NC:: -CIRCJLATING 
YUN INTERVIEW UN LIBRA'.'' 
SHABTAI ROSENNE ^Qy 4 .Q( 
1 3 9 9 UN/SA cou t;: i 
CHARLOTTESVILLE. VIRGINIA  
INTERVIEWER. JEAN KRASNO 
TABLE OF CONTENTS  
FOUNDING OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL 
The Jewish Agency 1,2,4,6,10,12,15,17,35 
Displaced Persons (DP) 3,4,10-12 
Br i t i s h Bring Palestine Issue to UN . . 3,8,9 
The White Papers 4,5,7 
The "Black Sabbath" 6 
The B r i t i s h Role 6,7,13,16,23,25 
The Royal Commission of 1937 8 
Indepeendence 9,10,15,20,21,22,26,33 
UN Special Session on Palestine . . . . 10,11 
GA Resolution: Partition 12-14,16,22,24,25,30,33 
Jerusalem 12,15,23,25,41 
The Fighting 14,15,33,34,37-41 
Balfour Declaration 17-19 
Declaration of Independence 20,21,26,31,32,34 
Law and Administration Ordinance . . . .21 
Truce 23,38,39,41 
UN Second Special Session 26,29 
US Recognition of Israel 27 
1 
UN Mediation 29,30 
Jewish Support for Statehood 34-37 
Arab Intentions 36 
UNTSO . , . 40 
THE ARMISTICE NEGOTIATIONS AT RHODES. 1949 
B r i t i s h Mandate Ends 43 
Recognition of State of Israel 43 
The Fighting 43 
The Truce 44,45 
The UN Charter . 46,47,51 
The Bernadotte Plan 4 6-49 
Jerusalem 47,70 
Bunche as Meditator 49,51,52,57,58,61 
The People at Rhodes 49,50,53,55,56 
Palestine Conciliation Commission . . . 52,67 
The Negotiations 57-70,74 
The Gaza Strip 60,61 
The Iraqi Army 65 
Role of the UN 66,72,73 
The Demilitarized Zones 70,71 
UNTSO 72 
Mixed Armistice commission 72 
The Cold War 73,74 
2 
THE SUEZ CRISIS 
Freedom of Passage 76-78,80-85,88 
Law of the Sea 78,80,81,88 
The Gaza Strip 79,87,89,90 
The Fedayeen 80,81,84,86 
The UNEF 81,87,89,90,91 
Agreement at Sevres 82,83 
The Attack 85-87 
The Armistice Was Over 87 
Uniting for Peace Resolution 88,89 
Hungarian C r i s i s 89 
Camp David 91,93 
The Iran-Iraq War 91,92 
The Yom Kipur War 92 
Peace-keeping 94,95 
Role of the UN 96,97 
End of the Cold War . 98-100 
3 
JK: For the record, Mr. Rosenne, could you explain the role 
that you played around the time of the establishment of 
the state of Israel and I think we w i l l have to start a 
few years back. 
Rosenne: Yes, you're quite right. I was demobilized from the 
Royal A i r Force ? I remember the date very well ? on 
the f i r s t of April 1946. On which date I went into the 
P o l i t i c a l Department of the London office of the Jewish 
Agency for Palestine. That was an agency that was 
established in 1929 under specific provisions of the 
Palestine Mandate and represented the Jewish people as a 
whole vis-a-vis both the Br i t i s h government, the 
mandatory, and the League of Nations as the supervising 
authority of those days. Its main office was in 
Jerusalem. Its second main office was in London. And 
i t s third main office which existed right throughout the 
whole period was in Geneva. Actually our Geneva mission 
today i s our oldest diplomatic mission abroad except 
perhaps London. But i t also had offices in I suppose 
Washington. I forget now where i t was in the United 
States. As I say i t was representative vis-a-vis the 
Bri t i s h government and the League of Nations. The League 
of Nations was dissolved later in 1946 and replaced by 
the United Nations and the Bri t i s h maintained their 
position as mandatory u n t i l , of course, 1948. The office 
i n London carried the burden of direct representation 
1 
with the Brit i s h government as opposed to the Jerusalem 
office which was related to the Palestine government. 
And, of course, the two were distinc t . The P o l i t i c a l 
Department carried the burden of the work of relations 
both with the British government which was primarily 
either the Colonial Office in those days or the Foreign 
Office depending really which level was being discussed. 
And i f i t was sort of detailed Palestinian level i t would 
probably be the Colonial Office. If i t was a broader 
p o l i t i c a l level i t would have been the Foreign Office. 
It dealt also with Parliament. It also did the public 
relations job in connection with both Houses of 
Parliament, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, 
and with the press on the major Palestinian issues, 
issues related to Palestine's events. 
I had actually worked before the War even in a 
voluntary capacity when I was a student. I went into 
their employ as I say immediately after demobilization in 
Apr i l , 1946. I plunged into a l i f e of crises which has 
continued v i r t u a l l y without end since that date. 
JK: When the UN met in England in 1946 was the Palestine 
issue brought up? 
Rosenne: No, the Palestine issue was not brought up in the UN at 
that stage. It was brought up at San Francisco 
indirectly and a r t i c l e 80 of the Charter reflects i t to 
some extent. It was brought up in Geneva at the 
2 
dissolution of the League of Nations in March/April, 
1946. Then the UN was out of i t . Other aspects of the 
Jewish problem of those days were raised in the i n i t i a l 
meetings in London especially what was called the 
"Displaced Persons", the DPs, which was a major problem 
in the immediate turmoil of Europe at the end of the War. 
That was handled by ECOSOC to some extent and by a 
provisional IRO which subsequently became the IRO i t s e l f 
which i t now being dissolved. That was the International 
Refugee Organization. The A l l i e d Forces had a big unit 
operating for a l l the DPs not only Jewish DPs. I think 
there were millions and millions of people wandering 
around Europe at that time. We had to handle that as 
well. 
JK: As we approach 1947 the British s t i l l had a mandate to 
govern Palestine. What was the situation at the time 
that they brought the issue to the UN? 
Rosenne: Well, the situation got very bad. Relations between the 
Brit i s h and the Jewish population and the Jewish Agency 
had become extremely bad. I wouldn't say there was a 
te r r i b l y strong demand for the end of the mandate or for 
independence as such, although i t certainly existed. The 
thought had been planted by the Royal Commission of 1937 
and was endorsed by the League of Nations with some 
d i f f i c u l t y . And i t had been endorsed by the so called 
Biltmore Conference in 1942, I think i t was, in New York 
3 
with the American Jewish and the American Zionist bodies. 
But I wouldn't say there was a t e r r i b l y overriding demand 
to an end to the British mandate per se. The demand was 
for immigration because of the DP problem in the 
aftermath of WWII and the Holocaust. 
JK: Can I ask where you were at that time? 
Rosenne: In London. 
JK: Could you mention something about the White Papers? 
Rosenne: Yes, sure. The White Paper was published in 1940 and i t 
prohibited Jewish immigration after a five year period 
unless there was Arab consent to i t . Of course 
tremendous bitterness was caused by that because of the 
Holocaust. The British may have relaxed i t very slightly 
but negligibly i n light of the proportions of the problem 
as we found i t as the War came to an end in 1945. There 
were Palestinian units in the Bri t i s h army at that time 
who were wandering around Europe seeing really what the 
situation was. Of course the stories were appalling. 
The immediate demand was for the removal of these 
White Paper restrictions, two in particular. One was on 
immigration and the other was on land sales which, by the 
way, partly affects the configuration today of the State 
of Israel and i s related to the whole problem of the 
"green l i n e " and the contemporary problem of the 
frontiers of Israel. The origin can be traced back to 
that White Paper of 1940. 
4 
The Brtitsh tried throughout 1946 to see i f they 
could reach some sort of agreement directly with us and 
with the Arabs. They themselves were exhausted after the 
War and their heart wasn't in what they were doing. 
That's for sure. We know that, in the armed forces. 
The Royal Navy, for instance, was blockading Palestine 
i t s e l f in the interest of what was called i l l e g a l 
immigration. The army tried to put down the tensions and 
the disturbances that were happening a l l around the 
country. The whole situation was mucky and d i f f i c u l t and 
unpleasant. 
The Br i t i s h t r i e d to resolve i t in several ways which 
were sometimes contradictory. The Palestine 
administration would sometimes go off on one tack and the 
people in London would go off on another. For instance, 
about towards the end of June, 194 6, what we c a l l the 
"Black Sabbath", they arrested a l l the leaders of the 
Jewish Agency in Palestine and put them in a prison camp 
in a place called Latrun which i s in the middle of Israel 
today. We tried to carry on negotiations in London f i r s t 
of a l l to get this brought to an end and then to deal 
with the situation as a whole. Bevin was not a l l that 
helpful I must say. Attlee as Prime Minister was in a 
way a second ranker. He got that position as a kind of 
compromise between various strong candidates in the Labor 
Party i t s e l f . The Labor Party we always f e l t reneged on 
5 
i t s own position which i t had proclaimed not only in i t s 
electoral campaign messages or program in the elections 
of 1945 but also i t s traditional position. It became as 
hardened as anybody and Bevin was a very tough nut. 
JK: What were the British objections to the Jewish 
immigration? 
Rosenne: Fear of the Arabs. Don't forget at that time the British 
Empire was s t i l l f a i r l y intact. Their major problem at 
that time was India. They had agreed on the independence 
of India. I don't think they wanted the partition of 
India which came under very bloody circumstances as you 
know in M6-M7. There was uncertainty how they were 
going to get out of India and what was going to take 
their place. There was on the horizon even then the 
problem of Africa which burst out much later in the *60s 
but was on the horizon then. The whole question of the 
imperial lines of communication was uncertain. There was 
also the Suez Canal running through Egypt which was at 
that time was their major line of communication both for 
the Far East and for East Africa. So, they were in a 
position of uncertainty. And I am not sure that they 
knew how weak they had become after WW II. After a l l 
they had an enormous army s t i l l and didn't demobilize i t 
as quickly as the Americans had demobilized their army. 
They had armed forces that were f i r s t rate. There i s no 
question about that. But they didn't know how weak they 
6 
had become or i f they did know they didn't want to show 
i t . I t came out later. 
They conceived of an idea which had been started in 1939 
but had been unsuccessful and had led to the White Paper 
of 1940 which I mentioned. That was a new t r i p a r t i t e 
agreement between us, the British, and the Arabs. What 
Arabs I don't know. It was on the future of Palestine. 
For that purpose they convened conferences again in St. 
James's palace in the winter of 1946-47, that terrible 
winter. I attended those conferences in a very junior 
position. I was taking the notes. One has to start 
somewhere and I started by taking notes at conferences. 
These conferences were extremely d i f f i c u l t . The 
delegations were talking at cross purposes. The British 
delegation had at least two parts to i t . One was the 
Foreign Office part and one was the Colonial Office part. 
They were sometimes at loggerheads across the table even. 
The thing broke up in complete disunity. 
Bevin used what he thought was a threat that he 
would transfer the whole problem of Palestine to the UN. 
This was already around February of M7 that this came 
up. We made our own analysis of what that would entail. 
It would have gone to the UN anyhow under the Charter 
through the transfer of the mandate into something else, 
either a trusteeship agreement or independence, whatever. 
So, we weren't t e r r i b l y put off by the threat. It was an 
empty threat to transfer the thing to the UN. The 
question was a different one. The question was what 
would we aim at i f i t went to the UN. 
To diverge for a minute, you have to understand that 
the partition proposal of the Royal Commission of 1937 
had created a tremendous controversy in Jewish ranks. 
The idea of a Jewish state, apart from the non-Jewish 
reaction to i t which was also extremely mixed and on the 
whole negative, I would say for many deep reason which I 
don't need to go into, in Jewish ranks too i t had created 
quite a deal of almost consternation. There was by no 
means unanimity i n the Jewish world, even in the Zionist 
world up u n t i l the very proclamation of Israel's 
independence, on the desireablilty or the f e a s i b i l i t y of 
complete independence. They were thinking in terms of 
maybe a dominion in the British Empire at the most. But 
when Bevin started using this threat to go to the UN 
that's when I think opinion gelled. In that case we were 
going a l l out for f u l l independence, by the way over the 
whole country not over any partitioned area. 
JK: Was his threat aimed at the Arabs? Was i t affective as 
far as their interests were concerned? 
Rosenne: Yes, they didn't worry at a l l about i t . Don't forget 
there were five independent Arab states those days in the 
UN. They didn't have the p o l i t i c a l weight that they have 
today or the p o l i t i c a l power that they have today but, 
8 
they were by no means insignificant. There had been the 
famous meeting of Roosevelt with King Ibnn Saoud in Cairo 
in M3 or M4, his last v i s i t to the Middle East, which 
changed the whole picture of Arab/American relations. Up 
u n t i l then they'd sort of been Aramco semi-colonial 
relations. A l l of a sudden they over night changed into 
a much more independent status with Arabism and 
Panarabism. They were far less worried about the UN than 
our people were, but our calculation was quite a cold 
c l i n i c a l one that i f we handled things properly we would 
get at any rate enough of partitioned Palestine to enable 
the DP problem to be solved. There was this terrible 
connection a l l the time of the DP problem with this. If 
you go into the records, for instance, of UNSCOP you 
would see that there was tremendous oposition in UNSCOP 
and by the Arabs to UNSCOP v i s i t i n g any DP camp. There 
was a compromise reached on that but I have forgotten the 
details. Either one or two members went individually or 
something l i k e that. That's how i t was done. 
The Arabs and the anti-Israeli elements, whoever they 
might have been, understood this connection of the DPs 
and the Palestine question and did everything to break 
i t . 
JK: In the spring of 1947 there was a special session at the 
United Nations on the Palestine question. The Jewish 
Agency represented the Jewish people. Was there any 
9 
r 
oposition to the Jewish Agency being the representative? 
Rosenne: There may have been in two areas. I am speaking now from 
memory. On the extreme religious right the people who 
are today opposed to Zionism and an independent Israel 
particularly, especially what are called the Sotmor 
Hasidim which are now quite strong in New York. They 
were brought over from Eastern Europe, what was l e f t of 
them. Then there were the extreme assimilationist 
c i r c l e s i n this country concentrated in what was called 
the American Council of Judaism. It s t i l l exists. I 
don't think i t was te r r i b l y effective because the bulk of 
the Jewish world, due to this connection with the DPs, 
wanted some action taken to resolve i t . 
