by Kofi Annan
But the UN had been politically sidelined. When I observed the moribund debates in the General Assembly on “the Question of Palestine,” all the symptoms of irrelevance and even destructiveness were plain. They generated a lot of heat but did not shed much light on who had to do what, when, and how, to achieve peace. The General Assembly and the Commission on Human Rights passed myriad resolutions against the Israelis. Any legitimate criticisms they leveled were often overshadowed by the fact that the member states of these bodies applied standards to Israel that they did not apply to the Palestinians, or to other conflicts—let alone to themselves. This left the Israelis convinced that they could never get a fair hearing from the United Nations.
But the Palestinians had even more grounds for complaint. They were the ones perpetually occupied or exiled. Their lands were being eaten up by settlements, they were seeing Jerusalem gradually isolated and altered, and they were largely unprotected when violence broke out. Yet the Security Council, with primary responsibility under the Charter for the maintenance of international peace and security, was usually silent. Even when the Council took positions, it did not establish mechanisms to enforce its will. The United States wielded its veto to protect the Israelis even from reasonable international scrutiny and pressure, paralyzing the Council on one of the world’s central conflicts.
Neither extreme was healthy, but the split was clear: Israel did not trust the UN and kept the organization at arm’s length, while the Palestinians looked to us to uphold their cause yet saw no prospect that we could help to achieve a solution.
I thought this was an untenable position for the UN on the verge of the twenty-first century, as bad for both parties as it was for the organization. Whatever the divisions among the UN membership, I resolved that as secretary-general, I should seek to be an active agent of peace. I realized this depended in large part on whether all the players in the region had confidence in me personally, regardless of their views of the organization itself.
REACHING OUT, BUILDING TRUST
With the Palestinians, this came fairly easily. I have strong feelings of sympathy and solidarity with their plight. As a young African, I believed they had been the victim of injustice, and I had identified with their liberation struggle. I had also felt firsthand the sense of loss, injustice, and indignity shared by Arabs, Muslims, and people of goodwill throughout the world over the Palestinian issue when I served as a young UN political officer in the Sinai.
I lamented and condemned the violent outrages some Palestinians committed, and I felt it was the duty of the UN, both on grounds of principle and as friends of the Palestinians, to speak plainly on this matter. But the “terrorist” epithet was too often used to deny the Palestinians’ political identity and obscure the fact that an entire nation was either occupied or exiled. Every Palestinian in the region encounters in his or her daily life the restrictions and denials that arise from the unresolved conflict, summarized in one word: indignity. As I told the Security Council in my last address on the Middle East in December 2006, Israelis need to confront this fundamental Palestinian grievance: “The establishment of the State of Israel involved the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families, turning them into refugees, and was followed nineteen years later by a military occupation that brought hundreds of thousands more Palestinians under Israeli rule.” The American public and political system also need to understand that a reflexive and often unthinking support for almost any Israeli action or policy will in the long run serve no one.
But I could easily appreciate the compelling and legitimate narrative of Israelis. Burdened by a uniquely tragic history and alarmed by their perilous geography, Israelis felt themselves surrounded by hostility and only one military defeat away from annihilation. Some Israelis doubted that an agreement with the Palestinians would be achievable because “the maximum we can offer is less than the minimum the Palestinians can accept.” Others feared the loss of control that would come with accepting Palestinian sovereignty and were unsure that an agreement would bring the hostility toward them to a permanent end. Many Israelis saw the Jewish claim to all the land as stronger than the claim of the Palestinians to part of it—an argument I could never accept. But most Israelis were pragmatic enough to look for ways to accommodate the Palestinians and divide the land—if Israel’s existence and security could be assured.
I had to grapple with the fact that Israelis felt that the UN perpetuated hostility toward them—and they were sometimes right. In my last address in the Security Council on the Middle East, I summed up what I had learned over decades of watching the handling of the issue in the UN’s intergovernmental organs. Many may have felt satisfaction in the decades of endless passing of General Assembly resolutions condemning Israel’s behavior, I said, but what tangible relief or benefit had this brought the Palestinians? What effect had these had on Israel’s policies, other than to strengthen the belief in Israel that the UN is too one-sided to be allowed a significant role in the Middle East peace process?
This statement was the culmination of a decade of reaching out. During my first trip to Israel in 1998, I promised to do my best to usher in a new era of relations between Israel and the United Nations. Israel was the only member state excluded from membership of a regional group, so I called for normalization of Israel’s status in the United Nations. I condemned anti-Semitism expressed by member states at the podium in New York and Geneva, and lamented the General Assembly resolution of 1975 equating Zionism with racism. None of my predecessors had said these things—after all, to do so is to criticize the membership itself.
