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MEMORANDUM
TO:
OPINION LEADERS FROM:
TOM DONNELLY, Deputy Executive Director SUBJECT:
UN “Fact-Finding” Mission Annan’s team
is stalled en route in Geneva. Israel fears that the purpose of the mission
is less to find facts than to return with an indictment of the Jewish
state’s alleged “massacre” of Palestinians in recent military
operations. But as Tell points out, it is the United Nations Relief and
Works Agency that “wholly funds and largely administers” the
Jenin camp -- the camp known for years among Palestinians as the “suiciders’
capital.” In other words, the UN already is a complicit partner in
the suicide attacks on Israel in the past few months. Israel rarely has
reason to trust the UN, but the UN’s own interest in Jenin almost
ensures that its “investigation” there can have no legitimacy. This UN sham is also
deeply injurious to America’s interests and to the Bush Administration’s
efforts in the war on terrorism. With some wobbling, the administration
largely has prevented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from diverting
it from its larger purpose of waging the war on terrorism and preparing
to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. The Jenin “investigation”
is simply a further effort to change the subject by those who oppose the
administration’s policies. Finally, to let the UN -- especially where it already has a vested interest -- be the final arbiter of the justice of Israeli operations in the West Bank is morally perverse. Israel was clearly fighting in its self-defense, and taking care to protect the lives of civilians during savage combat in dangerous urban conditions. It is a textbook case of “just war” principles in practice. The United States would rightly prevent, through the UN Security Council, a similarly prejudiced UN investigation of American operations in Afghanistan.
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May 6, 2002; attached). It offers a useful frame of reference for understanding
the questionable nature of the UN “fact-finding” mission being
sent by Secretary General Kofi Annan to the Palestinian refugee camp in
Jenin.