JK: Was the position of the Jewish Agency at that time to 
promote statehood? 
Rosenne: Yes. 
JK: Who were representing the Arabs? 
Rosenne: The Palestinian Arabs had a committee. I don't recall 
exactly how their relations went. They were represented 
by five Arab states of which the most important was Egypt 
which had i t s own major conflict with the UK at that time 
over the British bases and the Suez Canal and so on, 
getting out of i t s vassel status i t had been in between 
the two wars and independence. There was a 
resolution in the UN authorizing the appearance of the 
10 
Jewish Agency for Palestine which created quite a row. 
The next day there was a parallel resolution for the Arab 
High Committee. I don't re c a l l now whether they appeared 
or not. I t would be in the records. They were to some 
extent i n a tainted position. I use the word quite 
advisedly because their leader Hajj Amin e l Husseini, 
who i s related to the Husseini who i s now prominent in 
Palestine and who i s a relative moderate, was mufti which 
i s to say a chief religious leader, put in by the 
Briti s h . He was an extremist and he had had contacts 
with Hitler during the War. There are actual pictures of 
him in Berlin. That did not do the Palestinian Arab 
cause any good in those days when the UN was very much an 
anti-Nazi organization. 
JK: Then a special committee was appointed and they had 
recommended partition. Was the Jewish Agency supportive 
of that recommendation? 
Rosenne: Yes, I think i t i s f a i r to say that i t was supportive of 
that recommendation i f i t had been implemented in i t s 
entirety. That recommendation had three parts to i t . 
One was the establishment of the Jewish state. One was 
the establishment of the Arab state. The third was a 
separate status for Jerusalem. There was, of course, 
strong objection in Jewish ci r c l e s to having a Jewish 
state without Jerusalem, without any part of Jerusalem 
being a part of i t . But i t was accepted on the condition 
11 
that the whole thing in i t s entirety was put into effect 
because i t offered the opportunity to solve this DP 
problem. 
JK: Later on in November of 1947 the General Assemby adopted 
that resolution. 
Rosenne: With a major modification to our advantage, which was 
most of the Negev in the Jewish state which we certainly 
wanted because that was the area we saw as the settlement 
area for the DPs. 
JK: What happened with that recommendation? Why was i t never 
implemented? 
Rosenne: I would say that i t was never implemented partly because 
of Arab refusal to accept i t . That was certainly the 
prime reason. Arab refusal to accept and the Arab use of 
force to buttress their refusal to accept i t . The 
Br i t i s h refused to accept i t , too. One must never 
overlook that. I am not quite sure how far the US and 
the USSR really backed i t . They both voted for i t but, 
i t i s one thing to vote in the UN and i t i s always 
another thing to give i t p o l i t i c a l backing. I have never 
been sure i n my own mind that the two of them really 
backed i t . The Americans openly withdrew from i t a few 
months later for temporary reasons. The Cold War was 
beginning to shape up then and, of course, i t was acute 
in the Middle East. People overlook that. The f i r s t 
c r i s i s to be dealt with by the Security Council was 
12 
how a war could be a c i v i l war and simply by the stroke 
of a pen on the 14th of May, 1948, become an 
international war. For those who were involved in i t the 
date made no difference. It was s t i l l the same kind of 
war. It became in the f i r s t phase a war for the lines of 
communication. The main one being the road from Tel Aviv 
to Jerusalem. The second one being the road from Tel 
Aviv to Haifa. The third one being the road from Haifa 
across to Tiberias into Galilee. 
The Arabs v i r t u a l l y succeeded in 
cutting off Jerusalem. That was their major success. It 
was an enormous effort to keep i t open. I think the two 
sides exhautsted themselves in that six months period. 
In that sense the Security Council's f i r s t truce 
resolution was f a i r l y well timed. 
I want to say something about that period a l l 
together. I was transfered from the London office to the 
Jerusalem office of the Jewish Agency in December of M7. 
I was immediately put to work in the newly formed legal 
section of the P o l i t i c a l Department of the Jewish Agency 
for Palestine in Jerusalem. Our o f f i c i a l duty was not to 
handle the detailed legal control system of the British 
which was going on every day about this rule and that 
rule, about this case and that case having to do with 
immigration and land sales and so forth. That was 
handled by other people. Our immediate task was to 
14 
prepare a kind of commission which was established 
immediately after the partition resolution to prepare for 
the independence of the Jewish state. 
There are many stories about 
what happened in that period and probably a l l of them are 
true. There was a great deal of confusion as you can 
imagine. And the fact that Jerusalem was for a l l intents 
and purposes cut off within two or three weeks added to 
the confusion. Many people say that they did this and 
they did that and they probably did. Now the British 
announced that they were going to leave Palestine on the 
fifteenth of May, 1948. That was not the date in the 
partition resolution. The date in the partition 
resolution was later. It was August. But they decided 
unilaterally that they were going to leave on the 
fifteenth of May, 1948. I don't know why that particular 
date was chosen. I can t e l l you this that as soon as I 
arrived in Jerusalem I was called aside and I was told 
t h i s : the Bri t i s h have announced that they are going to 
leave Palestine on the fifteenth of May, 1948. We don't 
know whether to believe them or not to believe them. Ben 
Gurion has decided that come what may the Jewish state is 
going to be proclaimed on the fifteenth of May, 1948. To 
be more accurate on the night of the fourteenth of May 
because that was the Sabbath. 
JK: What was Ben Gurion's position at that time? 
15 
Rosenne: Ben Gurion at that time was very much lik e Shamir is 
today. He was the bete noir of the Br i t i s h . In fact 
when the people were attacked and put in Latrun ? he 
happened to be out of the country ? we wouldn't l e t him 
come into England because we thought he would be 
arrested. We kept him in Paris when he was in Europe. 
He was technically the Chairman of the Executive of the 
Jewish Agency for Palestine. He was, in fact, the 
commander-in-chief of the Hagana, the underground forces. 
He was the strong man of the country and a very 
determined person and a great leader and quite 
charismatic, too, on top of everything else. There had 
been a tremendous rival r y between him and Weizman at the 
time for this leadership position. And Weizman was quite 
a different character a l l together. 
JK: Could you just say something about Weizman's position on 
declaring the state of Israel. 
Rosenne: No one really knows what Weizman's position really was. 
They used to say that he was the f i r s t president, a 
position that he didn't want, of a state that he didn't 
want to see. But I think that i s going too far, 
personally. I think that he was very much wedded . . . 
in the nature of things he was a old man and he was sick. 
He had an attachment to the Br i t i s h . He had, of course, 
done this tremendous thing with the Balfour Declaration 
i n World War I. He had lived in Britian a l l his l i f e . 
16 
Many of the Russian Jewish intelligencia of the pre-
revolutionalry period were very much attracted to Great 
Britain for many reasons. They were influenced by the 
great Br i t i s h philosophers whom they read and, of course, 
i t was the bastion of democracy in Europe. A l l of that 
in those days was new to them. I don't think he ever 
lost that attraction for Britain and things British. 
Whereas Ben Gurion had a different background a l l 
together. He was not from the intelligencia, not from 
the Russian Jewish intelligencia. I don't even know i f 
Ben Gurion spoke Russian. Whereas Weizman and his wife 
would normally speak in Russian between themselves and 
their correspondence was often in Russian. He was a 
Chemist of world renown. Whereas Ben Gurion came from 
the Jewish masses of Eastern Europe. He had a very 
thorough Jewish education but that didn't make him of the 
intelligencia. He was self taught. He taught himself 
Greek which he wrote quite well and read without any 
d i f f i c u l t y . French, I was at a meeting once with some UN 
people and he corrected the interpreter, correctly. His 
accent was very bad but, he knew the language well. His 
English was pretty good. He was a self taught man. His 
p o l i t i c s were self taught in the hard school of labor 
p o l i t i c s which i s hard everyhwere. 
JK: Was Weizman capitulating to the British? 
Rosenne: Yes, much more than Ben Gurion. And Ben Gurion was in 
17 
the country and Weizman wasn't. He was either l i v i n g in 
London or in the United States which also made a big 
difference. But Weizman was the uncrowned king. Don't 
misunderstand what I am saying. People never forgot the 
Balfour Declaration and his part in i t and he was really 
the uncrowned king. If I may 
divert for and minute and put i t on the record, I ' l l t e l l 
you an extraordinary story. Our f i r s t embassy to Uruguay 
was around 1949. Our Ambassador, who just died a few 
weeks ago, was from a very distinguished Jewish family 
from Vilna and from Jerusalem. When he payed a courtesy 
c a l l to the British Ambassador, the Br i t i s h Ambassador 
started humming to him Ha-tigva, our national anthem. 
Our man was very surprised and asked what was going on. 
He said, "well I want to t e l l you. I was the third 
secretary in the Consulate General in Odessa in 1918 and 
after the Balfour declaration a l l the Jewish masses came 
to the Consulate and that's what they sang and I've 
remembered that tune ever since." 
So, I was told please prepare the necessary documents 
that had been required. Well, these are not documents 
you learn about in law schools. And I was told not to 
t e l l anybody that I was doing this. These were the 
transitional documents. I couldn't do i t by myself. It 
was too much. I think there was a group of four or five 
of us who worked on this almost non-stop, January, 
18 
February, March, A p r i l . We had d i f f i c u l t y getting the 
stuff down to Tel Aviv because of the siege of Jerusalem. 
As a matter of fact we were nearly unable to get early 
drafts down. And these consisted of the three documents 
which were issued. One was the Declaration of 
Independence i t s e l f . Here I was very irreverent and I 
said to Ben Gurion, "I am going to have a look at the 
legal part of i t . " (That's a l l the part that comes after 
"for these reasons") "But the Belles Lettres you can put 
i n . " So, by curious fluke 
someone had sent me a new edition of Jefferson's 
Parliamentary Manual which came out around that time. 
How i t got into Jerusalem I haven't the slightest idea. 
They had more important things to bring in than 
Jefferson's Parliamentary Manual and I say this now in 
the state of Virginia. When I read i t , not for the f i r s t 
time in my l i f e , but from a different perspective ? the 
American Declaration of Independence was there ? I saw 
that there were certain structures of i t that certainly 
could be used. To t e l l the truth i f you look very 
carefully at our Declaration of Independence you w i l l see 
that i t does follow the structure, not the wording, far 
from i t . Curiously enough, i t does not have an anti-
B r i t i s h passage in i t like the US Declaration has. Ben 
Gurion cut i t out. It was in one of the early drafts, 
something l i k e that. But he wouldn't allow i t to go in. 
19 
He also did something which I think Jefferson wanted to 
do and couldn't get away with i t . He cut out a l l the 
"whereases". 
JK: To simplify the language. 
Rosenne: And make i t more beautiful. I certainly prepared the 
f i r s t drafts of these three documents. I won't say the 
only f i r s t drafts but, I certainly prepared the f i r s t 
drafts. The Declaration of Independence, and there was 
the curious proclamation which I've seen signs of 
amazement about i t in the literature at home and even in 
the courts. I t was a proclamation which the State 
Council, the people who adopted the Declaration of 
Independence, adopted with i t . It empowered the 
government to work by decree indefinitely without any 
parliamentary responsibility. The reason for i t was our 
anticipation that the Arab armies would succeed in 
cutting the State into two or three parts. This 
proclamation would allow the army commanders of each area 
to take f u l l control. Fortunately that didn't happen. 
There was a third document which became the basic 
law s t i l l i n force called the Law and Administration 
Ordinance of 1948 which l a i d down the basic structure of 
the transfer of various authorities from the mandatory 
system to the independence system coupled with the 
abolition of two discriminatory laws which we would not 
20 
allow i n our statute book for one minute. It was the 
Briti s h immigration law and the land transfer law. I 
would say the two White Paper laws, addressing both of 
those. Now, 
we had in Jerusalem, as i t happened, an embryonic foreign 
office. It was not in Tel Aviv. It was in Jerusalem. 
They were caught in the siege. We worked on establishing 
the Foreign Office and planning i t . I was frequently 
asked to give opinions on various legal questions which 
arose nearly every day. And I think that this i s 
interesting from the point of view of this oral history. 
I would say u n t i l after what we c a l l the second truce 
which was in July of 1948 my basic instruction was to 
remain within the framework of the partition resolution. 
This i s probably not widely known but, a l l the i n i t i a l 
planning of the preparatory commission which I have 
mentioned, both on i t s legal side and on the economic 
side and other sides, was within the framework of the 
rather detailed partition resolution of 1947. It was 
only after that, that that instruction was removed. The 
reason for the removal of that instruction was, apart 
from the non-acceptance by the Arabs of that part of the 
partition, the breakdown of the UN in doing anything 
about the siege of Jerusalem. When things quietened down 
after the second truce in July, 1948, the Jewish 
population of Jerusalem, which when a l l was said and done 
21 
at that time was about 25 thousand i f not more, were down 
to one loaf of bread and one sardine a day. The total 
Jewish population of Palestine was about 600 thousand. 
There was a food line toward the end. 
They could not understand why they were being 
excluded from the Jewish state. Under the partition 
resolution they were. There was a very strong demand to 
put an end to that. Ben Gurion hesitated a l i t t l e b it 
but towards the end of July you'll find somewhere in the 
law books that extraordinary proclamation by the 
Provisional Government of Israel making Jewish Jerusalem 
part of the Jewish state. Let me say that legislation 
was passed. That signified the end to any close 
attachment to the partition resolution. 
JK: I would l i k e to just back up a few months before July of 
M8 just to cover some things that happened earlier 
before the mandate had expired. The Security Council had 
called for a truce in April because of the fighting that 
had been going on. That truce was not particularly 
effective. 
Rosenne: No, none of them were. F i r s t of a l l , there was nothing 
to back them up. The f u l l story of the British 
involvement in that phase of the war of independence has 
really not yet been written. I think that the widely 
held assumption that they adopted on the whole an anti-
Jewish position may not be f u l l y j u s t i f i e d . I think the 
22 
Arabs also have a gripe at them. But they were certainly 
a factor partly because they had to extracate themselves. 
