a departure.  And when I refer to the responsibility of members of the U.N. to follow through on a vision of two states, it's not just because that's the position of the president of the United States, but it is indeed the plan of the Quartet.  And what I'd just suggest is that the other three players in the Quartet besides the United States--the U.N., the EU, and Russia--need to think about that balance of responsibilities and rights which Tal has referred to.

MR. BECKER:  Suicide bombings, yes.  Well, I think sometimes we have short memories, and suicide bombings isn't the only form of terrorism.  There were hijackings, killings of school children, bus attacks and so on throughout the history of this conflict.  And I'm not claiming perfection on the part of Israel.  I certainly think there really is room to criticize.  But I simply don't think that either side has a monopoly on the status of victim or on suffering.

The problem we face, and the problem Palestinians face in particular, I think, is that terrorism is a particularly nasty sort of violence.  Because those engaged in terrorism don't distinguish themselves from civilians, they endanger not just the civilians they target, but  the civilians they hide amongst.  And they make, unfortunately, innocent Palestinian civilians place them at risk.  And it's an incredibly difficult situation to try to find terrorists who do not distinguish themselves from civilians, from amongst the civilian population.

That being said, I think the way forward is for both of us to try to empower those who are committed to non-violence, negotiations, and recognition--one or the other.  And the EU--and Karen, I appreciate your comments very much--made one point.  I'll give you one example of an annual resolution that the EU supports.  There's one resolution, for instance, which condemns violence against civilians, especially Palestinian civilians.  And the EU votes in favor of that.  Now, that was a compromise because initially, when it was drafted, it was just condemning violence against Palestinian civilians.  Now we have violence against civilians as well as against Palestinian civilians.  I don't consider that a move from a bad resolution to a good resolution.  The shift that has happened there is we send a message to Israelis that somehow Palestinian civilian lives are worth more than Israeli lives, and I think that's dangerous for the process.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  And there was part of the question addressed to me as the [inaudible] of the panel, and I'll be happy to answer it, which was why there was no representative of the Palestinians or the Arabs on this panel.  One has different panels address different subjects.  And if the subject we were addressing here was directly the Israel-Arab or Israel-Palestinian conflict, then it would make no sense at all to have it without representatives of the Arab side.

Discussing the question of the U.N. and Israel seemed to me somewhat different, because the injustice and absurdity of the situation is so manifest.  That is, there are 22 members of the Arab League, 56 members of the Islamic Conference, and this automatic built-in majority in the U.N. has been exploited to a fare thee well, to the point that 40 percent of the resolutions voted on by the General Assembly every year are condemnations of Israel.  The majority of the state-oriented resolutions that come before the U.N. Human Rights Commission are condemnations of Israel.  And so we have this pattern of sort of, I think, mindless exploitation of this automatic majority in the U.N.  Any resolution, regardless of what it said, that condemned Israel, is likely to endorsed.

And so it seemed to me that what would be interesting would be an exchange of views among Western states about how we ought to respond to this egregious misuse of the U.N.  And so that's the topic, and that seemed to me to require a different lineup of speakers than if we were having and exchange about the Middle East peace process or something on that order.

Next question?

QUESTION:  Thank you.  Paulette, the communications consultant.

I want to thank you all for your presentations, Mr. Becker particularly.  You gave a compelling statement about equal rights and responsibilities.  However, I, too, find that the absence of a Palestinian or Arab representative is somewhat naive in thinking that we would not deal with that particular issue.

But if the statement is in fact that there is a--the cries of unfair, that there is a preponderance of activity and actions and positions against Israel in the United Nations, then perhaps we should be answering the question here, which I haven't heard, which is why?  Why is Israel apparently ticking off so many people?

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Anybody want to respond to that?  We don't--

MR. LAGON:  I don't need to defend my friend and colleague Josh Muravchik for the lineup of the panel, although I may offer my own view on that.

To answer your final question, I must say I agree with Tal that a democratic state should be subject to criticism, be open to it, live by the highest standards.  But I submit there's a reason why there's such a rush to criticize Israel--as a desire to use this as a distraction from other problems.  There are real issues at stake for Israelis and for Palestinians, but the disproportionate amount of time is spent on it is a purposeful distraction--a distraction by dictatorships around the world from their own repressive activities and from other matters.

