PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIDDLE EAST : Sauce for Goose, Sauce for Gander : Prompt U.N. action on behalf of Kuwait mocks the 23 years of ignored resolutions on behalf of Palestinians.

We are told by the new custodians of the sacred flame of U.N. Security Council resolutions that linkage between the Persian Gulf and Arab-Israeli conflicts is heresy. Like all new converts, they burn with an admirable, if unnatural, zeal. But because new converts often have a shaky understanding of the faith they have embraced, it is worth reminding those who resist the drawing of parallels between Kuwait and Palestine that the admirable principles of international law they brandish in one place are in fact applicable elsewhere.

The Security Council resolutions most relevant to settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict are 242 (of 1967) and 338 (of 1973). The first of these calls for withdrawal of Israeli forces from territories occupied during the 1967 war, and for an end to the state of war and respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and independence of every state in the area, and for their right to live within secure and recognized boundaries. The second calls for immediate implementation of 242, and for negotiations between the parties under “appropriate auspices”--a phrase understood to mean an international Middle East peace conference--to establish a just and durable peace.

The question that arises when listening to the new converts to the sanctity of Security Council resolutions is why their faith demands that those concerning Iraq and Kuwait must be implemented with vigor and rapidity, while others are allowed to languish unimplemented, for decades in some cases. Clearly, there are dissimilarities in many respects, and the language of the various resolutions differs (sanctions have never been voted by the Security Council in a resolution pertaining to the Arab-Israeli conflict), but surely a resolution is a resolution, even after 17 or 23 years since its passage.

Now, after all this time, the Arab-Israeli conflict is being linked to settlement of the Iraq-Kuwait conflict. What brought them together was last week’s massacre in Jerusalem, and the resulting Security Council condemnation of Israel.

Much has been said about the United States galvanizing the United Nations to take concrete steps to deal with the Iraqi occupation, while paralyzing it where concrete steps regarding the Israeli occupation were concerned. However, one dimension has escaped notice. This is the fact that between 1968 and 1980, the Security Council passed 11 resolutions concerning Jerusalem. The United States abstained on six, but voted for the others, which were unanimously adopted: to deplore Israel’s settlement of its citizens in East Jerusalem; to demand the dismantling of Israeli settlements there; to call on states not to provide Israel with assistance to be used for such settlements; to reaffirm that the principle of the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force applies to Jerusalem, and to declare Israeli changes in the city’s status invalid.

This position on Jerusalem, which has been reiterated over the past two years by the Bush Administration, represents an international consensus just as universal as that opposing Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Now the new apostles of the U.N. gospel preach that the unanimous will of the international community must be translated into immediate actions, including perhaps the use of force, in the case of Iraq, but they remain stout opponents of any action regarding Jerusalem. There, they will accept neither the use of force, nor the imposition of sanctions, nor the stationing of U.N. forces, nor the sending of U.N. observers, nor even the sending of a U.N. mission--not a mission by the secretary general, but by the Security Council itself (with the muscle that that body’s executive authority under the charter would give it).

Their reason? Israel would not accept such measures, even the most feeble of them. Were such reasoning to be applied to Iraq, its absurdity would become apparent, for if Security Council resolutions represent the will of the international community, they should be applied irrespective of the attitude of any individual state.

Comparisons are of course odious, and much is different in these two situations. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the authority of the Security Council is indivisible, and it has clearly expressed its will on the issue of Jerusalem, in a manner that might have prevented the tragedy of last week, had it been implemented in a timely fashion.

This matter will not go away, if only because the Shamir government is on a collision course with a universal international consensus on Jerusalem, and it will probably force a confrontation by its own rash actions. It remains to be seen whether the new converts to the U.N. faith will adhere to its precepts elsewhere than in the Persian Gulf, where they underwent their miraculous conversion on Aug. 2.