The United Nations (UN) has never been a real player in securing an end to the Jewish-Arab conflict since it extended a rousing welcome to Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Chairman Yasir Arafat on 13 November 1974.
Abba Eban – former Foreign Minister of Israel – blasted that UN decision in Newsweek on 2 December 1974:
Abba Eban: An open letter to Palestinian Arabs
Dear Neighbors
I am thinking of a million of you who live in the West Bank and Gaza, and of another 700,000 across the river in Jordan who are inseparable from you in mind and heart. You never empowered Yasir Arafat to be your spokesman. Nor did you ask to be represented by the grinning youths who pumped bullets into the heads of Israeli women and children at Maalot and Beit Shean. But the United Nations has decided without you, and, in the deeper sense, against you, that these alone are your only legitimate spokesmen. You are now being incited by the PLO to break the peaceful rhythm of your daily lives…
… The conflict is not essentially about Arab survival or Palestinian identity. For these are not in peril – or even in contention. The Arab nation in its twenty sovereignties, its 4 ½ million square miles, its vast oil reserves, its unlimited money and its virtual control of U.N. votes is not an aggrieved underdog. It has done very well for itself. Its danger is lest its leaders, intoxicated with a recent sense of power, go beyond self-confidence to the avaricious pride that ends in self- the destruction. The world, including Israel, has long ago come to terms with Arab nationalism. The unsolved question is whether Arab nationalism will come to terms with the rights of the Jewish nation to live securely in its original and only home. Nothing in Arafat’s squalid tirade was more ludicrous than his assumption that there can be twenty Arab states and no Jewish state in the Middle East. The truth is that the Arabs must learn not to monopolize statehood, but to share it.
Crucial: For Israel’s roots in the past glory and future destiny of this region are too old and strong to be swept away. That is why people like Arafat who come to the U.N. with ridiculous covenants, talking about “liquidating the Zionist presence” or about Israel being “fundamentally null and void,” are freaks of political nature. Those who deny Israel cannot negotiate with it. By their very denial they exclude themselves from a diplomatic role. The crucial question now is whether other Palestinians, outside the PLO, by acknowledgement of Israel’s statehood and Jewish vocation can become negotiators and not merely orators…
… But in addition to warnings about the futility of war should we not reflect together on the availability of peace? Palestine comes into modern history as a region extending on both sides of the Jordan, comprising the present sovereign territories of Israel and Jordan and the administered areas of the West Bank and Gaza. Of this original Palestine, 80 per cent became an exclusively Arab domain through the separation of Transjordan from Palestine. Of the remaining territories, the West Bank and Gaza are available for territorial compromise. Most Israelis would favor the return of the greater part of them in a peace settlement with some border changes and with security arrangements to prevent the militarization of the West Bank…”
In 2026 – Eban’s 1974 words of wisdom still remain the key to ending the unresolved Jewish-Arab conflict: Allocating sovereignty in the West Bank and Gaza between Jordan and Israel – the two successor States to the 1922 League of Nations Mandate for Palestine.