But let me just--rather than looking at this so much as a, you know, how much visibility is there for the Israeli position versus the Palestinian position, because one must accept that the Palestinians, who do not yet have a state, are quite well represented within the U.N. system, both within the Secretariat and indeed within the bodies of the U.N.  Their views are well represented.  But let's just look at the imbalance captured by one snapshot.  At the Commission on Human Rights, as Tal notes, there's a dedicated agenda item, Item 8, to Israel and the occupied territories.  So all other nations might be subject to country-specific condemnation or censure under so-called Item 9, but Israel gets its own category for a battery of condemnations and censure.

Why is it that when the discussion of China--which, for all of its successes in economic development, remains a repressive one-party state with serious issues of civil liberties, control of the Internet, repression of religious freedom--when a resolution on China is brought up at the Commission on Human Rights, it is prevented from being considered, even on a substantive vote, by a procedural no action motion--and by massive margins.  And then there are multiple resolutions that relate to Israel.  Something's wrong.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  You asked why, and actually I had answered the question in my remark even before you asked.

Yes, sir?

QUESTION:  Yes.  Mark.  I'm Dick Helman from CPAC.  In keeping with the couple of recent resolutions of the Congress with which you are affiliated, in keeping with the dictum of Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick that one of the things the United States should be concerned with is fairness and equality of nations, including fairness and equality to Israel, how helpful would it be if Congress followed up on its recent resolution with respect to WEOG with some threatened or actual funding cuts to parts of the U.N. if that fairness to Israel does not eventuate?

And second, in keeping with President Bush's, then-Candidate Bush's promise to place our embassy in Jerusalem as a first order of business, and Secretary Powell's comment that--in his first hearing, I think, on the Hill during this administration--that the administration intended to place the embassy in Jerusalem--Israel's capital, to quote him--when will that take place?  How soon to the election will the president wait before keeping that campaign promise from the last election?  Although he has been very fair and positive to Israel, I believe.

Karen, when will the European Union show the same attention to Palestinian violations of human rights, for example, violation of the convention against using children, boys and girls, in warfare and incitement of terror and destruction by children and others in the educational and official media?

Ruth, what could be done with the U.N. to have it show as much attention to what's happening in Sudan as they do to what's happening in Israel?

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Okay.

QUESTION:  And last, Tal, sir, you might--

MR. MURAVCHIK:  No, no, no.

QUESTION:  --feel left out.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Wait.  No, no, no.

QUESTION:  Why would we propose--

MR. MURAVCHIK:  No, no.  Sir?  Sir?

QUESTION:  Is that enough?  Okay.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  No, that's too many.

QUESTION:  I'll save the one for Tal.  I'll talk to him afterwards, Josh.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  It's too many, because we want to give as many people as possible a chance to ask questions, who have them.  And I should have jumped in sooner.  Let's try to ask one question apiece.

MR. LAGON:  I'll respond briefly so that there can be other questioners.  On the matter of the location of the American embassy in Israel, it's quite reasonable that it should be in Jerusalem.  The Congress plays, actually, a helpful role, as it often does--I must say that as a former staffer with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and with the House leadership.  It highlights issues of principle that are needed to be raised.  I can't speak to the timing.  I'm not, you know, someone who's in charge of embassy buildings nor of our bilateral policy with respect to Israel, so I can't speak to that.

You know, having worked for the infamous Senator Helms of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when Ambassador Holbrooke worked on trying to get Israel, through negotiation, accepted in the WEOG in New York, it was partly propelled by legislation that Senator Helms was responsible for, where a condition for American policy in the U.N. was to get that Israeli membership in the WEOG.  I can't dissuade a congressional role speaking on these issues.  I have to say, I'm in the funny position now, working in the executive branch, where, you know, I would never invite a funding withholding or a conditional funding step by the Congress, just as a matter of executive-legislative relations.  But I'll affirm the role of Congress in focusing the mind on things that just need to be done because they're right.

MS. van STEGEREN:  Thank you for the question.  I made clear in my presentation at the beginning that we do give attention to human rights violations by the Palestinians.  You asked about the specific resolution.  What I can say to that is that we'd rather go in another direction.  The Netherlands has been very active, for instance, in the General Assembly as one of six facilitators last year in an exercise to streamline the agenda of the General Assembly and actually to bring the agenda down to issues that are real current.  This is a very, very difficult exercise.  As you know, we are not the ones that are introducing the resolutions on Israel, and we'd rather go, especially in the General Assembly but also in the Human Rights Commission, into another direction, which is streamlining the agenda and talking more about current issues.  Thank you.