For a good portion of my tenure, I also had a healthy dialogue with Jewish leaders in America. They wanted to influence me, no doubt—but I sought to influence them, too. My best friend among them was California congressman Tom Lantos—a stout defender of human rights, the United Nations, and Israel—who had been rescued from the Holocaust by Nane’s uncle, Raoul Wallenberg. Lantos was a rock of support during the Oil-for-Food crisis that we faced in the aftermath of the Iraq War. I also enjoyed ignoring diplomatic protocol by inviting Israeli ambassadors to meals at my house along with diplomats from across the Arab world—they might have been fighting each other, but I was not at war with anybody. These are precisely the kinds of contacts that are possible in a forum like the United Nations.
In later years, Nane and I attended the opening of a new wing of the Holocaust museum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and helped persuade other world leaders to come as well. I supported the General Assembly’s belated commemoration of the Holocaust in 2005 on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and its designation of January 27 as International Holocaust Memorial Day. As a result, the UN has a Holocaust outreach program—I wish more was known about it. When, in the years after 9/11, I decided to organize a series of seminars through the Department of Public Information on “Unlearning Intolerance” to promote understanding across the divides that seemed to be growing deeper in the world, I made sure the first seminar was on anti-Semitism, because, as I said in my remarks:
the United Nations emerged from the ashes of the Holocaust. And a human rights agenda that fails to address anti-Semitism denies its own history . . . When we seek justice for the Palestinians—as we must—let us firmly disavow anyone who tries to use that cause to incite hatred against Jews, in Israel or elsewhere . . . The fight against anti-Semitism must be our fight, and Jews everywhere must feel that the United Nations is their home too.
In reaching out to Israelis and to Jews, I often reminded them that UN General Assembly resolution 181 gave Israel its international birth certificate. The United Nations is mentioned no less than seven times in the declaration of Israeli independence that David Ben-Gurion himself famously read out loud in Tel Aviv.
LEAVING WITH LEGITIMACY: ISRAEL’S WITHDRAWAL FROM LEBANON IN 2000
Despite my attempts to reach out, I did not have any illusions about ma
king progress in the peace process with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who led Israel during my first two and a half years in office. He had been an Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, and he was gracious to me—I remember him telling me in 1998 at his residence in Jerusalem that his young son thought I was a hero when I went to Baghdad to prevent war with Iraq, since he had been frightened by the gas mask drills the entire country was enduring. But when I urged him, as the stronger player, to be more magnanimous toward the Palestinians in the interest of getting to an agreement, he described me as “Arafat’s lawyer.” He always seemed to focus on the tactical and expedient, not the strategic or historic.
The time for me to move came when Ehud Barak won the elections in 1999 and became prime minister. He wanted to conclude peace agreements with Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians before President Clinton left office in early 2001. Barak had serious intent, but as the subsequent eighteen months unfolded, it became clear that he lacked an understanding of what would truly be required to reach peace, both in terms of what Israel would need to offer and how Israel’s politics needed to be managed.
Yet in June 1999, all this lay in the future. I asked Terje Roed-Larsen to become my envoy. As a Norwegian researcher, he had helped broker the Oslo Accords and had then been the first coordinator in the mid-1990s of the UN’s work with the Palestinians in the occupied territory. Now, with the consent of the Security Council, I added a political component to his mandate—as special coordinator for the Middle East peace process. Roed-Larsen was creative, energetic, and indefatigable—and knew everyone. In a tough neighborhood, he was at one point or another blackballed by just about everyone. But he usually bounced back.
“Put your ear to the ground,” I told Roed-Larsen when I appointed him in late 1999, “and see if you can find openings.” He did and reported back that Barak intended to keep his election promise to pull Israel’s troops out of Lebanon.
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Lebanon is one of the most complex societies in the world. Its stability is at various moments either maintained or threatened—usually both—by its intricate religious and regional variations, its particular relationship with Syria, the impact of the unresolved conflict with Israel and the presence of Palestinian refugees, and a long history of penetration by outside players. All these factors were at play with ever-shifting geometries between 1975 and 1990, when about 120,000 people were killed in Lebanon’s civil war.
The war ended with the Taif Agreement, which was designed to abolish political sectarianism and disband militias. Yet Lebanon’s confessional makeup remained embodied in the “unwritten” National Pact of 1943, which reserved the presidency for a Maronite, the prime ministership for a Sunni, and the parliamentary speakership for a Shiite.
Israel had occupied southern Lebanon since 1982, when it drove Arafat and the PLO out of Beirut. Hizbollah emerged as a leading Shiite Lebanese group to resist Israel’s occupation, with strong backing from revolutionary Iran. Syria—which viewed Lebanon as part of its historic territory—was the de facto guarantor of the security of the country, but as a result penetrated deeply into Lebanese politics. The Israeli-Syrian conflict, while embodied in Israel’s occupation of the Syrian Golan Heights, was as often as not played out in the Lebanese theater, manifested in Syria’s alliance with Iran and its links with Hizbollah.
Given these realities, it was clear in 2000 that the best context for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would be immediately after Israel had reached a peace with Syria. Without this, an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon would carry the danger of sending the message that Israel was fleeing Lebanon due to Hizbollah’s armed campaign, empowering Hizbollah and giving Syria a possible incentive to cause mischief. With a peace deal, Syria would have had an incentive to behave differently and realign its relationship with Hizbollah.
