Palestinian Envoy Decries Portrayal of Arab-Israeli Dispute
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

UNITED NATIONS — On the eve of the Washington-led international summit in Annapolis, a Palestinian Arab diplomat, Riyad Mansour, accused the new leadership of the United Nations of increasingly portraying the Arab-Israeli schism as a dispute between “two equal sides,” instead of between an occupier and a “violated” people.
As a member of a steering group known as the quartet — comprising America, Russia, the European Union, and the United Nations — Secretary-General Ban is expected to take part in next week’s meeting, gathered by the Bush administration to promote an end to the Arab-Israeli dispute. “I’d like to see that the participants in the Annapolis meeting base their expectation on a more practical and realistic assessment,” Mr. Ban told The New York Sun earlier this week.
Meanwhile, as Israelis maintain that the reality at the U.N. remains much as it has been for decades, Palestinian Arabs point to a new trend since Mr. Ban took the helm this year.
In a November 19 letter to Mr. Ban, Mr. Mansour, the Palestinian Arab U.N. observer, wrote that he is “troubled” by a trend in recent periodic reports that he and other top U.N. officials have sent to the Security Council “that have had the effect of skewing the context of the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem.”
Several such recent reports “portray the prevailing situation as more of a conflict between two equal sides — the Israeli and Palestinian — rather than actually one of occupation,” Mr. Mansour wrote. The Israeli occupier, he argued, is “bound by clear obligations” under international law, while the Palestinian Arabs’ “most inalienable human rights are being systematically and gravely violated, and therefore” they require “international protection.”
“We are doing our best to report as sincerely as we can,” a U.N. spokesman, Farhan Haq, told the Sun in response. When a “mistaken impression” is created by U.N. reports, he added, “We do our best to correct it as quickly as possible.”
In his letter, Mr. Mansour writes that recent figures show a “marked decrease in suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.” Nevertheless, a recent report to the council on the protection of civilians in armed conflicts claimed: “A particularly worrying trend is the increasing resort to suicide attacks in places including Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, and Somalia.”
Mr. Haq said, however, that when the addressed the Security Council as it debated the topic on Tuesday, the writer of the report, the undersecretary general for humanitarian coordination, John Holmes, explained that the word “increasing” referred to a larger number of countries where suicide attacks against civilians are being used.
An Israeli U.N. ambassador, Daniel Carmon, declined to address any changes in Mr. Ban’s attitudes toward Israel, but said, “I see no trend of change in the Palestinian narrative at the United Nations.” Even as Prime Minister Olmert and President Abbas meet regularly, and as leaders in the region increasingly fear Iran more than Israel, he said the Arabs remain “attached to formulas left over from the 1960s and 1970s.”
Israel, Mr. Carmon added, “would like to see a narrowing of the huge gap between realities in the region and those at the United Nations.”
This week, as it does every year around this time, the General Assembly is expected to pass by a large majority a package of 20 separate anti-Israeli resolutions. Also, it will celebrate on November 29 a “day of solidarity with the Palestinian people,” which the General Assembly dedicated in the 1970s to mark the anniversary of a historic vote 60 years ago.
The 1947 resolution to partition Palestine into an Arab and a Jewish state was rejected by the Arabs. Last week, a top Palestinian Arab negotiator who is headed to Annapolis, Saeb Erekat, vowed that his side would “never” agree to the definition of Israel as a Jewish state.