MS. WEDGWOOD:  On what can be done, funding cutoffs actually don't work here, even if you thought they were a good idea, because it's not the U.N. that governs the regional caucuses.  It's the EU that controls WEOG.  So I fear it's very much in Karen's home court, and I'm sure she'll bring home glad tidings [inaudible] the "O" countries, the "Other" countries, that they would like to have this be an inclusive group and that it makes sense to do this and that the time is ripe and that Germany's aspirations are at stake.

As to the lady who asked the other question, I'll just refer her to the folk songs of Tom Lehrer, that old MIT mathematician, whose recordings are still available somewhere on the Web, if you know what I mean.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  That was a response, Ruth, that really is dividing the audience by generations.

[Laughter.]

QUESTION:  John Wohlstetter, a senior fellow, Discovery Institute.

A question for the European Union representative and that is, with respect to Article 51 and the ICJ's interpretation that the self-defense provision does not apply to non-state actors.  If, God forbid, Palestinian terrorists from the West Bank were to strike at European Union nationals during the Olympics, would the EU nations take the position of the ICJ that they had no right of self-defense against the Palestinians?

MS. van STEGEREN:  Well, as I explained already, one of our purposes was not to have the advisory opinion endorsed; it's just acknowledged.  In our explanation of vote, we have explicitly stated--and I also quoted that--that we recognize Israel's right to self-defense.  We also said in our explanation of vote that we don't agree with all elements of the advisory opinion, and that was very clear during the negotiations.  So with that package, we felt comfortable enough--the acknowledgement not an endorsement, not an approval, plus our explanation of vote--that our position was clear enough.

QUESTION:  Vladimir [inaudible], the Russian Television Network, RTV.  I have a short question for Mr. Becker.

In the Soviet days, the Kremlin's position was hugely pro-Arab and, during the Yeltsin presidency, more pro-Israel.  What would you consider Russia's position now in the Quartet, because it was the only member of the Quartet which wasn't discussed today.  Is it more pro-Israel, more anti-Israel, or neutral?  Thank you.

MR. BECKER:  Well, I think it's difficult to reach a general conclusion.  I think on the ICJ issue that the Russians did believe that it wasn't an appropriate mechanism and they saw it as undercutting the road map initiative, which they are very supportive of.  I think the Russians, for understandable reasons, have pretty strong views about the right of self-defense against terrorism, and those issues.  At the same time, if I can be a little cryptic, I would say that they are subject to the same pressures that many states find themselves subject to, political pressures, within the United Nations system.  And unfortunately, sometimes that doesn't lead to the best result.

QUESTION:  I'm George Bernstein, Zionist Organization of America.

In your comments-- [sound problem].

MR. MURAVCHIK:  We have trouble hearing you.  Can you speak right into the mike?

QUESTION:  I believe in your comments you have recognized the general antipathy to Israel throughout the world.  And for the generational gap, the comments of Lehrer were basically discussing how the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Hindus hate the Muslims, but everybody hates the Jews.  And that is really the answer.  And while you haven't explicitly said it, I believe the implication of your comments was that the Jews can't count on anybody when it comes down to the crunch.  When will the Israeli government act on that knowledge?

MR. BECKER:  Speaking from my personal view, if that was your impression from my remarks, that was not intended.  I do not believe that antisemitism is an explanation for the policy of every government and every vote and the attitudes that take place.  It may have some underlying role in some of the positions, in some issues.  It is difficult to understand, for instance, why the notion of a resolution on antisemitism was considered so repulsive for some states.  At the same time, I think it is misguided to turn a political conflict into a racial or ethnic conflict, or a cultural conflict, even if there are elements of truth and sometimes elements of that below the surface.  Our goal is to disempower those who want to turn this, as they did with the Durban Conference, into that kind of conflict.

I should say also that, although it was 58 years late, an important event happened a few weeks ago, and that was the first U.N. conference on antisemitism.  It was held by the Secretariat.  The secretary general made remarks about the fact that the U.N. should be a home for the Jews, too, and he called for a resolution in the General Assembly on antisemitism.  And it's a start.  That itself is a start.  I think we need to be very careful not to paint things with a broad brush.  It's true of the conflict.  Certainly not every Palestinian is more interested in the destruction of Israel than the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state.  There are many, many, many moderate Palestinians interested in the peace process, and we should not label across-the-board.

And the same applies to the U.N.  The U.N. isn't a monolith.  There are different actors, there are different players--some are states, some are Secretariat officials--and each needs to be judged on its merits.

