At the same time U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was given a rock star greeting in Jerusalem earlier this week, Israeli and American diplomats were joining forces in Geneva to torpedo an attempt by the Palestinian Authority to obtain observer status at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament (CD).
According to Israel’s Hebrew-language Kan public broadcasting network, the foreign ministry worked behind the scenes with U.S. and other delegations in the days leading up to the conference to derail the Palestinian Authority attempt.
“We did not want to set a precedent in which the Palestinians had observer status in an organization [that addresses sensitive intelligence issues] like this,” a diplomatic source told Kan.
The victory is an important win for the foreign ministry, which suffered a stiff setback in September when the international police intelligence organization INTERPOL admitted the Palestinian Authority as a full member by a 75-24 vote with 34 abstentions. The Palestinian Authority also enjoys “non-member observer state” status at the United Nations.
The Conference on Disarmament, which includes 65 countries, was founded in 1979 as a “multilateral disarmament negotiating forum” to discuss issues related to weapons of mass destruction including “cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament; prevention of nuclear war; prevention of an arms race in outer space; promoting effective international arrangements to assure non-nuclear-weapon States against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons; new types of weapons of mass destruction and new systems of such weapons including radiological weapons; and promotion of a comprehensive program of disarmament and transparency in armaments.”