If they were going to leave on the fifteenth of May they 
had to have their own lines of communication open to 
Haifa, to their port. They had problems of their own 
protection. They were a factor which interfered 
certainly with planning. 
The general staff of Hagana had a general basic 
directive which was ammended in about March of 1948. 
This general directive was to maintain the lines of 
communication open, to defend a l l the area allocated to 
the Jewish state under the partition resolution, but not 
to get involved with the British, not to interfere with 
them except for self-defense, of course. That was 
ammended around about this time. I really can't recall 
the exact ammendment, but there was a very important book 
in Hebrew that came out three or four years ago on the 
war of independence. Its name i s taken from the Psalms, 
"We were as dreamers", edited by Professor Yehuda 
Wallach, a military historian at Tel Aviv University. It 
consisted of about ten or eleven essays on different 
aspects of that period written by people who 
participated. There i s an essay by myself on Israel and 
the UN in that period. I haven't got a copy of i t here. 
I have a copy of i t at home. I could send you one i f you 
wanted i t for your records. It has never been translated 
23 
into English. We could put i t on the record here for the 
purpose of research and I ' l l send one of the off prints 
in Hebrew. You can put i t in your f i l e . (A revised 
English version i s being included in a collection of my 
essays to be published later in 1992 or early 1993 by my 
publishers, Nijhoff of Dordrecht, Holland.) 
This ammendment, i f I remember 
rightly, was no longer limited to defending the area 
allocated to the Jewish state under the partition 
resolution. It was just to defend in general. I think 
that was the major ammendment. The rest was technical. 
JK: Were the Brit i s h at that time attempting to maintain law 
and order? 
Rosenne: Not really. They evacuated the Tel Aviv area f a i r l y 
quickly and handed i t over. Jerusalem was completely 
divided with big barbed wire partitions. They had 
divided i t for some time. In Jerusalem they had two or 
three Br i t i s h zones of their own in which they 
concentrated their troops and Brit i s h personnel. These 
zones also divided Jewish Jersalem from Arab Jerusalem. 
I don't know whether you have been there or know 
Jerusalem. Right in the center of Jerusalem there has 
always been the Russian compound going back to just after 
the Crimean War. We used to c a l l them Bevingrads named 
after Bevin. The "grad" from Stalingrad, of course. The 
main one was there where the Russian compound i s , the 
24 
Central Post Office and other public buildings. When 
they l e f t i t there was a tremendous battle between us and 
the Arabs to see who would get hold of i t because i t was 
a strategic center, right in the center of Jerusalem. 
Fortunately, we got hold of i t . 
The rest of the country, as long as their 
communication lines to Haifa were kept open they did not 
have very much to fear. They knew they were leaving and 
i t was pointless for them to get involved and to lose men 
as they would have. 
JK: There was a second special session set up at the UN in 
Ap r i l . 
Rosenne: That was a US i n i t i a t i v e . That was to abolish the 
partition resolution and to replace i t with a US 
suggestion for a kind of trusteeship. They saw the way 
things were going. It failed, of course. The US brought 
quite strong pressure on us not to declare independence. 
And, in fact, Shertok, as his name was then, Sharett when 
he hebraized i t , was in Washington a few days before the 
Declaration of Independence and he met with the Secretary 
of State at the time and had a very d i f f i c u l t meeting 
with him. He came back with this very pessimistic 
reaction. But given the structure of the American 
administration the State Department i s one thing and the 
Congress i s another thing and the White House i s another 
thing as you know. I am not familiar with a l l the 
25 
details because I was not a l l that involved on the 
American side of i t . Obviously I was locked up in 
Jerusalem. People who were concerned were able through 
Truman to get this quite unexpected, quick US recognition 
which even took the US delegation in the UN by surprise. 
You see i t in the records even though the records are 
very cautious on this. For instance, a man li k e Jessup 
with whom I was quite friendly and Dean Rusk and people 
of that caliber were taken completely by surprise. In 
fact, I think they even heard about i t off the radio. 
JK: Were the US fears that the Jews would not be able to 
defend themselves? 
Rosenne: I don't quite know. I can't answer that question. There 
was a feeling at that stage that US Middle East policy 
had yet reached i t s level of independence that i t has 
today. They were s t i l l closely influenced by the British 
Foreign Office. The US had not been a Middle East power, 
really. It had interests, Aramco especially, and 
missionary interests in Palestine especially. But i t had 
no presence in the Middle East. There was no American 
presence in the Middle East. The presence was British. 
The navy was British. The army was Bri t i s h . Most of the 
Americans had lia i s o n duties in Cairo or wherever, the 
Russians, too. But, there was no presence as such. This 
only came later. 
JK: Who were the spokespersons at the UN in New York for the 
26 
Jewish Agency? 
Rosenne: A Rabbi named Abba H i l l e l Silver from Cleveland, i f I 
remember rightly, Abba Eban, Eliahu Elath was Ambassador 
to Wahington (he's s t i l l alive), Sharett came, of course, 
from time to time. I was going to t e l l you for your oral 
history there are two people in Israel you ought to get 
a hold of i f you can on this period. One i s Abba Eban 
himself. He i s often in the States. The other i s a man 
who lives in Jerusalem named Gideon Rafael. His other 
name before he Hebraized i t was Ruffer. I think he i s in 
Jerusalem. There should be no d i f f i c u l t y in getting his 
address. We are quite close friends because he was 
number one when I was number two in New York during the 
Six Day War period. He was very much involved in a l l of 
this i n the UN. He i s one of the real experts on the 
inner workings of the UN during that period, very much 
so. I ' l l be home in about a month's time. So, i f you'd 
li k e to send me a letter for him I w i l l send i t off to 
him. It would be no problem at a l l . 
JK: Good, I have been trying to reach him. 
Rosenne: In some respects he would be even better than Eban 
because he, I think l i k e a l l good diplomats, interested 
himself in the inner workings of the thing. So did I. 
I mean i f I wanted a transcript of a Security Council 
record five minutes after i t was spoken I could get i t 
because I knew where to go in what they called the 
27 
kitchen of the UN. You have to know these things. 
Whereas I don't think that Eban even knows that the 
records exist. He was at a higher level a l l together. 
JK: During this special session at the UN a UN mediator was 
appointed for the Palestine issue, Count Bernadotte. How 
effective was he and was he considered impartial by both 
parties? 
Rosenne: Well, I can't speak for anybody else but, he was not 
considered impartial in Israel. In fact, i f Israel had 
had any p o l i t i c a l clout at that time, which i t didn't 
have, I'm not sure that we would have agreed to him. It 
i s true that he had played a very significant role in 
negotiating the f i n a l stages of the war in Europe. It 
was on that basis actually that he was chosen. I think 
i t was only after Hitler's death in that last few days 
when they had to negotiate the unconditional surrender of 
Germany. For the West i t was Bernadotte as president of 
the Swedish Red Cross who was able to do that. 
He was not a good mediator in this case. We f e l t 
that he was pretty much under the control of the British 
who retained their opposition to the Jewish State unti l 
early 1949. There was a ter r i b l e incident in the Negev 
where we shot down 5 RAF planes which was no small feat. 
We were a l l RAF trained, too. It was no fun doing that. 
That really brought them up with a start and made them 
change their minds. I think that one of the reasons for 
28 
his assassination was that he was not regarded as 
impartial. He was regarded as hostile. And he proposed 
amendments to the partition plan and I don't know what 
led him to do i t either. Whereas there was a great 
deal of confidence in Bunche. Bunche was known in our 
a f f a i r s way back to San Francisco. I promised Lawrence 
Finkelstein that I would try and track this down, but so 
far I have not succeeded. I think that Bunche was the 
author of A r t i c l e 80 of the Charter but I have not been 
able to track i t down. A couple of years ago there was 
a seminar on Bunche in New York at the Ralph Bunche 
Institute. There was an a r t i c l e by myself on Bunche in 
that book, an extremely intimate, personal a r t i c l e which 
brings out sides of Bunche that had not been brought out 
before. It i s not a dry diplomatic history either, a 
sort of drinking a glass of beer around the b i l l i a r d 
table. 
Bunche had a far better reputation as far as our 
aff a i r s were concerned. Yet he had a remarkable 
reputation for fairness anyhow, at that period and in my 
opinion right through t i l the end. But not everybody 
shares that. I think that the fact that you are opposed 
sometimes doesn't mean to say that the man i s not being 
f a i r . Whereas people are inclined to equate opposition 
with unfairness. I never had that feeling with Bunche. 
I don't think that Bernadotte could have done what Bunche 
29 
did, somehow or other. I don't think he had the physical 
stamina to start with. I don't think he had the down to 
earth personality that Bunche had. The team s p i r i t that 
Bunche created not only amongst his own staff but amongst 
others. He was really quite remarkable. 
JK: What do you think would have happened i f the Jews had 
taken no action when the mandate expired? 
Rosenne: I think probably we would have a l l been slaughtered, to 
t e l l the truth. The Arabs were in that kind of a mood. 
And I don't think the outside world would have done very 
much about i t . 
JK: What did the declaration of statehood imply in terms of 
the UN Charter? 
Rosenne: I don't think we payed too much attention to i t at that 
time. There i s a reference to the UN in the Declaration 
of Independence. The concept of self-determination and 
independence as they developed later in the UN certainly 
didn't exist in those days. We are talking about the 
immediate aftermath of the War. And in a way one has to 
look at the Declaration of Independence and what happened 
in the Middle East as really a part of the concluding 
phases of World War II as opposed to the decolonization 
operations which started in the late 1950s and 1960s in 
the UN where the Charter provisions for self-
determination assumed quite a new significance. Whereas 
a man li k e Bunche who has been credited as one of the 
30 
fathers of that part of the Charter may have dreamt about 
i t i n World War II, i t was certainly not seen then as a 
matter of practical p o l i t i c s . 
The Declaration of Independence i s much more, to put 
in these terms, a consummation of the mandate of the 
League of Nations rather than of the UN and the United 
Nations was s t i l l working with League of Nations concepts 
at that time rather that the quite new concept of self-
determination and human rights which has emerged in the 
UN since. 
JK: Did the declaration of statehood affect aggression 
towards the new state? 
Rosenne: Very much so. You had no definitions and anyhow a l l 
definitions are dangerous and not effective. I would put 
i t this way. The admittance of Israel into the UN gave 
a certain international standing to i t s de facto 
borders at that date through A r t i c l e 2, paragraph 4. If 
you take the subsequent events at the UN, various 
resolutions on reaffirming principles of the Charter and 
so on, when you get to Art i c l e 2, paragraph 4, there are 
frequent references to "boundary lines or the word 
"lines." They were designed to refer to these kinds of 
armistice lines, or whatever you might c a l l them, both in 
Israel or in other parts of the world where a l l sorts of 
provisional lines came into existence in conjunction with 
some sort of UN action. 
31 
JK: Was i t anticipated that the declaration of statehood 
would in some ways bring in the UN in terms of protection 
against aggression? 
Rosenne: Yes, quite definitely because simultaneously with the 
independence there application for membership in the UN, 
as provided for in the Partition Resolution, by the way. 
In fact, the Arabs today make use of that telegram as an 
argument that we should be pushed back, not to the 
armistice demarcation lines even, but to the partition 
lines of 1947. They say, "well, that's what you 
undertook." They forget that i t was a part of the 
acceptance of the t o t a l i t y of the partition plan. 
JK: Was the declaration of statehood also important to the 
Jews in Israel that were fighting? 
Rosenne: Very much so. Overnight i t turned underground forces who 
had only been partly well disciplined into a national 
fighting force, a national army which could unite the 
people. Here Ben Gurion was very far sighted when he 
disbanded forceably what was the e l i t e force in the 
underground, the Palmah, because i t was too l e f t - wing 
for him. He was a s o c i a l i s t himself but middle of the 
road. Ultimately the right wing, too, the Altalena 
incident, with Begin and Shamir and so on, he disbanded 
them both. He insisted on a single national army. A l l 
that was only possible because of the Declaration of 
Independence. It was the supremacy of the government, 
32 
framework of the mandate going down to quite a low level 
in local government and their own representation vis a 
vi s the Jewish Agency, by the way. They had the normal 
democratic processes of discussion and decision making 
through various executives and various committees. As 
far as the outside world i s concerned there was no 
question with European Jewry, i t was completely 
disorganized. There was none at that time. The only 
Jewish communities of any significance were in the UK and 
the USA and perhaps places l i k e Australia, too far away 
to be of any real significance. The British Jewish 
community was v i r t u a l l y at that time 100% behind the 
idea. The American Jewish community was certainly 
divided, but i t threw i t s weight behind the idea. The 
Jewish community was 5 or 6 million people already then. 
Although i t was probably more homogeneous then than i t i s 
today. It was much more concentrated in the East. That 
was before i t started spreading out. 
The formal organization backed i t . There was quite 
a l o t of volunteer manpower that came and, of course, 
money. For instance, there was a man who only died a 
year or two ago. I had met him in of a l l places, Las 
Vegas. He l i t e r a l l y stole from the American a i r force. 
He was an a i r force p i l o t for the US a i r force. He stole 
I think three big bombers. How he got them I don't know. 
He got them to Israel. He was very severely punished. 
I've forgotten what the punishment was. He got some sort 
of severe punishment and I think i t was Johnson who 
rehabilitated him. Then he became king of Las Vegas. 
Hank Greenspan I think his name was. You couldn't f l y 
ai r c r a f t unless they belonged to a state under the 
ordinary law of aviation. And you were in trouble with 
ships at sea unless they flew a flag of a recognized 
state. There i s a famous case of a ship in the English 
law reports in 1948 called the Asya who was picked up by 
the Royal Navy. She had struck the Zionist colors. They 
knew that this was a unrecognized state. So, there were 
certainly practical implications of statehood apart from 
the emotional ones. 
JK: Did the declaration of statehood affect Arab intentions 
in any way? And what were the Arab intentions? 
