It’s in the nature of things for the United Nation’s role in any conflict to be attacked by people on both sides, and when you work for the UN there is often a temptation to take that simple fact as evidence that you are doing something right. By that easy test, the UN’s membership of the Quartet may be considered a success. From the beginning (in the spring of 2002), many Israelis and supporters of Israel were suspicious of the Quartet, seeing it as an attempt by hostile or potentially hostile third parties to dilute the United States’ support for Israel. They noted, for instance, that the period of the Quartet’s formation coincided with the passage of several Security Council resolutions on the Middle East, un-vetoed by the US – notably Resolution 1397 in which the council for the first time called explicitly for two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side within secure and recognized borders. And among the three other members, it was the UN that aroused most suspicion. Israelis, after all, had good reason to regard the majority of UN member states as a priori hostile on the basis of numerous General Assembly resolutions and to believe that this attitude was shared in at least some branches of the UN Secretariat. On the other side, many people objected to the UN becoming one member of a body whose other members were UN member states or, in the case of the European Union, a group of member states. This arrangement seemed both anomalous in form and dangerous in substance, since implicitly it discriminated against those member states (the vast majority) who were not members of the Quartet. This second objection undoubtedly had logic on its side. The Quartet was an anomalous arrangement. It resulted from an unusual initiative by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who during his first term (1997-2001) had gradually and skillfully accustomed member states to a considerable exercise of discretion on his part – making himself, more than any of his recent predecessors, a diplomatic actor separate and to a certain extent independent from the other principal organs of the world body. Thus “the UN as personified by him within the Quartet was not quite identical with “the UN to which all states, including the other Quartet members, belonged. It could be argued that in behaving thus he was acting beyond the powers bestowed on him by the UN Charter, and it is undoubtedly true that he could not have sustained this role if strong opposition to it had been articulated within the General Assembly. His skill lay precisely in avoiding that. There was grumbling behind the scenes, but no serious attempt to stop him in his tracks. The reason for this was that by and large, and with varying degrees of resentment, the majority accepted that he was acting in the interests of the organization. The truth was that by the late 1990s the UN had for a quarter of a century – and in sharp contrast to its earlier role from the 1940s to the early 1970s – been marginalized as a political player in Middle East peacemaking efforts. And the reason for this was equally clear: At least from 1975 onwards Israel no longer accepted the UN as impartial. It preferred to rely on the good offices of the US; the US was happy to provide them, keeping the UN firmly to one side; and the Arab states, followed eventually by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, had little choice but to accept this. Kofi Annan felt that this was wrong on all levels. The UN should have a significant role in helping to resolve such an important conflict. It should be accepted as impartial by both parties. And to win that acceptance the Secretariat, at least, must actually be impartial, no matter what the General Assembly might say. He therefore set out, from early in his first term, to convince Israel and its supporters of his good faith and good will. He scored his first success in this respect in 1999 when the Israeli government led by Ehud Barak accepted his appointment of Terje Roed-Larsen as UN special coordinator, not only in the Occupied Territories (as his predecessor Chinmaya Gharekhan had been) but also “for the Middle East peace process. This was followed in 2000 by a more substantive success, when Annan persuaded the Security Council to endorse his certification that Israel had indeed withdrawn from Lebanese territory under the terms of Resolution 425 (1978). Even so, up to the end of the Clinton administration the US continued to exercise a virtual monopoly over the mediator role, especially between Israel and the Palestinians. But in 2001 the incoming Bush administration proclaimed itself unwilling to continue this role, believing that Clinton had become too heavily involved in Middle East diplomacy and that Israel should be left to deal with the second intifada essentially by military means. This created a vacuum which Annan saw both as a danger and as an opportunity. He knew that neither the UN nor anyone else could fill the vacuum without US support, but he saw it as the UN’s role, working with the EU and Russia, to provide a mechanism through which the US could re-engage – and one which, precisely because it contained these other three actors, would make the mediation effort somewhat easier for the Arabs to accept. Insofar as the objective was to get the US to reengage, the UN’s role may be considered a success. It is of course unlikely that the US could long have avoided doing that in any case, but the Bush administration did make this more difficult for itself by its excommunication of Yasser Arafat – thereby increasing the utility of partners who did not share that self-imposed handicap. But it is much less clear that the UN – or for that matter the other Quartet partners – has had any significant success in modifying the substance of the US approach. Rather, the anxiety of America’s partners, especially the UN and the EU to keep alive the Quartet has made them more responsive to US pressure, and Quartet statements have therefore tended to involve at most a slight rephrasing of previously established US policy. Thus the Quartet’s main product, the “road map of April 2003, was frequently and not inaccurately referred to as “President Bush’s road map. After the January 2006 Palestinian elections, the US was able to turn the Quartet’s prediction “that it was inevitable that future assistance to any new government would be reviewed by donors against that government’s commitment to the principles of non-violence, recognition of Israel, and acceptance of previous agreements and obligations into a kind of self-fulfilling mantra. This severely restricted all forms of outside assistance to the Palestinians, thereby aggravating their already dire humanitarian situation and driving them to the brink of civil war, while also making it very difficult for any international actor to engage in a meaningful dialogue that might, over time, have brought Hamas to espouse the principles in question. Whatever the wisdom of the US adopting this policy for itself, it was surely a mistake for the UN to go along with it to the extent that it did. Kofi Annan’s determination to keep the Quartet in being – now evidently shared by his successor Ban Ki Moon – was understandable and probably right. At least it is hard to see that anything positive would have been achieved by breaking it up. But surely the UN would have made itself more useful, including to the US, if it had adopted an interpretation of Quartet principles closer to that of the Russians, rather than imposing unnecessary restrictions on its own freedom of maneuver.
Edward Mortimerwas director of communications in the office of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan between 2001 and 2006. He is now senior vice-president and chief program officer of the Salzburg Seminar. This commentary first appeared at bitterlemons-international.org, an online newsletter.
