A Mood of Defiance

By William E. Smith

The Arabs' U.N. campaign is met with obstinacy from Jerusalem

It's terrible," groaned a senior diplomat in Tel Aviv. "Terrible." He was referring to the way in which the issue of Jerusalem has assumed center-stage attention in the Palestinian autonomy talks between Israel and Egypt. He could just as easily have meant the way in which the Middle East peace process is faltering. Patience among many protagonists is wearing thin, and the forces of extremism on both sides again appear to be in the ascendancy.

At the U.N. in New York City, the General Assembly met in an "emergency session" -- only the seventh in the U.N.'s 35-year history-- to consider the plight of the Palestinian Arabs. Under discussion was a draft resolution, sponsored by a number of Arab and other Third World nations, that would endorse the right of Palestinians to form their own sovereign state and that would order Israel to retreat to its pre-1967 boundaries. On previous occasions, emergency sessions had been called to deal with fast-breaking crises, such as the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 and the outbreak of chaos in the former Belgian Congo a decade later. This time the resolution's sponsors seized on the device of an emergency session, because, under this procedure, it is possible for the U.N. to assemble a military force. Such a force could be used, the sponsors felt, to press the Israelis to withdraw from the occupied territories.

Unfortunately for the sponsors, however, they failed to clear this fanciful notion beforehand with the Soviet Union, which did not want to risk an outbreak of armed conflict in the Middle East.

In the face of Soviet unwillingness to cooperate, the Arab sponsors retreated, and the session instead turned into another broad diplomatic offensive against Israel, the U.S. and Camp David. Farouk Qaddoumi, the Palestine Liberation Organization's spokesman, declared that the Camp David accords "constitute a conspiracy against justice and peace." Islamic Conference Secretary-General Habib Chatti of Tunisia raised the possibility of suspending Israel's U.N. membership "if it continued to ignore the decisions of the organization and refused to evacuate the occupied Arab territories." For his part, Israeli Ambassador Yehuda Blum denounced the emergency session as a "grotesque farce" and called the P.L.O. "a linchpin of the terrorist international." When he rose to speak, practically all the Arab delegates left the Assembly chamber.

There appeared to be little doubt that when the vote is taken this week, the Palestinian-state resolution would pass by an overwhelming majority. In fact its sponsors were hoping that the U.S. and Israel would have little if any company in their casting of nay votes, assuming that the Western Europeans could be induced to abstain. In the end, that could happen, but last week the Europeans were clearly distressed that the draft resolution made no reference at all to Israel's right to exist. Speaking for the European Community, Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Gaston Thorn called the omission "unfortunate." He added that the proposed resolution did not "seem to contribute to the search for a just and lasting solution" because it failed to "offer the indispensable guarantees for [Israel's] existence."

Thorn, who is the current president of the Community's council of ministers, is the central figure in the independent European effort to participate in the Middle East peace process. In mid-August he will embark on a monthlong "fact-finding" tour of the Middle East. The Western Europeans have been careful to emphasize that they are merely trying to keep the peace process alive during the U.S. presidential campaign, when for political reasons Washington is likely to be reluctant to put any undue pressure on the Israelis. But the initiative is also motivated by an overriding European concern: oil. As the Community's energy commissioner, Guido Brunner candidly told TIME last week, "The Europeans are running out of patience and are increasingly nervous about their petroleum supplies." The Israelis resent the Europeans' intrusion. During his U.N. speech last week, Blum interrupted his attack on the Arabs to denounce the European Community as part of a "sorry parade of nations, great and small, that are trying to supplicate the Arab oil gods."

Even before the U.N. debate last week, the Israelis had demonstrated their own drift toward extremism. They are fully aware that Jerusalem is the most incendiary issue in the Middle East negotiations. They also know that it was the mere introduction last spring of a Knesset bill to reaffirm Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem -- including the predominantly Arab eastern sector -- that caused Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to suspend the peace negotiations for several weeks. At that time Israeli political experts soothingly insisted that the bill, which was introduced by Right-Wing Firebrand Geula Cohen, had no chance of passage.

Yet last week, in the first of three readings (votes), the Knesset passed the bill by a vote of 65 to 12. Among those who supported it was Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who is still convalescing from a heart attack he suffered last month. But he showed up in mid-evening to cast his vote and to advise all members of the U.N. that "Jerusalem, City of David, is the eternal capital of Israel and of the Jewish people, and will remain undivided for all future generations."

The Knesset action was but the latest in a series of potentially devastating political steps that the Israelis have been taking under Begin's leadership. The Prime Minister has already announced his intention to move his own office to East Jerusalem; the timing of the symbolic gesture would presumably depend on when he next wishes to show his defiance of world opinion. The Knesset vote not only distressed the Carter Administration but also angered the Egyptian government. Warned a senior Egyptian official: "If that bill passes, we shall not go on negotiating, we shall interrupt the talks once again." On the floor of the Knesset, Opposition Member Yossi Sarid sarcastically congratulated Geula Cohen for "succeeding in torpedoing the peace process." That judgment may have been an exaggeration. But it is an open question how many more provocations the process can withstand.

With reporting by DAVID AIKMAN, Louis Halasz

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