Rosenne: The Arab intentions were certainly to prevent the 
independence of Israel. They would have slaughtered us 
a l l . They made no bones about i t . They wanted us a l l 
out. I don't think the declaration of statehood terribly 
affected this underlying aspiration of theirs. It may 
have intensified i t . 
JK: Did they ever offer any efforts toward a peaceful 
solution? 
Rosenne: No. Not to the best of my knowledge. I must make that 
reservation to be f a i r to them. 
JK: From your position in Jerusalem I'm not sure you would 
35 
have any personal experience with this but, in your view 
was the Secretary-General involved in the Palestine 
issue? 
Rosenne: Trygve Lie, yes. 
JK: Was he supportive of the Jewish state? 
Rosenne: I believe so, yes. He was very supportive of Bunche, as 
far as I know, too. Well, there i s no question about i t . 
You've only got to read his book. His letters to the 
Permanent Members of the Security Council of 15 May, 
1948, t e l l i n g them i f they don't do something the UN w i l l 
have turned into the footsteps of the League. I think 
that was the f i r s t time that letter was published. It 
was in his book. I think i t i s called In the Cause of  
Peace. He was a hard headed Norwegian. I think he had 
been foreign minister at one time. He was a f a i r l y hard 
headed p o l i t i c i a n and he saw in the Palestine issue a 
test case for the UN, to prevent i t from going the way 
the League went. 
JK: Immediately after the mandate had expired and Israel had 
announced i t s statehood then very heavy fighting broke 
out. 
Rosenne: That's when the Arab armies entered the scene. Actually 
the Jordanian army entered about a week before. 
Basically that was when the Egyptian army which was the 
main army entered. Although the Jordanian army was the 
best. There i s no question about that. But the Egyptian 
36 
was the biggest. What i s not realized i s that the Iraqi 
army managed certainly to get a contingent as far as 
Jerusalem and burried away in the Jordanian armistice 
agreement i s a clause about Iraq. They wouldn't enter 
into an armistice agreement directly. It was limited to 
the immediate states. Nasser was in that invading force 
in the part that was cut off, the Arab units that were 
cut off at a place called Faluja. There was a special 
agreement about them in the armistice negotiations to 
allow them to march out in military order. Nasser was 
there and that's where our people got to know him. He 
wasn't unknown to us as a person. I think he was a 
captain at the time. 
JK: The f i r s t c a l l s for a cease-fire by the Security Council 
were ineffective. How was the truce f i n a l l y accepted and 
put into f u l l effect? 
Rosenne: My own feeling was that i t was exhaustion. They kept 
coming with these c a l l s . They were half hearted. They 
didn't have any backup machinery which was worth 
anything. They had the Consular Commission in Jerusalem 
but, i t was completely cut off. It couldn't do anything. 
The Red Cross was also being f a i r l y ineffective at that 
time. The president was Ruessen 
from Switzerland. But I think that the main truce which 
was on June 10th was rather better timed from the point 
of view of the Security Council. They had a closer 
37 
appreciation for the r e a l i t i e s of the situation and there 
really was complete exhaustion. Certainly on our side. 
We had nothing, l i t e r a l l y nothing. I remember one night 
I had been given a r i f l e and given a bullet and told the 
bullet didn't f i t the r i f l e . 
JK: The cease-fire was in effect for a while. 
Rosenne: Four weeks. That was i t s prescribed time. 
JK: Why did the fighting break out again? 
Rosenne: It broke out again because the Arabs wanted i t to. If I 
remember rightly, subject to correction, i t was actually 
for a four week period. The Arabs broke about a day or 
two before the end of that four week period. That was 
one of the biggest military mistakes that they have made. 
We had managed to get ourselves better organized. 
JK: Then what i s known as the Ten Day Offensive took place. 
Rosenne: Yes, i t gave us half the Negev. 
JK: The f i n a l truce went into effect on July 18th. That was 
when we were really able to set about organizing the 
state. Although there was sporadic fighting i t was 
isolated after that. There was a l i t t l e fighting in 
Jerusalem and there had been another outbreak in Galilee. 
The main front was s t i l l Egypt and the Negev where there 
was continuous military action on a relatively small 
scale but i t was there nevertheless. 
It was the outbreaks there which led to the two 
resolutions of November, 4th and 16th of 1948 which laid 
38 
the basis for the armistice negotiations. 
JK: Why was the July 18th truce able to be put into effect? 
Were the Arabs willing at that point? 
Rosenne: Yes, everybody was exhausted by that time. The war had 
been going on for six months. The losses were f a i r l y 
heavy. I think our losses in the War of Independence 
were greater than the losses in a l l our other wars. They 
were very heavy. It was complete exhaustion. There was 
no real administration. It was sort of hand to mouth 
from one day to the next. Also the UN in the meantime 
had managed to in an empiric way put together what became 
the beginnings of the UNTSO which i s s t i l l i n existence. 
They had already by the second truce the capability not 
of preventing outbreaks ? They didn't have that and they 
were never intended to have that; the big powers would 
never have agreed under the Charter i t s e l f ? but, they 
had the a b i l i t y to observe and report. It i s from then 
onwards that you get much more objective and m i l i t a r i l y 
accurate reporting than we were having beforehand. 
JK: The UN could have a presence there and could observe what 
was actually going on. There was continued fighting even 
though i t would break out periodically. 
Rosenne: The whole situation was extremely unstable. The Security 
Council simply said that such and such a time on such and 
such a date the fighting w i l l f i n i s h . Well, i t didn't 
work that way. The lines were only really straightened 
39 
out in the armistice negotiations. You would have lines 
mixed. The forward lines would be mixed. Let's say that 
the forward line of one side would be behind the forward 
lin e of the other side and a l l sorts of things like that. 
JK: So, even the demarcation lines were not absolutely clear. 
Rosenne: They weren't demarcated in the fronts. The fronts were 
not stable. You weren't in a stable military situation 
at a l l . The Security Council simply said at X hours on 
such and such a date the fighting w i l l stop. The 
demarcation lines had to be established after that. 
JK: Then were they established? 
Rosenne: They were partly established after that by negotiations 
with UN assistance especially the lines in Jerusalem. 
The lines i n Jerusalem were basically established then. 
In the north they were not established. They were 
established at Rhodes. 
There was a major outbreak of fighting in the Negev 
because of the crisscrossing of the roads and the use of 
the roads. There were very few roads at that time. The 
road system was very poor and very central through the 
whole thing. Very d i f i c u l t arrangements had to be made 
to l e t the Egyptian convoys in to supply their troops and 
to l e t our convoys in to supply our people and that's how 
the whole thing was very unstable. 
A great deal of credit here goes to General Riley, 
40 
Bunche's number two, of the US Marine Corps, who handeled 
this with great s k i l l in my opinion. A Marine General 
doesn't stand for any nonsense. His yes i s yes and his 
no i s no. He can twist your arm and twist your arm and 
so on. 
JK: Was i t this particular incident which brought about a 
greater concern for establishing peace negotiations? 
Rosenne: Yes, the Negev, I would say so. There were two 
resolutions. They were local incidents, but they were 
quite serious. There were two resolutions in the south. 
There was only one for the other fronts which made the 
armistice negotiations easier. I won't go into a l l the 
details because in this a r t i c l e of mine on Bunche in the 
Bunche book I go into that. 
JK: This part of the interview w i l l deal with the Armistice 
negotiations that took place in January and February of 
1949. Just to f i l l in a l i t t l e b i t of background on 
this, the British mandate had expired in May of 1948. 
Rosenne: When you say expired I would say terminated. It was 
basically a unilateral termination. It was an Act of 
Parliament. 
JK: Upon which the Jewish people announced the establishment 
of the state of Israel which was immediately recognized 
by the US through the support of President Truman. 
Rosenne: Yes, i t was also immediately recognized by the Soviet 
Union. I think the Soviet Union was in f i r s t because 
41 
they didn't and s t i l l don't recognize the difference 
between recognition de jure and recognition de facto and 
the US was de facto only. A subtle technicality to i t 
but, technically, they were f i r s t . 
JK: Then immediately following that day fightning broke out 
between the Arabs and the Jews. 
Rosenne: Between the Arab states because the Paletinian Arabs had 
started fighting immediately on the 30th of November, 
1947. It broke out in Jerusalem f i r s t . The fighting had 
been going on since the beginning of December. The 
armies invaded on the 15th of May. They notified the UN 
that they were doing i t . 
JK: As you had mentioned i t was the Egyptian armies at that 
point. 
Rosenne: They were the main most serious one, the biggest one. 
The Jordanian army was also quite serious. 
JK: Several truces had been called for by the Security 
Council but, i t wasn't u n t i l July 18th of 1948 that the 
truce was f i n a l l y put into effect. 
Rosenne: I f I can c l a r i f y that for a minute. These appeals from 
the Security Council were graduated. That i s to say that 
they started by asking for a cease-fire and they 
developed from cease-fire to truce which led to the f i r s t 
and second truces of the summer of 1948. But the 
inherent i n s t a b i l i t y led to further outbreaks especially 
i n the south. From truce they advanced to armistice, a 
42 
f i r e , which a policeman can do i f he sees a brawl in the 
street almost, to truce which i s traditionally something 
arranged by military commanders, not on governmental 
level. Certainly with governmental consent but, i t i s 
not at the governmental level. Whereas armistice is 
already at governmental level. It was related to another 
quite technical aspect. In those days the Security 
Council was much more technical than i t has become since, 
and wisely so. The question was in those days: under 
what a r t i c l e of the Charter was the Security Council 
acting? Behind that question i s a second question 
namely, under what chapter of the Charter were they 
acting? And behind that question i s the main p o l i t i c a l 
issue. If i t i s under Chapter VI, that i s headed "the 
paci f i c settlement of disputes," the resolutions of the 
Security Council are technically recommendations. If 
they are acting under Chapter VII, they are technically 
mandatory, subject to their terms. Now we had a 
p o l i t i c a l aspiration in 1948 to move the Palestine 
question, as i t was called on the agenda of the Security 
Council, from Chapter VI into Chapter VII because as we 
saw i t , i t was the Arabs that were causing the breakdown 
of peace a l l the time. In fact, after the Arab move 
which brought the f i r s t truce to an end, the Security 
Council did move into Chapter VII and the second truce 
was actually ordered by the Security Council under 
44 
that and his assassination i s , quite honestly, I don't 
know. It i s something that I never got to. I, quite 
honestly, don't know. I had to draw up the documents 
which were sent to the UN and which were sent to Sweden 
about that. I drafted what was given to me and I was not 
allowed to go behind those documents. 
JK: But, in general, as we had talked about earlier, he was 
not considered impartial. 
Rosenne: No, he was never considered impartial. I think that had 
we had any real say in his appointment I doubt very much 
i f we would have agreed to i t . He wasn't an unknown 
personality l i k e , for example, Ambassador Jarring after 
the Six Day War who was relatively unknown. 
JK: In terms of playing the role as a mediator he was not 
effective i n that capacity. 
Rosenne: No. There was also another confusion. You see, the 
General Assembly uses these words and no one really knows 
what i t means by them. Going back to the beginning of 
the century and the Hague Convention of 1907 a l l these 
things l i k e mediation and "good offices" are a l l spelled 
out i n considerable detail. One of the problems was when 
the General Assembly used the word "mediator", c a l l in a 
"mediator", was i t thinking in these l e g a l i s t i c terms or 
did i t have something else in mind. We had continuous 
disputes with Bernadotte really over his powers. In 
other words, did he have power only to make 
46 
recommendations and i f so, to whom? Or did he have any 
other powers? This was a source of bitter discussions 
with him. Those of us who were old enough to know, and 
I don't include myself at that time, the one man in our 
foreign service who had actually worked through the 
League of Nations and his thinking was closely influenced 
by League of Nations' procedures and practices [Jacob 
Robinson]. I'm quite sure that had the League of Nations 
used the word "mediator" in any particular situation, i t 
would have meant in that technical sense of the Hague 
Convention. I'm pretty certain that i s what i t would 
have meant. The UN was i t s e l f going through a 
transitional phase. It used these words and I don't 
think anybody could be sure what was meant by them. We 
had the same problem in Rhodes over the word "armistice." 
It was very interesting and I discussed that in my essay 
on Bunche i n the Bunche book. So, I needn't spend time 
on i t here. The whole issue i s discussed there. 
JK: Did the death of Count Bernadotte help the negotiation 
process? 
Rosenne: I think so, yes. F i r s t of a l l , Bunche was much more 
energetic. Bunche was much more nimble minded and very 
quick at exploiting the slightest opening. I'm not sure 
that Bernadotte had that capacity. 
JK: Then Ralph Bunche was named the acting mediator. 
Rosenne: He was Bernadotte's number two at the time. He 
47 
automatically took over. There was enough d i f f i c u l t y 
over appointing Bernadotte. Bernadotte was technically 
appointed by a committee of the General Assembly. That 
committee of the General Assembly consisted of the five 
Permanent Members of the Security Council. The Cold War 
in 1948 had not reached the level i t reached even later 
on i n 1948, l e t alone what happened later on. I doubt 
that those five Permanent Members could have agreed 
quickly at any rate on a person to take Bernadotte's 
place. So, i t a l l automatically f e l l on Bunche as number 
two. That brought in General Riley of the US Marine 
Corps as his chief military advisor in place of a Swedish 
General who had been Bernadotte's military advisor. As 
a result of that the whole of the mediation effort was in 
US hands, at any rate, technically. Riley was a serving 
offi c e r seconded to the UN. Bunche by that time was no 
longer in the American service. He was not seconded to 
the UN. He was a real international c i v i l servant. 
He had three or four people. One was Stavropoulos 
who became legal advisor to the UN. He was Greek and had 
been a member of the Greek government in exile. He had 
quite an important role to play in a l l this. There was 
a Frenchman named Henri Vigier (he died within the last 
15 years) who had been in the legal and security section 
of the League of Nations already. I've come across 
League of Nations f i l e s going back to the 1920s with his 
48 
i n i t i a l s on them. I had done some research in their 
archives i n Geneva. There was another very curious 
character named Paul Mohn. He wrote a pamphlet in 
"International Conciliation," a very important pamphlet 
around about that time. He was Bunche's representative 
in Tel Aviv between September and January or even later, 
I suppose. He i s one of these quiet, unassuming, 
extremely competent, capable diplomats. He was capable 
of doing rough work and doing i t well. He wrote an 
important pamphlet in that wonderful series of the 
Carnegie Endowment at one time called "International 
Conciliation." I recommend that you take a look at i t . 
