U.S. Rejects Resolution on Mideast

Palestinians and their Arab allies forced a confrontation with Washington early today, with the United States announcing it would veto an Arab-backed Security Council resolution calling for international intervention to halt “a dangerous deterioration of the situation” in the Gaza Strip and West Bank.

The draft resolution won the support of a large council majority, with France, Russia and Ireland joining the expected Asian and African supporters of the Arab position. In a message aimed as much at the Bush administration as at Israel, it called pointedly for the “preservation” of Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority as “the indispensable and legitimate party” for future negotiations in the region.

After hours of often bitter debate, with invited Israeli and Palestinian speakers joining the 15 council representatives, the document had apparently won support from 11 members, with three abstentions. But U.S. Ambassador John D. Negroponte announced that “with regret” the United States would veto the resolution, making a vote formally moot.

The United States signaled from the start that it would block the resolution, which initially called for protection for Palestinian civilians but made no explicit mention of Israeli civilian victims of the violence.

“It ignores the central issue, which is the terror attacks,” James B. Cunningham, the deputy U.S. representative to the United Nations, told reporters when the council began debating the draft resolution Thursday night.

On Friday, the text was broadened to include a condemnation of “all acts of violence and terror resulting in deaths and injuries among Palestinian and Israeli civilians.” But Negroponte said that it remained too one-sided in its emphasis on Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip and West Bank and that it failed to specifically decry the recent suicide attacks against Israelis.

“Unfortunately, the resolution before us fails to address the dynamic at work in the region,” the U.S. ambassador said. “‘Instead, its purpose is to isolate politically one of the parties to the conflict, through an attempt to throw the weight of the council behind the other party.”

The Palestinian representative to the U.N., Nasser Kidwa, said in a speech here Friday night that although the Palestinian leadership condemns terrorism, attacks on Israeli civilians within “occupied Palestinian territory, including Jerusalem,” can be considered legitimate resistance to foreign occupation. “We absolutely do not accept any attempt to label these acts as terrorist acts,” he said.

The resolution called for an international “monitoring mechanism” to oversee compliance with steps toward a cease-fire recommended this year by former Sen. George J. Mitchell’s fact-finding commission.

Israel has consistently opposed the introduction of foreign observers, and the Bush administration--echoing the findings of the Mitchell committee--has said international monitors could function only if invited by both sides.

U.S. and British diplomats were eager to avert a confrontation with the Arab states and tried unsuccessfully to have the draft resolution tabled.

Jeremy Greenstock, the British ambassador, warned that a dead-end Middle East debate could weaken U.N. influence in the region, even as members were showing unusual unanimity in the quest to dismantle Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network and rebuild Afghanistan.

“The Security Council should remember that over the last few months we have been able to speak with one voice,” Greenstock said in the closed session Friday, according to diplomats there.

The fact that the council even voted on the resolution was seen as a victory for the Palestinians, who have complained bitterly that the Middle East has been relegated to the sidelines by the war in Afghanistan. Kidwa, the Palestinian representative, said Thursday that he was angry with what he called the Security Council’s “abysmal failure” to intervene in the Middle East crisis.

“It seems that the council now acts only when one member wants it to act,” Kidwa said, referring to the United States.

Yet even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Afghan war, Palestinians had been unable this year to win council backing for resolutions criticizing Israel and advocating international intervention.

Fears are mounting throughout the Middle East that the escalating Israeli-Palestinian conflict could destabilize the region. The United States and its European allies are also concerned that a failure to address the issue could tear apart their tenuous anti-terrorism coalition. Key Arab supporters of a global campaign against Al Qaeda--Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia--were central forces behind Friday’s push to bring the resolution to a vote.

The unscheduled Middle East debate came at a time of intense activity at the Security Council, which has been trying for the last week to reach an agreement on a mandate for a U.N.-backed peacekeeping force in Afghanistan while tending to other global trouble spots.

The council was briefed Friday by Lakhdar Brahimi, the special U.N. envoy to Afghanistan, who was back at headquarters for the first time since he led negotiations in Germany on a new interim government that is to take office next week.

Despite the preoccupation with Afghanistan, most council members supported the Arab call for intervention in the Middle East.

“The situation is very dangerous, and the Security Council should take some action,” said Kishore Mahbubani, the representative of Singapore, which usually supports Washington.

Drafted by Egypt, the resolution was directly prompted by Israel’s declaration Thursday that it was severing ties with Arafat, a move provoked by the killing of 10 Jewish settlers on a bus by Hamas militants.

“We must not allow, under any circumstances, that bridges between Palestinians and Israelis be completely burned and the door to a political settlement slammed for good,” a Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman said Thursday.

Officials at the U.N. also voiced alarm at the violence.

“I think we are as close as we’ve ever been to a full military confrontation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” Terje Roed-Larsen, the U.N. special envoy for Israel and the Palestinian territories, said in the Middle East on Thursday.

Although senior U.N. officials condemned violence on both sides, they were unusually direct in their criticism of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority. Secretary-General Kofi Annan issued a statement Thursday, a day after the West Bank bus attack, saying that the “targeting of civilians is unacceptable” and urging Arafat “to take decisive action against those responsible for such terrible acts.”