Unfortunately, a March 2000 summit in Geneva between President Clinton and Syrian president Hafez al-Assad failed. Barak had insisted on retaining a thin strip of Golan land on the eastern shores of the Sea of Galilee for security reasons, and when Clinton conveyed Barak’s offer to Assad, the aging Syrian leader turned it down flat. He insisted, as he always had, on a full withdrawal to the 1967 lines and Syrian access to the lake. Barak had not gone all the way in his peace offer. His initiative tragically failed—and with it, the chance to begin a major reorientation in the region.
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Days after the Geneva failure, Barak told me that he would keep his Lebanon withdrawal pledge. But it turned out that he did not want to go all the way here, either. Under pressure from his military, he wanted to withdraw in stages and leave behind security outposts inside Lebanese territory. I told Barak and his foreign minister that if they wanted to coordinate this with me and gain international legitimacy for Israel’s actions, I needed a full withdrawal—and I wanted his commitment in writing. After much to and fro, Barak wrote to me on April 17 confirming Israel’s intention “to cooperate fully with the United Nations” and to withdraw “in full accordance with Security Council resolutions 425 and 426”—the UN resolutions calling for Israel to end its occupation of Lebanon. Egyptian foreign minister Amre Moussa later told me that my insistence on the letter had boosted Arab confidence that I would “do the right thing.” This helped give me the space to work with the Lebanese and Syrians effectively, even as I closely coordinated with the Israelis.
I knew that if the withdrawal went well, it would extricate Israel from an eighteen-year presence in southern Lebanon that had become a quagmire, and it would help Lebanon’s further reemergence after the civil war. But a withdrawal that went wrong could lead to massive conflict—to say nothing of permanently discrediting me as a regional mediator. As Madeleine Albright said to me at the time, “The UN role in this is a big deal.” Since I was in the lead, I insisted that this be respected and asked her and the other big players not to send their own envoys to meddle.
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Israel and Lebanon had no diplomatic relations, and under international law only they could agree to the border between them. As a go-between, my job was not to set their border but to determine a line to measure whether Israel had withdrawn in accordance with resolution 425. Drawing what became known as the Blue Line required the UN team to ferret out evidence from archives around the world and was incredibly complicated.
The difficulties were immense. Consider the village of Ghajar—inhabited by Syrian Alawites, in occupied Syrian territory, but right on the border with Lebanon. After 1967 the villagers had accepted Israeli citizenship, unlike other Syrian villagers in the Golan. Yet the village’s natural growth over the decades had, it turned out, taken it into Lebanese territory. The Blue Line would have to go straight through the village, leaving the northern residents in Lebanon and the southerners in Israeli-occupied Syria. This pleased no one, myself included. Some villagers feared their fate at the hands of Hizbollah. Barak, who remembered conquering the village in 1967, thought “cartography was trumping peace.” We secured a Lebanese undertaking that neither the army nor Hizbollah would enter the village—an arrangement that lasted until 2005, when four Hizbollah fighters were killed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) after launching an attack from the north. Ghajar remains an unresolved problem today.
But the biggest headache was the Shab’a farms. The Lebanese claimed that certain farmlands adjacent to the Lebanese village of Shab’a fell in their territory. A map dated 1966 was presented to us by Lebanese president Emile Lahoud, and it showed the farms in Lebanon. Yet it stood gloriously alone, contradicted by eighty other maps—including ten Lebanese government maps from after 1966, all showing the farms in Syria (and thus within the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights). Even Lebanese banknotes suggested the farms were Syrian.
I asked my staff to check the map presented by President Lahoud. Sure enough, it was from 1966—except for the ink in the area of Shab’a, which was barely dry. We let the Lebanese know that this was a map of
“questionable authenticity,” and that I would go public if I ever heard about it again.
The Shab’a farms were probably being laid as a political trip wire. Barak’s move had taken Syria by surprise and was causing some angst. If Israel’s occupation of Lebanon ended, how could the continuation of armed resistance on Lebanese territory be justified, whether by Hizbollah or Palestinian factions? If the Lebanese state regained control of all its territory, would it begin to raise questions about Syria’s military and intelligence tutelage of the country?
In the end, we developed a simple way to draw the line between Lebanon and Syria, based on the delineated areas of operation of two UN peacekeeping missions in the area—the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) on the Golan. The Shab’a farms were in the UNDOF zone. Israel would eventually have to return the farms—but to Syria, in the context of a peace agreement with Damascus, unless Lebanon and Syria formally agreed that Shab’a was part of Lebanon. To date, they have not done so.
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On May 22, 2000, I presented the proposed Blue Line in a report to the Security Council, which endorsed it, just as things were heating up on the ground. The Lebanese had no intention of allowing the occupying force to extricate itself on Israel’s terms. Large crowds, including Hizbollah elements, began moving south, entering villages in the Israeli-controlled area. Barak had to rush through his departure—within a week, Israel had vacated almost all positions in Lebanon, leaving mainly at night under cover of Israeli artillery fire.