I think i t was on the mediation effort. I've lost track 
of him completely. I don't know whether he i s s t i l l 
alive although a Swedish friend of mine recently told me 
that he i s . It might be interesting i f you could find 
him. 
JK: Around the same time that Ralph Bunche was appointed 
acting mediator the UN recommended the establishment of 
armistice negotiations. 
Rosenne: It more than recommended, i t called for them. By this 
time the Security Council was acting under Chapter VII of 
the Charter and i t s resolutions were essentially 
mandatory subject to the actual text, of course. Here 
the Security Council went beyond recommending. What the 
actual words were I don't r e c a l l . It may have been 
49 
"called for" or "invited the parties to enter" or 
something l i k e that. The essential thing was not that 
verb. The essential thing was the negotiations. We have 
never moved from this position. We want direct 
negotiations with each one of the Arab states and not 
anything through intermediaries. Here the Security 
Council picked us up on that and rightly so. Bunche knew 
that and knew how to exploit i t . It was heavily undercut 
by the Palestine Conciliation Commission which was also 
part of Bernadotte's recommendations. The PCC was 
established by the General Assembly in November/December 
of 1948. There was considerable r i v a l r y between Bunche 
and the UN i t s e l f and this PCC, which was composed of the 
representatives of the United States, France, and Turkey, 
a very curious mixture. The French were supposed to be 
the pro-Israeli side of things, Turkey the pro-Arab side, 
and the US a kind of impartial, nuetral chairman. It 
didn't really work that way. It was quite unsuccessful. 
It convened two major conferences. The f i r s t was in 
Lausanne i n the summer of 1949, immediately after the 
armistice negotiations finished. The main conference was 
in Paris in 1952. It was a complete failure because i t 
never brought the parties together. It always kept them 
apart and transmitted messages from one to the other, not 
always in the form in which i t was given but in the form 
that i t thought was most l i k e l y to produce results. 
Whereas with Bunche, the secret of the armistice 
negotiations was the fact that the Security Council had 
called for negotiations and this was interpreted by 
Bunche as meaning that "you boys s i t in the same room and 
you're going to damn well s i t there u n t i l you've reached 
an agreement." The UN had remarkable control over this 
in Rhodes because the island was v i r t u a l l y inaccessible 
at that time. The UN had one plane, the Dakota, and one 
day i t went to Cairo and one day i t went to Tel Aviv. 
You could only get off the island i f you could get onto 
that plane. To get onto that plane you needed an OK from 
the UN. It was called the "milk run". 
JK: What was your position in Rhodes? 
Rosenne: I was legal advisor for the Is r a e l i delegation for the 
two sets of talks in Rhodes. In the north, in Lebanon 
and Syria, we had a much smaller delegation there. The 
army man was the head of those two delegations. I think 
he was a colonel then, Makleff. He's dead now. He later 
became Chief of Staff. We had one Arab expert and myself 
from the Foreign Ministry. Those negotiations in the 
north are quite heavily documented in an unexpected way. 
What happened i s this. The delegation in New York 
complained once that i t did not have enough direct 
reporting from Rhodes to know what was going on, to know 
what the atmosphere was like and so on. It only got dry 
o f f i c i a l reports. I was on very close personal relations 
51 
with a man who was the legal advisor of the delegation in 
New York, Jacob Robinson (no longer aliv e ) . He was the 
man who I told you had had a great deal of experience 
with the League of Nations in the minorities question. 
He had at one time been legal advisor to the government 
of Lithuania. Lithuania had a major dispute with Poland 
over Vilna, which ran right through the League of 
Nations. He had handled quite a lo t of that dispute. 
That was where he got his experience at multilateral 
diplomacy which was in those days in i t s beginnings. 
That i s how we were able to handle the UN quite early in 
our existence with a great deal of professionalism. He 
was in New York. I got into the habit of writing 
personal letters to him on a f i r s t name basis. 
For some reason which has made me very angry the 
State Archives at home have included them in a volume of 
diplomatic documents relating to the Rhodes armistice 
agreements. These are not diplomatic documents at a l l . 
If anything they are undiplomatic documents. In one 
let t e r I say that the instructions given to us by Ben 
Gurion are complete rubbish and thank God we've not been 
able to carry them out and can now dispose of them. Now 
you don't put that kind of stuff in diplomatic documents. 
It i s one thing for a student to pick them up going 
through the archives. I don't think they should be 
banned or anything but as a result nearly a l l my 
52 
correspondence to the delegation in New York on the 
negotiations in the north have been described in f u l l 
even down to what we had for lunch and with whom and how 
we crawled through mine fi e l d s . 
From Rhodes there was a certain amount because Eytan 
who was the head of the delegation in Rhodes was a good 
correspondent and writes with a fa c i l e pen. He used to 
write home quite a lot, or telelgraph home quite a lot. 
A l o t of his stuff i s in the archives but, there i s very 
l i t t l e about the negotiations with Jordan. Partly 
because they didn't take place in Rhodes. They took 
place privately. Eytan can t e l l you about that. He 
conducted them. The f i r s t negotiations were with Egypt 
in Rhodes. 
JK: Who were some of the major actors who were involved in 
the negotiations in Rhodes? 
Rosenne: Bunche, Riley, Vigier, Stavropoulos, those four. On the 
Egyptian side apart from the o f f i c i a l delegation which 
was headed by a colonel in the Egyptian army named 
Shareen who was somehow related to King Farouk. The 
Egyptians had a f i r s t class, highly professional 
ambassador who was not a member of the delegation in 
Rhodes. He was probably the main Egyptian c i v i l i a n i n 
that delegation. Their delegations were much more 
military than ours. Ours were evenly balanced. We 
attached as much importance to the p o l i t i c a l side of 
53 
t 
* 
these negotiations as to the military side. In fact, I 
don't think the c i v i l i a n side paid too much attention to 
the military side. They went of into a military 
subcommittee and we were very happy to l e t General Riley 
and the officers work i t out themselves with the lines or 
whatever they wanted to do. We were interested in the 
p o l i t i c a l side of i t . 
JK: Who else represented the I s r a e l i side? 
Rosenne: There was a man named Shilouh (no longer alive) who was 
an extremely s k i l l f u l and experienced diplomat and who 
had conducted a great deal of our relations with the 
Brit i s h military throughout the War in Cairo. I suppose 
he was about the most outstanding. The rest middle 
ranking army officers and intelligence units and Foreign 
Ministry people. From the army we had Rabin (later Chief 
of Staff and Prime Minister of Israel) there part of the 
time with Egypt. He was commander of the southern front 
at one time. Yigael Alon (later Foreign Minister) was 
there some of the time. But above a l l there was Yigael 
Yadin (not alive) who was deputy chief of staff in the 
War of Independence. He became chief of staff later. He 
was the son of an archeologist who had a worldwide 
reputation (Prof. Sukenik). Yadin himself has a worlwide 
reputation as an archeologist. With his knowledge of 
archeology and of the history of the country and his 
personality he became a very good chief of staff. He 
54 
knew enough about the Roman occupation of the country and 
the Crusaders and where the roads went and so on. Walter 
Eytan was the head of the delegation. Abba Eban was in 
New York. This man Shilouh whom I mentioned was the head 
of the delegation with Jordan. The real negotiations 
with Jordan did not take place at Rhodes. 
JK: Not u n t i l later? 
Rosenne: No, they were going on at the same time. In fact, the 
agreement was telegraphed to Rhodes after i t had been 
reached and i t was incorporated into the armistice 
agreement. We don't know how much Bunche knew of this. 
My suspicion i s that Bunche did know and played the game 
extremely loyally. I have heard that he didn't know and 
was taken by surprise when he got this telegram saying 
that this was the contents of the agreement that the 
negotiations had gotten bogged down in Rhodes. They 
weren't bogged down. They were simply not taking place. 
The Jordanian delegation in Rhodes did not have f u l l 
power. That did not matter very much. It was only a two 
hour f l i g h t to Amman and a two hour f l i g h t to Cairo. 
We had to bring our own communications. We brought 
communications from the army. I think the Egyptians did 
the same, probably. 
There were two great things that Bunche did. One 
was when he greeted us on arrival saying that there were 
no victors and no vanquished here. Everybody i s here on 
55 
a footing of equality. The second was the socializing 
which he forced on us mainly through the b i l l i a r d table. 
We were really a l l ex-army, one army or the other, from 
the War. Most of us could play b i l l i a r d s or snooker or 
pool or whatever you do around a b i l l i a r d table with a 
glass of beer. Bunche used that to very great effect, 
very successfully to turn them into human beings and to 
realize that the others were human beings, also. 
JK: So, the Egyptians and the Israelis played together. 
Rosenne: We played three sided snooker, or whatever you c a l l your 
pool, with the UN. And I've got a guess that the UN 
would arrange when the UN would win and when they 
wouldn't. That's a guess on my part. But i t was very 
effective. I t i s the human side of diplomacy which makes 
i t tick. 
JK: You mentioned that there were both military and p o l i t i c a l 
aspects to the negotiations. How was that undertaken and 
how did the subcommittees operate? 
Rosenne: It was undertaken at home by the good integration between 
Ben Gurion and Sharett. Ben Gurion was Prime Minister 
and Minister of Defense. He took this double job 
following the Churchill precedent in the UK during the 
war. Sharett was a very loyal Foreign Minister although 
he quarreled very b i t t e r l y with Ben Gurion afterwards. 
They were a clash of personalities as much as anything 
else. They had the coordination at the highest level. 
56 
The two parts of the delegation, of course, had 
differences of opinion obviously, but i t basically worked 
well. We didn't pay too much attention to the military 
details unless we were asked for the c i v i l i a n side of i t . 
I can't say the same for the military people. They did 
try to lay down the law about the technical legal parts. 
I was actually told by Yadin, and I was angry with him, 
that everybody knows that the breadth for t e r r i t o r i a l sea 
i s three miles. Therefore, we can say t e r r i t o r i a l sea in 
the agreements. I said I didn't know that the 
t e r r i t o r i a l sea was three miles and therefore, i f you 
want three miles you've got to write three miles. But 
that i s the difference between the army approach and the 
c i v i l i a n approach. 
JK: [This i s the f i f t h side of the taped interview. ] We were 
talking about the armistice negotiations that were going 
on i n January and February of 1949. We were focusing on 
the negotiations going on in Rhodes between Egypt and 
Israel and we were talking about the differences between 
the military and the p o l i t i c a l aspects of the 
negotiations. What were the objectives of the military 
aspects and did they d i f f e r or coincide with the 
p o l i t i c a l issues? 
Rosenne: By in large in those days there was f a i r l y close 
coincidence. With Egypt there were two major objectives. 
One was to make i t possible for us to get to the Gulf of 
57 
Aqaba on the Red Sea. It ended up with Taba arbitration 
a couple of years ago because the Egyptians controlled 
that part of i t . It was a kind of no-man's land. The 
Jordanians weren't in i t yet. They were in Aqaba i t s e l f 
which i s on the east side of the Gulf but not in Taba. 
The other was to get the Egyptians out of Beersheba. The 
Egyptians had a government of some sort at Beersheba. 
They were as far north as that. We wanted them out from 
behind the Egytian frontier altogether. We didn't quite 
succeed in that and i t ' s regrettable in retrospect that 
that didn't happen because that was how the Gaza Strip 
was formed. The Gaza Strip was a small area, a very 
small area even today, which under the Armistice 
Agreement remained in Egyptian hands and that i s at the 
root of a l l that has happened since. Apart from that we 
succeeded i n getting them a) right behind the previous 
frontier, the 1906 frontier and b) with other 
arrangements which were of a military character the way 
was l e f t open to us, i f we wanted to, to get to Taba, to 
the Red Sea. Those were our main objectives. There was 
not much difference there between the p o l t i c a l and the 
military objectives apart from the technicalities of the 
military. 
What about villages that were primarily Arab or primarily 
Jewish and how they would be f i t into the various 
demarcations? 
58 
Rosenne: Most of that area was desert. The problem was not 
villages but nomadic tribes which continued for quite a 
long while afterwards, the problem of the Bedouin nomads. 
The real area was the Gaza Strip. That was how the Gaza 
Strip came into existence. That was not so elsewhere. 
In the Jordanian front there are divided villages but not 
anywhere else as I r e c a l l . They are settled 
pragmatically and the less the central governments know 
about i t the better, to t e l l the truth. 
I don't know whether you know this but, the 49th 
parall e l frontier with Canada i s not always along the 
49th paral l e l precisely for that reason. Some of i t goes 
north of i t and some goes south of i t to avoid cutting up 
Indian reservations and villages. It i s done 
pragmatically. 
JK: You mentioned that Ralph Bunche set a certain kind of 
mood at Rhodes by making i t clear that there was no 
victor and no vanquished in the negotiations and also 
that he had everyone working face-to-face in the same 
room. Did i t start out that way i n i t i a l l y ? 
Rosenne: Yes, almost from the f i r s t day he convened a face-to-face 
meeting. By no means were a l l of the negotioations face-
to-face. Don't misunderstand me on that. F i r s t of a l l , 
i t i s not possible in any diplomatic negotiations. We 
a l l ate in the same diningroom at the same time, at 
different tables, that's true, but the Hotel des Roses 
59 
had only one diningroom. It was wartime conditions even 
though i t was as late as 1949. The area had been in 
Italian hands and had been transfered to Greece under the 
peace treaty which had only entered into force f a i r l y 
recently. It wasn't in very good shape. The dinner was 
served at 1:00 and everybody ate at 1:00. If you jostled 
at the doorway with an Egyptian going in, you jostled 
with an Egyptian. The delegations were on three floors 
with the UN in between. One was on the f i r s t floor, the 
UN was on the second floor, and the other was on the 
third floor. That kept them apart to avoid any 
f i s t i c u f f s or anything like that which could easily have 
happened. But, at the same time they were a l l together. 
