A Diplomatic Catastrophe

The big thing in Israel tonight is that the US, in refusing to veto the UN Resolution, and France, in refusing to delay the vote, reneged on promises.

And Tzipi Livni is in a crossfire: from her fellow Kadima miniters for screwing things up and from her rivals in Labor and Likud.

The word out in the media is that Gabriella Shalev was left alone to run a campaign when she needed someone more senior to work the work, which means face-to-face and not by phone.

Here's how she sees her 'battlefield':

"If diplomacy is hypocrisy and double-talk, then those things exist here," she admits. "These are things I hadn't known, because in the world of law and academia, people seek the truth, even if it isn't pleasant or convenient. That's what I have always done, even if it isn't the truth that I personally came from. And I have seen here what George Orwell calls 'doublethink' in '1984.' On the one hand, [there is] a great deal of courtesy, respect for the State of Israel and for me as an older woman, who comes from the academic world. And then come the anti-Israel speeches. It's very difficult, from the personal perspective as well, to sit through such meetings at the U-shaped table in the Security Council, facing 15 men in dark suits, with glaring eyes."

And another story:

In September, the president of the General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann of Nicaragua, hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Later, Israel was the rotating chair of the WEOG (Western European Countries and Other Groups) bloc at the UN, and Shalev was supposed to have spoken on behalf of the group, but Brockmann, so it was reported, tried to prevent her speech.

"The few times I had met him, he was in fact a 'gentleman,'" says Shalev, "which is also indicative of doublespeak. The moment he learned that the representative of Israel would be delivering the speech at the ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, he tried to prevent not only our address, but also America's, as the host country. After the speech was nevertheless confirmed, he decided to absent himself from it and appointed someone else to sit in his place. The ceremony was scheduled for late at night, so it wasn't as impressive as it should have been. With the help of good friends like the Germans, we nevertheless had our say.

"And then Father d'Escoto invited me to a meeting. I was glad, because I haven't come here to quarrel, and certainly not at the expense of the State of Israel. But as I passed through my office, I found that all of the members of our mission were tense: They had called us from Reuters and asked for comment on a statement by Brockmann that 'in the wake of slurs bordering on the criminal from senior sources in the Israeli delegation' - you can guess who this was - he had received threats to his life. After that he retracted this [statement, and said] it wasn't connected to Israel. I said ... sorry, I am canceling the meeting. It's good there wasn't [another] woman there, otherwise they would have called it a cat fight."

This is a bit of background to the uneasiness felt here:

Veteran UN watchers told The Jerusalem Post that the Americans' unwillingness to veto the British resolution, whose text was amended to reflect the concerns of Arab leaders, was unusual. "The fact that the US didn't veto is a victory, of sorts," said Warren Hoge, a former New York Times UN bureau chief who now works at the International Peace Institute, a think-tank that conducts research on UN affairs and conflict resolution.