Ghostly Applause for a News Blackout - 21 July 2000

"The 18th of July," said an Israeli diplomat, "could be one of the historic dates of the new century.

"Both parties," he said, "must seize not only the moment but literally the day as a once-in-a-lifetime chance."

Well, Wednesday came, and Thursday, and on into an exhausted Friday, and still nothing historic.

"Once in a lifetime" was an odd phrase to use about an Israeli/Palestinian grievance, for a catalogue of grievances as old - well if not as old as Judea, at least goes back, at the latest, to 1917 when General Allenby - a British general - ended the 400-year rule of the Turks by conquering Palestine and turning it into a British mandated territory, which, we now see, was when the mischief began.

A short history of Palestine says it all in one sentence: The British administration was hampered from the start by the claims of the Arabs and of the obligations of the Jews implicit in the Balfour Declaration.

"The Balfour Declaration? What was that?" I hear.

And I hear to my astonishment: for two generations of Englishmen the Balfour Declaration was as familiar as the first sentence of the Lord's Prayer. It's almost as short.

Its author - Arthur James Balfour - was the British foreign secretary when Allenby forced the Turkish surrender.

Balfour? Today an inconceivable type for a British prime minister which he became, was a tall, wispy aristocrat, a philosopher with a soft voice and a gentle touch of malice.

When Winston Churchill published his two-volume history of the First World War, Balfour said: "I see that Winston has written his autobiography, he calls it The World Crisis."

Beneath this languid surface was an acute politician and a realist. And when the British conquest of Palestine was complete Balfour foresaw inevitable friction between the two main claimants to the land of Palestine.

He made a declaration about future policy which was approved by the allies and by the League of Nations in handing over Palestine to British rule.

The declaration said simply that Britain would support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine provided that safeguards could be guaranteed for the rights of non-Jewish communities in Palestine.

Need I say that that sentence has been subjected to as many varied and tortured interpretations as the freedom of speech clause in the American Constitution.

Essentially the meeting at Camp David was yet another attempt in an interminable series to define what are the rights of the Arabs and what safeguards will permanently guarantee the security of both populations.

Mr Arafat has said, and said again this time, that nothing less than a Palestinian state would suffice. And he would announce the setting up of that independent state on 13 September.

So when the two leaders joined the president at his country retreat in Maryland the press officers of each party agreed to announce that there were three main issues: How much territory should Israel cede, what is to be done with the 4m Palestinian refugees and the question of the control of different parts of Jerusalem. Really those have been the issues all along.

And then the moment the gates closed on Camp David an extraordinary, some diplomats thought a wonderful thing, happened, which would stay wonderful whatever the results of the summit.

The White House announced with the enthusiastic consent of Mr Barak and Mr Arafat that there would be no news releases, no press conferences - an absolute news blackout.

This was a new and absolutely unique ban and in a gusty wind that stirred a leaf or two outside those closed gates I thought I heard the faint applause of a ghost - the ghost of Dag Hammarsjold, the second secretary general of the United Nations, a serious, brave Swede who really believed that the United Nations could override the self interest of the big powers and that he could rein in the belligerence of the Soviet Union - a delusion which so enraged the Soviet dictator Kruschev that he initiated a long debate on the functions of the secretary general, the effect of which on Hammarsjold's successor was in fact to diminish his powers.

But this sudden association of mine with Hammarsjold was sparked by the Camp David deliberate news blackout.

From the start of his first term as secretary general Hammarsjold had begged, without success, for such a ban to become traditional.

He was saddened and then appalled at the enormous and constant presence of the press whenever there was a meeting of two or three national leaders on a delicate issue.

He believed there were occasions - and a summit was certainly one of them - at which there should be a total blackout till the matter was decided and announced.

He ascribed the trouble of an ever-present and intrusive press to Woodrow Wilson - the American president during the First World War - who was practically the author of the peace treaty.

Among the many beautiful ideals which Wilson announced would run the world from then on was the great democratic announcement that "henceforth diplomacy would not, should not, be conducted behind closed doors where big men cooked up decisions which you and I might one day have to live up to, even fight for, without ever having had a word to say."

Which sounds fair doesn't it, just, democratic?

What it came to mean in actual practice when the press corps of, say, a dozen correspondents had ballooned into an attendant mob of several hundred, it meant that we the people were proclaiming our right to know everything, to get slivers of news every day, to judge them, to condemn them and the men behind the closed doors, and generally to disturb and confuse and depress the diplomats doing the diplomacy.

President Wilson's slogan for this new policy was: "Open covenants openly arrived at."

"Diplomacy," he added, "shall proceed always frankly and in the public view."

Both the British leader, Lloyd George, and the French, Clemenceau, were appalled.

And Dag Hammarsjold, much later, maintained till his dying day that frank and creative diplomacy was crippled by that motto. What he wanted was "open covenants secretly arrived at."

But Wilson's rousing slogan was quoted by every apprentice reporter and acted on and to penetrate and expose what the big boys were talking about in private became the main ambition of what were first called "keyhole" and then "investigative" reporters even though along the way, pundits - even writers especially - lamented the Wilson prescription.

In 1932 Walter Lipman, for many years the most distinguished of American political commentators, wrote: "Great masses of people cannot negotiate. They can no more negotiate than they can together make love or write books or invent.

"They can approve or disapprove of the results but if they participate in the negotiation itself they merely shout themselves hoarse and fall into a hopeless deadlock." And so it has been.

All these weeks I've said nothing about the United Nations numbing report on the appalling spread of Aids in the huge stretch below the Sahara, of what has lately been called "the hopeless continent" - Africa.

I've not talked about it because, as with any other catastrophe, I don't believe you should comment unless, in some way, you can help.

But this week the Senate of the United States voted an annual billion dollars in loans. The international drug companies have agreed to cut their prices for African nations.

The following discussion in the Senate went beyond the selling of the Aids drugs, which even for the most intelligent patient requires a tricky and careful series of routines.

There was also much general talk of the need for education, prevention and "developing the medical infrastructure" - quite an undertaking when you consider you're talking about 50m victims who are mostly very poor and barely literate.

What this news prompts in me is a memory - a very poignant memory - of being in India 37 years ago on a small mission for the United Nations.

The year was 1963, a year that the secretary general - the gentle U Thant - called the "year of poverty" and he'd asked us, this film crew, in India particularly to film scenes of not dire but routine poverty. A very touchy assignment.

In New Delhi I had a long talk with the wife of India's ambassador to the United Nations, Sir Benegal Rau.

Lady Rau was in charge of the government's campaign to teach birth control to the sub continent's then 1,700,000,000 - a daunting task.

We discussed the aid that the Western nations were giving and, while acknowledging the promptness and generosity of it, she said: "But they offer us money for all the Western preventatives - money for contraceptives, each of which costs a villager a month's wages."

In the end Lady Rau said they needed much, much more money, not for condoms and the like but to build roads, just navigable tracks through to 80,000 villages so as to be able to send doctors and helpers to teach and convince the villagers, to begin with, a basic truth that they were unaware of - that there is a connection between sexual intercourse and the birth of a baby.

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