Quite a l o t of private meetings went on especially 
on the c i v i l i a n side in the hotel at Rhodes. And you 
couldn't get off the island, as I said, without the UN 
helping you off. Face-to-face meetings took place quite 
often without records, to discuss limited points either 
heads of delegations or number one or number two or 
whoever he wanted. For instance, I think some of the 
technical legal discussions were participated in by the 
Egyptians and Stavropoulos. The Egyptians had a legal 
advisor but they didn't seem to give him much authority. 
I don't know what he did but, I've lost touch with him. 
I've not seen him since. 
60 
Then every now and then there would be formal 
meetings with records. There weren't many of these 
formal meetings with records with the Egyptians. There 
werew about four or five, that's a l l . But that was when 
things had already been more or less agreed, the way 
things are usually done. 
JK: How much authority or autonomy did your delegation have? 
Rosenne: Well, on this we had to check quite frequently with the 
government. We had brought directives, of course, but we 
would check nearly everyday, nearly every word. They 
relied on us quite a l o t . Don't forget that the senior 
staff of the Foreign Ministry was in Rhodes. It was 
already second rank. I am not saying that in a 
disparaging sence. They were very good people both in 
Tel Aviv, as i t was then, and in New York. But the top 
rank of the Foreign Ministry, the Director General, head 
of the Arab department, and the legal advisor were a l l in 
Rhodes. So, there was not much that could be done from 
home on any detail . On broad lines i t was a different 
story. Both Sharett and Ben Gurion wouldn't agree quite 
a l o t . We would ask and report and they would say we 
don't agree with what you've done, undo i t . Just undo 
i t . It's not the end of the world. 
JK: Do you re c a l l who else was there from the United Nations? 
Rosenne: As I said, i t was Bunche, Riley, Vigier, and 
61 
Stavrapoulos. One of the secretaries was k i l l e d with 
Hammarskjold, a French g i r l . We used French quite a lot 
in these negotiations. There was a man called Grant or 
Grand who was a press relations of f i c e r but, those were 
the four main people. There was one other named Pablo 
Azcarate. He was a Spaniard, I think a Republican. He 
had been prominent in the minorities section in the 
League of Nations secretariat at one time. He got 
involved and I remember him one day crying that Jerusalem 
in the height of the siege reminded him of the siege of 
Madrid. Eytan knows a lot about Ascarate. They were 
quite close. 
JK: As we discussed there were separate discussions going on 
with Egypt, with Jordan, and Syria and so forth. Why was 
i t handled in this way? 
Rosenne: F i r s t of a l l , we would not have gone into any joint 
negotiations. That i s for sure. Secondly, for a purely 
material point of view, the issues were quite different 
in each case. The main issue in Syria was actually the 
water line. I t had nothing to do with the fighting at 
a l l . There our objective which we obtained was to get 
the whole of one of the sources of the Jordan, the Dan, 
the River Jordan i t s e l f , the Sea of Galilee, and the 
lower Jordan entirely in Israel. And that we succeeded. 
It had been entirely in Palestine. Through that we were 
able to construct the National Water Carrier to take the 
62 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
water from the north down to the south. Incidently, this 
year there i s a drought in the north instead of the south 
and they are turning i t around and sending i t the other 
way. It i s very curious. The Syrians wanted at a l l 
costs to prevent that and on that they fa i l e d . With 
Lebanon there was no real problem. With Jordan the 
problem was Jerusalem and what i s now the West Bank. 
During the fighting were there other nations involved? 
Iraq mainly, the rest was purely nominal. There may have 
been a platoon or a battalion or so. 
How was that handled in the negotiations? 
They withdrew after the negotiations started. Iraq was 
the only one that was any problem. They were discussed 
at the Sunneh part of the Jordanian agreement. Jordan 
took responsibility for their actions. Actually they 
withdrew. The attack we made on Deis Yasseen which led 
to this t e r r i b l e business afterwards was completely 
j u s t i f i e d from a military point of view because the Iraqi 
army was there. They are not to be underestimated, the 
Iraqi army. They did get as far as Jerusalem which is 
quite a distance from Bagdad. 
In the agreements was there any acknowledgement that 
other forces had been involved? 
No, only the Jordanian one. There were no independent 
Arab states at that time, don't forget. A l l the 
mediterranean states were s t i l l under European 
63 
occupation. The only independent state was Saudi Arabia 
at that time. They had a nominal unit. Well, Iraq was 
also independent. 
JK: In your book you mentioned that each agreement had a 
preamble each of which stated that the negotiations were 
entered into at the request of the Security Council. Was 
there a specific p o l i t i c a l reason for including that? 
Rosenne: Yes, the UN in those days was not what i t i s today. It 
was far more potent even then. It had not been destroyed 
by the Cold War at that stage. The Security Council 
meant something. From Israel's point of view we wanted 
to get admission into the UN, as well. In fact, a great 
deal of the armistice negotiations were partly 
p o l i t i c a l l y motivated by our application for admission to 
the UN. If you look at the dates you w i l l see the 
connection between them. Membership was May 15th, 1949. 
It was before the Syrian agreement was finished but, the 
other three were finished. There was a special cease?
f i r e arrangement that was made with Syria that could be 
reported before the date of the crucial vote in the 
General Assembly. There was a definite connection 
between our position in the armistice negotiations and 
our admission into the UN. It also happens to be a 
historic fact. The UN had an interest in i t , too. 
Bunche and Trygve Lie both had a UN interest in i t . 
JK: Also in the preamble i t mentions that these agreements 
64 
were established to f a c i l i t a t e a transition to a more 
permanent peace. So, were these negotiations considered 
temporary? 
Rosenne: Yes, we considered them temporary. As a matter of fact 
i t produced quite curious incidents in the negotiations. 
As I mentioned in the a r t i c l e on Bunche I raised the 
question of the duration of the armistice agreements 
themselves. We wanted to follow the Hague Convention of 
1907 and have an unlimited duration to be renewed in one 
year. The UN said under no circumstances would they have 
anything to do with an agreement which allowed the 
resumption of the use of force. It i s quite a powerful 
argument. They got their way on that. The other was a 
very curious incident in the Syrian negotiations with 
this very complex arrangement of a demilitarized zone in 
the north which was an inhabited area not a desert area 
l i k e the one in the south. The Syrians wanted i t to be 
in force u n t i l replaced by the agreements to be worked 
out at Lausanne under the PCC. Whereas we by that time 
had become sophisticated enough to know that Lausanne was 
going to get no where. And we opposed that wording and 
we got our way on that on the ground that i t was too 
indefinite. 
I never understood what lay behind that demand by 
the Syrians. It was to me i l l o g i c a l . But the Syrians 
were very i l l o g i c a l . Negotiations with them were 
65 
extremely d i f f i c u l t . One day we got to the clause about 
the release of prisoners of war. The Syrian legal 
advisor, with whom I became personally friendly right 
through the whole period and who ended up being a judge 
on the International Court, said "well, we can't agree to 
that." I said, "what do you mean you can't agree to the 
release of a prisoner of war?" He said, "surely Mr. 
Rosenne knows about the Napoleonic division of powers 
which we have in our country." The prisoner was one who 
had had some disciplinary action taken against him. So, 
I said, "what the h e l l does that have to do with i t ? " He 
said, " i t i s in the hands of the judiciary." So, I did 
something very rude. I simply pulled out a big newspaper 
and put i t in front of me and started to read. I said to 
Vigier, "when this fellow has learned his law l e t me know 
and I ' l l put my newspaper back." That was a dirty trick. 
But we remained very good friends. We used to bump into 
each other in the streets around New York. 
JK: In the agreements seldom were the actual countries named 
un t i l the end of the document. 
Rosenne: I don't recollect that there was any special reason for 
that. I don't think any issue was made out of i t . There 
was a different issue. It arose with the Syrians in 
particular. It was f i r s t of a l l the exchange of f u l l 
powers at the governmental level not at the military 
level. An armistice i s essentially a military document 
66 
but, we insisted on f u l l powers eminating from the 
government, that they should be signed in the names of 
the governments of the countries rather than in the names 
of any particular unit or in the names of the armies or 
anything l i k e that. That was an issue mainly with the 
Syrians. You're right that i t i s a l i t t l e b i t surprising 
to find the names of the countries only mentioned at the 
end but, I doubt i f we made an issue out of i t . I don't 
recollect making an issue out of i t . I think we were a 
l i t t l e b i t sensitive to Arab suseptibilities about that. 
JK: They s t i l l did not want to recognize Israel as a state. 
Rosenne: Well, they're named once. They are not completely blank. 
Eytan may know more about that. I'm sure he would have 
consulted me i f the question had arisen in any serious 
form. I believe we didn't pay too much attention to i t 
nor did our people at home either. Sharett and Ben 
Gurion would have been very sensitive to anything like 
that. I think they saw only the importance that the name 
of the countries should made somewhere in the document. 
JK: Were there demilitarized zones set up during the talks? 
Rosenne: Yes. 
JK: How were they set up in terms of who would maintain law 
and order, etc.? 
Rosenne: This issue didn't really arise in the Egyptian agreement 
because i t was in the middle of the desert. It was an 
67 
area which Yadin happened to know from his knowledge of 
history and archeology that the Romans had used and the 
Crusaders had used and we had used i t to get to the 
Sinai. I t was uninhabited except for these Nomadic 
tribes. There was simply no problem about that at a l l . 
And i t was a small area. The real problem arose in 
Jarusalem, a heavily populated urban area where there 
were demilitarized areas only a few yards wide from time 
to time and place to place. More seriously i t was the 
north. The Syrians had gotten across the Jordan north of 
the Sea of Galilee at a place called Mahanagim which owes 
i t s place to history as the site where Jacob had his 
dream. The Syrians got across the Jordan there and 
wanted to retain their hold. That was part of this 
debate over the water line. Ultimately they agreed to 
withdraw from this area on the condition that the Israeli 
army didn't advance. So, the army became policemen. 
That's how i t was done. The area as fixed was basically 
along the lines, maybe tidied up a l i t t l e b i t , of where 
the front actually was at the time. 
JK: So, the Israelis functioned as police. 
Rosenne: Police were allowed. This i s quite common. It i s done 
everywhere in the world in demilitarized zones which are 
inhabited. You can't have inhabited demilitarized zones 
without some kind of enforcement. There were births and 
deaths and marriages and things l i k e that which no one 
68 
knew quite how to handle. Bunche said, "don't get bogged 
down with that kind of stuff. Just deal with i t as i t 
arises." In addition to that area which was more or less 
demarcated by the actual front, some more was thrown in 
as a kind of g i f t to the Syrians because part of 
Palestine l i e s on the east bank of the Sea of Galilee. 
The f o o t h i l l s of the Golan Heights, some parts of the Sea 
of Galilee were always in Palestine. That area was also 
demilitarized because the Syrians had succeeded in the 
southern part of the Sea of Galilee i t s e l f in getting to 
the water in Palestine. One of their conditions for 
withdrawing from there was that the whole of that side 
should be demilitarized. The frontier of that area was 
fixed. It was the old Palestinian frontier. The 
inclusion of i t in the demilitarized zone was purely 
arbitrary. 
JK: How was the armistice agreement to be implemented? 
Rosenne: By quite an elaborate machinery in which the UN was very 
heavily involved through what was already in place, the 
UNTSO, but under a different hat. They were technically 
the supervisory organ of the parties to the armistice 
negotiations and not operating as the UNTSO. Under each 
agreement there was a separate Mixed Armistice Commission 
composed of an equal number of representatives of each 
side with a UN chairman. The Egyptian agreement went one 
further and had a kind of appeal commission that was not 
69 
followed in the other agreements. This appeal commission 
was used once or twice. It dealt with some pretty tough 
issues including the Suez Canal. That went through that 
machinery and so did Aqaba, for that matter. 
They were very patchy and i t i s in here that my 
critic i s m of the UN really began developing. Because 
they turned into kind of scoreboards. How many times 
were you found responsible for being guilty? How many 
times was country x found guilty? How many times was 
country y found guilty? This was without attempting to 
find out what were the underlying causes for these 
outbreaks. Some of them were purely lo c a l . A soldier 
might have gotten drunk and run across the lines and 
someone fired a shot at him. But they were a l l reported 
numerically. I was one of those and a few others that 
found that the UN instead of operating to take the 
language of the preamble as a transition to permanent 
peace were actually rather inclined to keep the parties 
at arms length and to report every so often to 
headquarters in New York. Party x has been condemned 
nine times or y has been condemned ten times. This went 
on with Egypt through 1956 and was one of the reasons why 
Ben Gurion refused to allow the agreement to be revived 
after the Suez War of 1956. Because i t was just plain 
ridiculous. The other agreements went on u n t i l 1967. 
Hammarskjold realized that, subject to the Security 
70 
Council, the armistice regime was teetering. He regarded 
the Egyptian part as the most important. I think he was 
right on that. He made his v i s i t to the Middle East in 
1956 when he tr i e d to shore i t up. But i t was always 
keeping the parties at arms length with the UN as a kind 
of football umpire in the middle instead of really trying 
to bring them together in order to discuss issues and see 
what could be resolved. It was about that time that the 
Cold War came along and you can't separate the Middle 
East from the Cold War. The Cold War became serious in 
the early f i f t i e s . As early as 1954 when the Soviets 
started very heavily arming the different Arab countries 
mainly Egypt. The Iraqi-British agreement broke down in 
1953. What happened after that i s an integral part of 
the Cold War. The Middle East was not an independent 
factor in world affairs at a l l . It was one of the flash 
points of American-Russian tensions. 
JK: The agreement had no expiration date. Were there 
provisions within the agreement to conduct further peace 
talks? 
Rosenne: Yes, there were no specific provisions in the Armistice 
Agreement to conduct p o l i t i c a l negotiations. We would 
have liked i t but, I don't think we would have gotten i t . 
The Arabs certainly wouldn't have agreed to that because 
they regarded the Armistice Agreements as a military 
phase as the traditional concept of an armistice as a 
71 
military phase. In the Jordanian agreement there is a 
special clause ca l l i n g for further talks to work out 
details especially as regards to Jerusalem. Jerusalem 
was a special issue. Populations were intermingled. A 
lo t needed ironing out in Jerusalem. We tried to operate 
i t and the Jordanians refused. It was a special 
committee of some sort that was supposed to be 
established under this agreement. We brought this before 
the Security Council, the refusal of Jordan to honor this 
part. And the Security Council did nothing about i t . 
