Motives Not All So High-Minded : U.N. vote is monument to selective indignation

The passage of a U. N. Security Council resolution criticizing Israel’s recent deportation of four Palestinians and demanding that it abide by the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention in the territories it occupies ought to be a sobering event not only for Israel, but also for the United States, which supported the censure.

Calling a friend to account for insupportable conduct never is a pleasant experience, particularly when doing so puts one in dubious company. And no mistake should be made: That is precisely where the United States stands in the wake of this resolution, the third vote hostile to Israel taken by the Security Council since the onset of the gulf crisis. All three resolutions have been initiated by the Palestine Liberation Organization, which would be satisfied either to provoke the United States into a veto that might shatter the anti-Saddam coalition or to drive a wedge between Washington and its ally, Israel. Those also are the shabby objectives of the majority of these resolutions’ supporters.

Whatever one may say concerning Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories, the U.N.’s interest in it borders on the obsessive, particularly when one considers the catalogue of human-rights violations with which the U.N. does not concern itself.

Take, for example, Amnesty International’s most recent report on conditions in the four nations--Cuba, Colombia, Yemen and Malaysia--which sponsored this resolution:

--On Cuba: “At least 60 government critics, many of them prisoners of conscience, were arrested . . . . The majority were sentenced to prison terms after trials which fell short of international standards of fairness . . . . At least four prisoners were sentenced to death and executed in 1989.”

--On Colombia: “Many hundreds of people, including judicial officials investigating human-rights violations, were extrajudicially executed. Scores of other people ‘disappeared’ after detention.”

--On Yemen: “At least 31 suspected opponents of the government were arrested and held without charge, including possible prisoners of conscience . . . . The fate of 16 detainees who ‘disappeared’ in previous years remained unknown.”

--On Malaysia: “Allegations of ill treatment in detention continued, and the national press reported that four people died in police custody. At least 71 death sentences were imposed . . . seven for possession of firearms.”

Israel has no death penalty except for Nazi war criminals.

But the continued expression of the U.N.’s hypocrisy is abetted by Israel’s insistence that it can exercise sovereign authority over the people and territories it occupied while defending itself in 1967. Treatment of their inhabitants must be governed not by Israeli legality, but by the Geneva Convention. It forbids the collective punishments and deportations Israel continues to employ against the Palestinians.

That is one problem; the U.N.’s anti-Israeli obsession is another. Both call to mind the Latin aphorism, Pax Opus Justitiae. Peace is the work of justice.