I'll leave it at that.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  I'm afraid those lyrics don't sound nearly as funny without the music.

We have time for one or two more questions.  Walter?

QUESTION:  Walter Burns, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and, 20-odd years ago, the American representative at the U.N. Human Rights Commission.

Question to anybody on the panel.  Can any of you think of anything good ever accomplished by the Human Rights Commission?

MS. WEDGWOOD:  Yes, I can.  And that's why I think, again, there is pain when worthy organizations are shanghaied or misused.

No, the U.N. Human Rights Commission, for example, does appoint thematic special rapporteurs--a special rapporteur on disappearances, a special rapporteur on torture.  And a lot of those guys and gals are very brave people who go into dungeons in the most dreary capitals and regional cities around the world, are often under-funded, too many of them; they don't get enough staff support.

But the Human Rights Commission has a very worthy and noble past where people of great stature in the past have been appointed to it.  I think Louise Arbour being appointed as high commissioner for human rights--she's an old friend of mine from Yugoslav tribunal days.  And she is a boffo gal.  She's smart, she's politique, she's mignonne, she knows--she picks her battles.  And I'm very hopeful that, when she settles in, she will figure out ways to use the commission in the ways that it should be used.  And she has, I hope and I believe, enough strength of will not to become swept away by the running passions of the hour.

I also would like to say briefly, Josh, I think, for Europe especially this year, this is a very resonant issue.  We do a lot of European country reports at the committee, and I know that European capitals are concerned about hate speech and violence at home and how you avoid it and how you repress it.  And I do think that--just putting Tom Lehrer back to his dated 1968 student politics milieu--that unfortunately there is kind of an iterative effect between Middle East politics and violence in Europe.  And therefore, to maintain a respectful and loving tone toward both peoples who are involved in this embrace, who share the same history of displacement in so many ways, I think is a very important didactic lesson for the culture of European democracies.  And I think Europe would be deluding itself if it supposed that you could take kind of an aggravated tone in the Middle East and not have it have resonance at home.

QUESTION:  Ten seconds, Josh?

MR. LAGON:  If I could just respond to your question quickly.  I for my sins now am the official at the State Department responsible for policy related to the Commission on Human Rights.  And the answer to your question is there are some things it does that are worthwhile, but right now the Commission on Human Rights does more harm than it does good.  And we are committed in a policy to trying to clean it up, and one thing we are trying to do is pursuing an idea perhaps so simple that it hasn't been pursued as much as it should have been in recent years, which is to get all the democracies of the Commission on Human Rights--some three-fifths of its 53-nation membership--and get them to work together to improve the members who run for the commission and the product of the commission in a democracy caucus, in an effort that both Capitol Hill and the executive branch, Democrats and Republicans all support.

But you ask a very good question.

QUESTION:  May I--just 10 seconds, Josh.  Perhaps things have changed in 20 years, Professor Wedgwood, but I recall laboring for a resolution to send a rapporteur to one of the Soviet countries and so forth, knowing very well that that particular country would never let that rapporteur set foot in the place.  And he was not allowed to come in.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Last question, please.

QUESTION:  David Moses, American Jewish Committee.

I was just wondering if Ruth or Tal would expand a little bit upon the absurdity of having a division of Palestinian rights that represents .01 percent of the population, plus two special committees that work under its aegis, whereas in that division we also have major global continental groups.

MR. BECKER:  Well, if you're referring to the Division on Palestinian Rights in particular or in general terms, I think that, as I said, this is an issue of proportion.  Proportionality is a wonderful principle in law in general.  It's a shame that the ICJ didn't take it all that seriously, I think, when it looked at the fence, unlike the Supreme Court.  And I think it's a shame that the United Nations hasn't done it as well.

This is a complex conflict without black and white.  And as I mentioned, the Division on Palestinian Rights--which has a large budget, spends millions of dollars--and other bodies seem to me to reinforce the precise opposite of what we want if we believe in a peace process where two people work together and realize each other's rights and if we believe in a U.N. that has as its basic principle the nonselective application of international standards.

MR. MURAVCHIK:  Well, I'd like to thank each one of the four panelists.  I thought you were all outstanding.  And for those of you who are unhappy with the composition of the panel, please don't hold it against them.  That's entirely to be laid at my doorstep.

Thank you all for coming, and please look for our next session on the U.N. and nuclear nonproliferation sometime during the month of September.