But by this time, 1953, the Security Council was so 
heavily distorted by the Cold War that i t really became 
a useless operation. Around that time there was one year 
when the Security Council had no meeting at a l l on the 
Middle East, one year in i t s history. That was 1963, I 
think. 
JK: Are there any other points you'd li k e to bring up in 
regards to the armistice? 
Rosenne: This was the f i r s t time that an armistice of this scale 
had been organized through an international organization. 
There was a tremendous amount of experimentation that 
went on. It was a matter of personal pride that when 
they got involved in the armistice negotiations in Korea 
both sides asked for copies of my book. About the same 
day I got the requests from both Moscow and Washington. 
I met some of the people who were involved in the Korean 
72 
negotiations and they told me that they read that book 
from cover to cover. So, i f i t helped on that, i t was 
something. 
JK: Thank you. We have another session to do but, we can 
take a break. 
JK: This portion of the interview w i l l deal with the Suez War 
in 1956. Mr. Rosenne, what was your role in Israel at 
this particular time during the Suez c r i s i s ? 
Rosenne: At that time I was s t i l l legal advisor for the Foreign 
Office in the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. I ' l l put i t 
this way, there i s a continuum from really the beginning 
right through to Camp David about freedom of navigation 
through both the Suez Canal and the Strait of Tiran. The 
two were linked. We had thought at Rhodes during the 
armistice i n one of our later conversations with Bunche 
that the problem of Suez was resolved by the Armistice 
Agreement. The problem of Tiran had not yet arisen. We 
knew of the existence of the s t r a i t , of course, but, i t 
was used very l i t t l e at that time. One of our objectives 
there was to get this land, only a few miles, on the Red 
Sea in order to give us this outlet to Africa. In 
Bunche's report to the Security Council of August, 1948, 
when we had completed the last of the armistice 
negotiations with Syria there was a half sentence which 
73 
we didn't l i k e very much. It was not really what we 
thought we were going to get. I don't remember the exact 
wording but, i t said something li k e "and a l l vestiges of 
war (or war conditions) w i l l be removed," something like 
words to that effect. That was intended as far as we 
were concerned (Eytan could t e l l you more about this) to 
deal with the freedom of passage through the Suez Canal 
Which had come up through the armistice procedures and 
through the Security Council, the Security Council 
resolution of September 1, 1951. 
This was my f i r s t appearance attending Security 
Council meetings. My colleague, Robinson, was in Israel 
and we had to swap positions. I was in New York at that 
time. That was when I got my introduction to the 
Security Council. I had been in the General Assembly 
before that. I didn't present. Eban did the speaking in 
the Security Council, but I was the legal advisor. I 
knew quite a b i t about the Suez Canal. In fact, I had 
lived there during the war and knew i t physically quite 
well. So did Eban. I'm not sure that we didn't know i t 
better than some of the Egyptians because i t i s not an 
area frequented much by Egyptians, at any rate south of 
Ismailia. 
The Tiran issue began coming to the fore around late 
1949 and early 1950, as far back as that. There was an 
exchange of correspondence through the US Embassy in 
74 
Cairo to the Egyptians. It was a b i t obscure. That was 
when they occupied these islands. They had been 
unoccupied and I think technically belonged to Saudi 
Arabia. The Egyptians put a small army unit on i t . The 
st r a i t s are very narrow there. They are a few hundred 
yards wide and could be controlled by one canon on the 
shore. The canon i s probably s t i l l there. We in the 
Foreign Ministry already as early as that began thinking 
that there was going to be only one way to get the 
Egyptians off those str a i t s and that was by force. They 
didn't seem to be moving voluntarily. 
When Hammarskjold came in the summer of 1956 a good 
deal of his time and attention was spent trying to solve 
what had already at that time become a twin problem, the 
Suez Canal and Tiran. There were major legal differences 
between the two because the Suez Canal was dealt with by 
the Constantinople Convention of 1888 whereas the Strait 
of Tiran was under general international law which at 
that time was in a state of major flux becausse i t was 
just before the f i r s t conference on the law of the sea 
was convened. These matters are a l l connected and you 
w i l l see why in a few minutes. Hammarskjold very much 
thought that the two questions of freedom of passage 
through Suez and freedom of passage through the Strait of 
Tiran should go to the International Court for an 
advisory opinion. He thought at one time that Israel 
75 
would lose on the Suez Canal issue and win on the Strait 
of Tiran issue. That was never my opinion. My opinion 
was that the risk of losing on both was extremely high. 
JK: What were Israel's objectives? 
Rosenne: Trade with East Africa. 
JK: So, they wanted basically freedom of passage. 
Rosenne: Yes, freedom of passage, that's a l l . That's enough. 
That's what a l l the law of the sea conferences are about, 
more than anything else. 
JK: They didn't want control. 
Rosenne: No, only freedom of passage and overflight. Now, how 
were these connected? I think we managed to pursuade 
Hammarskjold to drop this idea of going to the 
International Court. Well, we did pursuade him. 
Although i f you take President Eisenhower's statement 
after the Suez War in 1957 around March, he does talk 
about u n t i l j u d i c i a l l y determined. He uses words to that 
effect. I think that John Foster Dulles was also 
thinking along those lines. 
After the Suez War the major issue that arose which 
we couldn't do anything about was how to withdraw from 
the Gaza Strip where the pressures were very great. I 
think in retrospect they were completely misplaced. A 
bunch of high level experts and technicians from the 
office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva 
came to look at the Gaza Strip and help us while we were 
76 
i n occupation of i t in that period. They very much 
thought they could have solved the problem then. They 
were ready to help. Here again the UN intervened. It 
belonged to the UNWRA, the special organization to deal 
with the Palestinian refugees and they wanted nothing to 
do with the High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva 
where there was tremendous expertise in that period for 
settling large numbers of people. It was s t i l l post war 
period. They were kicked out when we l e f t . There were 
very long and d i f f i c u l t negotiations with the Americans 
especially and with the UN. Hammarskjold was a strong 
personality. He had his own interests. The American 
delegation handled these negotiations mainly with Mrs. 
Meir who was then Foreign Minister. The delegation was 
headed by a very prominent lawyer named Arthur Dean who 
was with the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell which was also 
the firm of John Foster Dulles. This i s a link up. 
Arthur Dean was afterwards the head of the US delegation 
to the f i r s t and the second conferences on the law of the 
sea in 1958 and 1960. Here you have a link up of a 
series of complicated issues. We said this to 
Hammarskjold and to the Americans that we f e l t that the 
question of Tiran could be solved through the conference 
on the law of the sea. It would be ridiculous for a 
government to put that kind of issue to a court where i t 
loses control over the operation at a certain point, a 
77 
major operation of that kind. As far as Suez was 
concerned we said, "look, the Egyptians simply damn well 
better open the canal. That's what the Security Council 
resolution says." But i t didn't happen that way. 
The major objectives in the Suez War as far as we 
were concerned I think were two. Nasser had started 
organizing the Fedayeen which is what developed into the 
PLO as part of the Egyptian intelligence from Gaza Strip. 
They were beginning to cause a nuisance. At the same 
time we wanted freedom of passage through Tiran to 
develop our trade with the Far East and East Africa. 
Those were the major objectives. I think we actually got 
both, to t e l l the truth, in the end. Although i t was 
d i f f i c u l t . There was a speech by Mrs. Meir in the 
General Assembly on March 1, 1957. It took several 
months to negotiate that speech. It was negotiated 
primarily in New York between her advisors in New York 
and Arthur Dean and his advisors and Hammarskjold and his 
advisors. I was the backup in Jerusalem as far as the 
government was concerned. I had to continue as number 
two i n the delegation for the f i r s t law of the sea 
conference, where we got the clause through which is 
often regarded as the Aqaba clause. [The reference i t to 
A r t i c l e 16, Paragraph 4 of the 1958 Convention on the 
T e r r i t o r i a l Sea and the Contiguous Zone.] It partly 
settled the thing because the UN had an observer post at 
78 
the s t r a i t of Tiran which remained there u n t i l Nasser 
removed i t i n 1967. This was the UNEF One which was 
establised then. UNEF One was a b r i l l i a n t conception. 
I strongly suspect i t was Bunche's and i t was in the 
drawers. I think they must have foreseen something like 
this coming. I'm not sure i f they foresaw the Anglo-
French part of that operation. I don't think anybody did 
u n t i l after the nationalization of the Suez Canal 
Company. If you look at the documentation very carefully 
you w i l l observe that Israel was dead silent on that. It 
never expressed i t s e l f on that. We had an observer at 
the London Conference on the Suez Canal. I don't think 
he opened his mouth and i f he did he certainly didn't say 
anything against the Egyptians. We did not want to 
interfere with the Egyptian national aspirations. They 
were no concern of ours as long as we could get freedom 
of passage. 
JK: How long had Israel's freedom of passage been blocked? 
Rosenne: From 1946. The f i r s t Egyptian legislation was then 
directed against "Zionist goods" through the Suez Canal 
was in 1946. The British did nothing about i t . They 
couldn't. After the independence in 1948 i t became much 
easier for the Egyptians anyway. They had a Prize Court 
which operated. Most of i t s decisions have been 
published. 
JK: In the summer of 1956 Nasser nationalized the canal which 
79 
the French and the British objected to highly. Can you 
t e l l me something about the agreements at Sevres? 
Rosenne: I know nothing about the agreements at Sevres at a l l . 
Like everybody else we were just presented with certain 
operational instructions. There was the f i r s t 
glimmerings, apart from maybe the memoirs of Eban who was 
involved or maybe Ben Gurion, of anything serious of the 
inner history i s an a r t i c l e which was published within 
the last two years in the Brit i s h periodical 
International and Comparative Law Quarterly by Geoffrey 
Marston of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. He 
obviously had access to Foreign Office documents. It i s 
quite an interesting account of how the legal people of 
the B r i t i s h Foreign Office were kept out of i t . My guess 
i s that the legal people of the Isr a e l i Foreign Office 
were also kept out of i t probably for the same reasons. 
It was a case which got beyond l e g a l i t i e s . The legal 
people were l e f t to clean up the mess, which often 
happens. 
JK: The agreements were apparently to coordinate some kind of 
efforts between the British and the French and Israel. 
Rosenne: Yes, as far as I know. I have never actually seen them. 
I don't even know i f they have been published. I suppose 
they have been. I am an operational man on the whole. 
I've been very careful in a l l my writings, which are a 
lot , to avoid dealing with the Middle East. I didn't 
80 
want to cause any embarrasment to any particular 
government, Israel or anybody else, for that matter, by 
writing on the Middle East. I have a certain standing in 
the international community. I've kept off the Middle 
East and have not interested myself in the details of i t 
except when I have had to professionally. I don't recall 
ever seeing the Sevres agreement. 
JK: What were your instructions? 
Rosenne: My instructions were basically to do what I could to get 
the freedom of navigation through both areas. That was 
our prime interest. The Foreign Office was more 
concerned with the Fedayeen and that side of i t . We had 
issues with Egypt which we thought had been solved by the 
armistice but, i t turned out differently. Don't forget 
there was a revolution in Egypt shortly after the 
Armistice Agreement. I don't think i t really affected 
things a l l that much. It affected the personalities, the 
King and the corrupt government. Then Nasser took over 
with his strong personality and he became extremely anti-
I s r a e l i and leader of a wide anti-Israeli coalition by no 
means limited to the Arabs. He the one who really 
brought what i s called the Third World into i t . It was 
very curious, on the night that he died which was in the 
middle of a General Assembly we had scheduled a normal 
delegation reception that night. Some quite innocent 
delegate from some country came up to us and said, "I 
81 
suppose your reception for tonight w i l l be cancelled." 
I said, "What for?" He said, "well, haven't you heard 
Nasser has died?" I answered, "we should cancel a 
reception because Nasser has died?" But, that's how 
things go at the UN. You don't always know who you are 
talking to. 
There was a man before Nasser who was less hostile 
but less effective. His name was Naguib. He had also 
been involved in the 1948 war. Our people knew him also. 
On October 29, 1956, Israel attacked Egypt. 
There was a trememdous camouflage operation that went on 
at that time. Everybody thought the tension was between 
Israel and Jordan. If you look at the press carefully 
you'll see that the tension that was spoken about was 
between Israel and Jordan. 
This was on purpose to deflect attention? 
I don't know. I was in Europe at that time on something. 
I don't r e c a l l what took me to Europe but, I know I was 
called i n a hurry about that time. I thought that war 
was going to break out with Jordan. You see, i f war i s 
going to break out, the last thing any military i s going 
to do i s t e l l any c i v i l i a n that doesn't need to know. 
Was there a feeling that Egypt was going to attack 
Israel? Was this a preemption or was i t really an 
attempt to gain something? 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
JK: 
82 
Rosenne: I think i t was really jumping onto the band wagon. I 
think i t was exploiting an opportunity which presented 
i t s e l f with Anglo-French i n i t i a t i v e s vis-a-vis Egypt. 
The issues were there anyhow. I think the Foreign 
Ministry had reached a conclusion, or at any rate the 
higher echelons of the Foreign Ministry, that the only 
way to get freedom of passage through Tiran was sooner or 
later by the use of force. The Egyptians would not 
voluntarily relinquish any of their position there. I 
think that i s the point of departure for the whole 
thinking. What I think happened, and here i s to some 
extent informed guess work on my part, i s that when the 
Brit i s h and the French started their i n i t i a t i v e to use 
force against Nasser for whatever purpose they wanted, 
our people, especially the Ministry of Defense and this 
i s Shimeon Peres (he was the main contact in those days), 
saw an opportunity here to get the Strait of Tiran. This 
was by jumping piggyback. The French gave us one thing 
which was cardinal in a l l this. They gave us air cover 
over Tel Aviv which we didn't have. That was quid pro 
quo. The sequence of events was more or less like this. 
