UN to postpone fact-finding mission a few days

In a surprise turnaround, Israel decided Tuesday night to "postpone" its agreement to cooperate with the UN fact-finding mission, with one diplomatic official saying Israel was afraid of being "set-up."

The decision was made after consultations Prime Minister Ariel Sharon held in his office with Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer and representatives from the Defense Ministry and the Foreign Ministry who are preparing Israel's case.

According to a senior diplomatic official, Israel received intelligence information the Palestinian Authority was busy setting the stage in Jenin to "cook up" evidence for the fact-finding committee "proving" a massacre had taken place.

Israel, furthermore, received no assurances its representatives would be allowed into the camp to present their arguments.

The official reason for the decision was that UN General-Secretary Kofi Annan had changed the fact-finding mission's terms of reference from strictly fact-finding to something more expansive.

Israel is concerned, the official said, the committee will go beyond investigating what happened in Jenin to a wider probe that Israel never agreed to, and which could lead to a recommendation to Annan to set up an investigative committee or to dispatch of international observers.

"The composition of the committee was done without our consultation or agreement," the official said. "We are a sovereign country and don't have to accept these types of dictates."

Israel, according to this official, is also unhappy three of the four members of the committee are political officials, not military officers able to go to a battlefield and - in a detached manner - discern what happened.

"It is better for us to suffer a few bad days of publicity now, rather than have to live with the consequences of a biased report later on," the official said.

Earlier in the day, Sharon told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee he would accept the fact-finding committee because it was the "lesser of evils." He said the US made it clear it would not veto a Security Council resolution for a commission of inquiry, and that the fact-finding mission was preferable to such a commission.

Foreign Ministry legal adviser Alan Baker, one of the members of the team, said earlier in the day that although Israel expected to be consulted before the committee was appointed, it did not object to the fact-finders.

"All the members of the team are respected professionals who have a proven track record in the international community," Baker said. "We trust their objectivity and professionalism."

Baker vehemently denied reports that one of the members of the team, former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross Cornelio Sommaruga, is anti-Israel or anti-Semitic.

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote an article two years ago on the controversy regarding keeping Magen David Adom out of the ICRC because the Star of David is not a recognized symbol. Krauthammer quoted Sommaruga as saying, "If we're going to have the Shield of David, why would we not have to accept the swastika?"

Baker, who was present at the time of the remarks, said that using this comment to allegedly show an anti-Jewish bias on Sommaruga's part "is a vile manipulation of something said in a different context."

"I know the context because I was there," Baker said. "When we were talking about adding additional emblems in the Red Cross movement, Sommaruga remembered that the old historic Indian symbol of the swastika, before it was used by the Nazis, was proposed as a humanitarian red cross symbol. To take it out of context as something he said - in an anti-Semitic context - is vile, manipulative, and destructive."

Mordechai Yedid, the Foreign Ministry's deputy director-general in charge of UN and international organizations, said Sommaruga was behind a compromise that would have allowed Israel to join the organization in 2000 - but that meeting was postponed after the current violence broke out, and has not yet been rescheduled.

At the same time, other diplomatic officials said Israel's relations with the ICRC hit an all-time low when Sommaruga was its head - largely over allegations of torture of security prisoners. These relations improved, however, after a meeting Sommaruga had with then-Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon.

One of the other members of the fact-finding committee, Sadako Ogata, the former UN high commissioner for refugees, received an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion University two years ago.

In her speech, Ogata said: "Israel is a country rooted in history's worst tragedies of forced human displacement, and millions of refugees owe their tragic plights to the Holocaust. The Jewish people have behind them hundreds of years of persecution, flight, and exile. On the other hand, not only economic migrants, but also refugees have built this country and refugees of Jewish origin have made enormous contributions everywhere."

Regarding former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, one diplomatic official said he is of the old school European social democrats. The official said Ahtisaari has demonstrated an understanding of the complexity of the situation here, although he could not be called a "friend" or "supporter" of Israel.

Annan yesterday upgraded the status of US Army Gen. William Nash from adviser to a full member of the staff, a move that pleased Jerusalem. "We wanted an American military man on the committee," Baker said. "And now we have one."

A number of MKs took Sharon to task for initially agreeing to the establishment of the fact-finding committee.

Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman David Magen (Center) said the results of the inquiry can already be predicted and they "won't be complementary to Israel."

Minister-without-Portfolio and National Religious Party leader Effi Eitam, a former brigadier-general, said yesterday in a faction meeting that IDF drones had filmed all of the activities during the operation in Jenin.

He said it would be better to hand over the tapes to the UN than to allow soldiers who participated in the operation to testify before the inquiry.

One official presenting Israel's case said the staff is considering whether to use the film from the drones, basing their decision on whether the resolution of the pictures is of a high-enough level.

Former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu also came out against the committee, telling Israel Radio it "will produce results that will harm Israel. It is completely illegitimate."

"The UN has proven its bias by its failure to examine an endless number of terror attacks against Israel," Netanyahu said from the US, where he is on a mission to enlist support for Israel.

He also said the UN had withheld information and misled Israel about the abduction of three soldiers by Hizbullah.

The UN Security council convened Tuesday night after Israel requested the delay. At the end of their meeting the Security Council issued a statement saying it expects "fast implementation" of the resolution adopted last Friday welcoming the fact-finding mission and Israel's "full cooperation" with the secretary-general and the team.

While the council was in session, Yehuda Lancry, Israel's UN Ambassador met with Annan at UN headquarters to request changes in the composition of the team and the scope of action of the mission.

Annan agreed to postpone the mission by a few days and said in a statement that he expected the team to be in the region by Saturday.

The three-member U.N. team and its military and police advisers are currently gathering Wednesday in Geneva for meetings.

I guess your point is that, in the aerial photos, there's not a whole lot of difference before vs after. While that may be so, it will not convince many because they will claim that there are many bodies not yet found. How do you "prove" no massacre? You can't, because they will always say that they just haven't discovered the bodies yet.

I don't know about you, but I am getting pretty scared here. The UN and Israel are clearly headed toward confrontation. The world sees the UN as having more authority than any single nation (though I disagree). So the clamor against Israel will grow and grow. This is where Bush will be really tested. Does he really have the cojones to hold fast? He wants to have it both ways - support Israel and kepp European allies. He can't - he must choose sides.

I agree that it is impossible to prove a negative. You can't prove that there are no invisible elephants, for example. However, photos like the ones you can link to on this thread do prove that not only was Jenin itself largely untouched, but so was that miserable refugee camp. It shows the Pallies and the media for what they are: lying ba$tard$ and lying whores, respectively. If you add photos like this to the ridiculous claims of the Pallies that they didn't, for example, booby-trap dead bodies (when everyone knows that they booby-trap live bodies), then the absurdity of their position is shown. These and other pieces of irrefutable evidence can show that the other side is incapable of being believed and that, therefore, their claims of massacre are absurd. A similar case can be built to show that the Israelis are speaking the truth about this. In neither case would there be absolute, cosmic level proof that no massacre took place, but you'd have one side that never told the truth insisting that it did, vs. the other that always tells the truth and says it didn't.

Of course, we are dealing with the UN and world opinion, which is more likely than not to ignore proof even if it came up and bit them in the @$$, so it might not do much good to build these two cases. I still think that it is worth the effort.

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