by WILLIAM SAFIRE New York Times, Apr 23, 2001

WASHINGTON - The "Commission on Human Rights" is the group of 52 nations that decided in Geneva last week that China - while torturing and killing members of the Falun Gong, raping Tibet’s culture and imprisoning foreign nationals - was not to be censured in any way.

At the same time, the U.N. group, turning to the uprising of Palestinians as well as Hamas-Hezbollah terrorism, found Arabs blameless and called on Israel - which is not permitted to sit on the commission - "to desist from all forms of violation of human rights." Because diplomatic hypocrisy rarely rises to such a level, let’s examine who stood with whom on these votes.

Supporting the United States on the attempt to urge China to stop its oppression were most European nations, Canada and two South American countries.

Approving China’s brutal internal crackdown were its Communist allies in Vietnam and Cuba, Arab and African bastions of democracy from Libya and Syria to Algeria and Liberia, as well as China’s ally Pakistan and intimidated neighbor India.

Abstaining - knowingly blocking pressure on China - were a dozen nations including Mexico (Vicente Fox thinks of business first) and Colombia, where paramilitary forces literally chop up rebels with chainsaws (and whose president, Andres Pastrana, constantly has his hand out for U.S. aid).

Here is the anti-Israel lineup: 50 nations. This includes France, where Jacques Chirac is fearful of speaking out against Syria’s occupation of France’s abandoned ally, Lebanon.

Only two nations refused to blame Israel for Arafat’s war: the United States and Guatemala. (Who’s the Israeli ambassador to Guatemala? Make that man foreign minister.) The 50 nations siding against Israel called for "international protection" of the warring Palestinians, thereby encouraging Arafat to continue his violence.

Against this background consider Israel’s response to Arafat’s escalation to mortar attacks on Israeli villages. If mortar shells landed on U.S. soil from Canada or Mexico, and either of those governments tacitly approved such attacks, the U.S. would take military cross-border action to wipe out the mortar positions and end the bombardment.

That’s what Ariel Sharon ordered. The punitive raid was not "reoccupation" of Gaza land that Israel wants no part of. The local Israeli commander, the morning after that night’s response, asked for a delay until nightfall to more safely withdraw his troops; perhaps to protect them, he then said his force might stay "days, weeks, months."

That prompted the usual State Department even-handwringing from Colin Powell, criticizing both mortar escalation and the "excessive" raid. Worse, to Israelis, their subsequent pullback appeared to be on American orders, which I’m told it was not.

That miscommunication gave Sharon a black eye in the media, but in the following day’s phone conversation with President Bush, the prime minister recalled that as a general he also had occasionally said the wrong thing to the press; sources here confirm there was no acrimony in the call. (Sharon is "Arik" to Powell, "Ariel" to Bush.)

His strategy, it seems to me, is to apply the Powell Doctrine of disproportionate military response to the warring Palestinian leadership - while now easing economic pressures on the Palestinian people. The hope is to build bottom-up pressure on the swaggering warriors from suffering working people.

That requires a fierce answer to Arafat’s undeclared war. As Americans painfully learned in Vietnam, when one side fights to win and the other side fights to settle, the side fighting to win wins.

Sharon will end the war when he convinces Arafat - or the silent Palestinians misled by him for so long - that a war against Israel cannot be won. Nothing silences guns like the prospect of no victory. If this is not the time for peacemakers, history can still honor the war-enders.

To begin the war-ending process, Israel needs an unwavering ally in the Security Council and in Geneva to demonstrate to Arab dictators and queasy abstainers that no "international force" of human-rights hypocrites will intervene to help defeat the Jews.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2001 and is filed under opinion.