We did attack Egypt. There i s no question about that, 
whether i t was provoked, the Fedayeen, whatever. We were 
then presented with an ultimatum by the British and the 
French to cease and desist or withdraw, whatever, within 
a limited period of time or else. And i t was on the 
83 
basis of the "or else" that they started their operation. 
That i s how i t was done. But their operation failed 
completely because i t was so badly handled. 
JK: I think they asked the Egyptians and the Israelis to 
separate themselves ten miles back from the Canal but, 
the Canal was in Egyptian territory. 
Rosenne: Right, but they also mishandled i t . They didn't have 
their troops in place. But they did give us a i r cover 
over Tel Aviv which we didn't have at that time. Our a i r 
force wasn't strong enough. 
JK: After the fighting broke out the UN called for a cease?
f i r e and a withdrawal of forces. 
Rosenne: And also put the UNEF One in place. I think the prime 
objective of UNEF One was to save face for the British 
and French. It's original disposition was to separate 
the Br i t i s h and the French from the Egyptians vis-a-vis 
the Port of Said. From there i t expanded outwards and 
was given a role. The armistice as far as we were 
concerned was dead and buried. Ben Gurion made a very 
sharp speech in Parliament about i t being dead and buried 
and he said, " a l l the magicians in Egypt could not put i t 
together again." This i s a quotation from the Bible. 
The UN would not accept that, de jure, but de facto one 
has to accept the situation. Of course, when the 
Armistice Agreement disappeared, a l l the armistice 
commission and the observer set up disappeared along with 
84 
i t . Anyhow, i t would not have been big enough to observe 
this much larger area which now came into play. One of 
the conditions for our withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was 
UN observation posts at Tiran which remained there until 
1967. There was freedom of passage through Tiran during 
a l l that period. That i s the link up which was tidied up 
on the legal side through the f i r s t conference on the law 
of the sea in 1958. Again Arthur Dean, the same man with 
whom the terms of our withdrawal were negotiated, was 
head of the US delegation. He knew exactly the issues 
that were involved and we had at that stage very strong 
cooperation from the British and the French who realized 
the significance of straits in general. That became a 
major issue in the last conference on the law of the sea, 
keeping passage open and overflight. 
JK: The resolution to c a l l for a cease-fire came from the 
General Assembly. 
Rosenne: What happened there was that i s was the f i r s t application 
of the Uniting for Peace Resolution. That was a 
resolution that was adopted in 1950 after the Security 
Council had been completely stymied by the Russian veto 
in the Korean issue. That i s when the Americans 
developed the idea shifting the center of gravity of the 
UN for the maintenance of peace from the Security Council 
to the General Assembly. Keep in mind that the General 
Assembly resolution i s never more than a recommendation. 
85 
This i s quite important in a l l this. Incidently, we were 
very reserved towards that resolution but, by that time 
we couldn't oppose i t . We did privately warn the 
Americans that i t could backfire, as i t has done in a bad 
way. One of our speeches in the UN expressed certain 
reserves. As the results of the vetoes in the Security 
Council, Br i t i s h and French vetoes, an emergency session 
of the General Assembly was called. To show you how 
things are linked, the West managed to get the issue of 
Hungary before the General Assembly where i t was also 
vetoed. There was a second emergency session running in 
parall e l over the Soviet intervention in Hungary. The 
two ran in p a r a l l e l . It was complex. You can't separate 
one part of the world from the situation in another part 
of the world. It was extremely complex. 
JK: [the tape was changed for the interview] We were 
discussing at the end of the last tape the linkage 
between different events at that time and that the 
resolution for a cease-fire had come from the General 
Assembly because of the veto in the Security Council. A 
cease-fire did take place and UN Emergency Forces were 
put into place. As you mentioned they were f i r s t at Port 
Said to separate the French and British from the 
Egyptians. How did this begin to interact with the 
Is r a e l i position? 
Rosenne: It opened up a po s s i b i l i t y of an agreement with the 
86 
Egyptians to station the UNEF and included in that would 
be in the Gaza Strip and along the frontier. In fact, in 
the Taba arbitration one of the issues was, where was 
their post at Taba. This was a question of fact not a 
question of law. There was a long discussion about i t . 
In the end they brought the Egyptian commandant of that 
post to give evidence as to where his post was. In the 
course of the discussion on the points where they would 
be stationed and patrol, i t was possible in that context 
to have one quite a distance away at Tiran i t s e l f . 
That's how i t was done. In retrospect i t was quite a 
s k i l l f u l l y conceived diplomatic operation. I didn't have 
direct responsibility for that. 
JK: So, at that point you had observation. 
Rosenne: No, the observation with Egypt disappeared. It was 
replaced by UNEF. 
JK: They were to occupy the border? 
Rosenne: More or less. I wouldn't go as far as to say occupy. 
Don't forget half of i t was desert and s t i l l i s . They 
had these frontier posts to observe what was going on, to 
make sure that no one crossed into the other side. They 
were more important, from the observing point of view, on 
the Gaza Strip than half way down the Sinai which was 
rock and desert and at this one post at Tiran which 
operated u n t i l i t was removed. It was through that that 
i t was possible to get this ten year settlement of the 
87 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
JK: 
Rosenne: 
Tiran part of the problem but not the Suez Canal part of 
the problem. That was only settled in the peace treaty 
at Camp David. 
Then the UN operation that took place did have definite 
advantages for Israel over what the situation had been 
before. 
In one sense, certainly, in another sense i t went further 
than the observers ever went in keeping the parties 
apart. In that respect i t may have been one of the 
underlying factors which led to the Six Day War. 
Why would that lead to further fighting when i t was 
intended to keep peace? 
It wasn't intended to be a buffer zone. You are reading 
too much into i t . There was no zone at a l l . It was 
essentially a small unit of soldiers. I don't remember 
how many there were but, they were small companies. I 
don't think they were more than that. They were 
scattered down at various points by agreement as to where 
they were to be. They were not much different than the 
observers except there were more of them. 
Were they able effectively to stop the Fedayeen raids? 
Yes, quite well. There they were quite effective and 
their presence kept the Strait of Tiran open. Although 
i t wasn't te r r i b l y much used in that period after a l l 
that work. Tiran got i t s importance actually in the 
Iran-Iraq War where the Jordaian port of Aqaba became one 
88 
of the main Soviet supply routes to Iraq. As a result of 
that there was a major Soviet interest in keeping those 
s t r a i t s open. It didn't worry us. The Port of Aqaba is 
quite an important contact both for East Africa and more 
importantly for the Far East. 
JK: You've mentioned several times that keeping the parties 
separated did not aid in peaceful settlement. In what 
way did that operate negatively? 
Rosenne: It operated negatively in the sense that there was never 
any attempt to get together and discuss underlying 
issues. It was the US i n i t i a t i v e which really did that 
after what was in one sense a success and in one sense a 
failure of the Egyptian Prime Minister, Sadat. His 
success was in the Yom Kipur War, the f i r s t few days of 
i t . His failure i s that he hadn't planned i t properly 
and i n the end he nearly lost his whole country. That's 
enough. The Syrians were also the same. I was brought 
up in a country which says that the only battle of 
importance i s the last one. 
I think that Sadat goes into the category of great 
men in the sense that he realized what had happened and 
realized that the only way from his country's point of 
view to put an end to this situation and that was to 
reach some sort of agreement, creaky though i t might be, 
with Israel. We are lucky that there i s a desert. I'm 
not sure he could have done i t i f i t had not been for the 
89 
Sinai desert. That's why the situation with Syria and 
the other countries i s so d i f f i c u l t . But the main issues 
between Israel and Egypt were partly settled earlier but 
were f i n a l l y settled in the peace treaty. That was 
achieved after a l l sorts of preliminaries. It took a 
long time with a lo t of comings and goings. Barbara 
Walters was involved at one time. There are a l l sorts of 
curious ways that diplomacy works, as when the Egyptians 
and the Israelis were locked up at Camp David, l i t e r a l l y 
physically locked up in Camp David. They were not let 
out u n t i l they had reached an agreement. In other words, 
i t was a repetition of the Rhodes process. I would very 
much lik e to see what happened with Theodore Roosevelt 
and the Treaty of Plymouth in 1905, i f he locked up the 
Japanese and the Russians somewhere. I haven't been able 
to find out yet. It i s on my agenda to look into that 
one day to see what happened. It was that kind of 
diplomacy, the strong arm diplomacy of the Americans, 
s k i l l f u l with s k i l l f u l opposite numbers who knew their 
national interests and knew when to give and when to 
stand firm. That goes for Begin and that goes for Sadat. 
JK: In retrospect today we talked about a lot of issues 
involving the Middle East crises and the United Nations. 
In retrospect were there ways that the UN operated 
effectively and were there ways in which they could 
90 
improve? 
Rosenne: Personally, I think one must be very careful not to 
generalize. I think that every international dispute as 
far as I can see has i t s own contours, i t s own 
physiognomy. The concept of the UN peace-keeping force 
which emerged in stages simply out of sheer necessity has 
turned out to be a good one, but only up to a point. It 
i s a good one in the sense that i t does stop fighting or 
at any rate i f i t doesn't stop fighting altogether, i t 
enables i t to be kept under some sort of control and not 
expand too far. But i t has not shown any capability of 
getting to grips with underlying issues. It needs a 
great power to take that in hand and i t needs great 
statesmen to get into the act. The UN Charter i s 
misconceived, the Charter i t s e l f . And i t i s probably 
just as well that i t never worked because i t i s based on 
the false assumption of the perpetuation of the wartime 
alliance when there was nothing even to perpetuate. 
Because they were fighting against the same country 
doesn't make them real a l l i e s . The UN peace-keeping 
forces from which, in principle at any rate, the big 
powers are excluded generally unless by agreement, and 
which only operate by agreement has shown i t s e l f to be a 
more effective machinery for the maintenance of 
international peace after i t has broken down, to bring i t 
back and maintain i t . I don't think i t has shown i t s e l f 
91 
very effective for the solution of international 
disputes. But, on the other hand, I'm not sure in this 
modern world that the public doesn't expect major 
international disputes to be resolved over night. It i s 
just not possible. For instance, I see no solution at 
a l l to Ulster and I see no solution at a l l to Gaza, for 
very much the same reasons in both cases. This i s very, 
very tragic i n both cases. If Ulster were not part of 
the UK there would almost certainly be a peace-keeping 
force there. There should be, there really should be. 
The reasons why neither of them get resolved are similar 
problems and they go very deep. I think that some 
international situations are such that the most that can 
be done by the international community i s to keep them 
under control, not l e t them lead to major outbreaks like 
occured in the early part of this century every time 
there was even a minor outbreak in the Balkans. For 
instance, who would have thought that the bullet that was 
shot in Sarajevo in 1914 would have led to what i t did. 
It wouldn't have had the UN been in existence then. 
JK: Do you think that an international organization i s 
capable of peace making? 
Rosenne: I wouldn't exclude i t but on the whole, no. I think i t 
has to be l e f t to one of the big powers operating with 
general consent. It has to be removed from big power 
riv a l r y . The international organizations are too open to 
92 
r i v a l r i e s . The Secretary-General U Thant, for whom I had 
the highest admiration (I worked with him quite a l o t ) , 
said to us one day, "look, I'm managing director of a 
concern which has 120 share holders of which you have one 
share." In that sense the UN i s not the League. In i t s 
heyday i t had 60 members. The most i t had was 65. That 
was before the big countries started withdrawing from i t . 
It had two secretaries-general in the whole of i t s 
history. The UN has had a secretary-general with never 
more than two terms. Every ten years i t has changed, or 
even more frequently. It goes in rotation and not 
necessarily on a b i l i t y . For instance, U Thant was chosen 
after Hammarskjold died. There were two very strong 
candidates. One was Manfred Lacks and one was Monge 
Selim of Tunisia. There was strong opposition to both 
and the big powers decided that they wanted what they 
thought was a weak man. We happened to know U Thant 
personally and had actually helped him when he arrived in 
New York as Permanent Representative of Burma, vi r t u a l l y 
unknown and unknown in New York. We had physically 
helped him and befriended him and so on. He turned out 
to be a much stronger personality than the big powers 
thought. That's for sure. Waldheim was chosen again 
because they wanted a weak man. And i t was Europe's 
turn. I understand that the present Secretary-General is 
also not very good. So my sources t e l l me. I have no 
93 
personal opinion. I've had nothing to do with him. I'm 
told he's weak and indecisive. He was involved in the 
law of the sea conference and they say he didn't leave 
any mark on i t . But i t was Latin America's turn. The 
next turn i s probably Africa and no one knows who i t is 
going to be. The one man who could possible have this 
job belongs to the wrong tribe in Uganda and i s out of 
things at the present moment. 
The publicity of the UN i s the bain of any true 
diplomacy. You simply cannot do i t i f every move is 
public. I'm not saying you don't report what you do but 
to have every move reported, every time you sneeze 
reported i s not the way to conduct public a f f a i r s . It 
simply can't be done that way. 
JK: In the past in several of these situations the Security 
Council had i t s arms tied because of the veto. 
Rosenne: I wouldn't say i t i s because of the veto. I think that 
i s an over simplification. The veto i s only expressive 
of something. It i s an extremely inaccurate word to use. 
There i s no such thing as a veto. It simply doesn't 
exist. The Charter says that certain resolutions require 
a majority. If that majority i s not there, i t ' s not 
there. There's no resolution. So, how one can talk 
about a veto I don't know. A veto here means when 
something has been passed by the Congress but, the 
President says, no. There i s nothing passed by the 
94 
Security Council. So, i t i s a different concept. It's 
a legal technicality, perhaps, but not entirely. If the 
Security Council i s hamstrung, i t i s hamstrung because of 
the fundamental lack of agreement among the major powers 
which finds expression i f necessary through the veto. 
But more often than not i t finds expression in that 
matters are not brought before the Security Council. 
Don't forget that before a meeting of the Security 
Council takes place there has to be nine votes in 
agreement that i t should take place. The Secretary-
General does not just send out an invitation to a meeting 
at 2:00 tomorrow afternoon. The actual meeting of the 
Security Council i s negotiated f i r s t . The t i t l e of an 
agenda item i s negotiated. There used to be enormous 
debates over the t i t l e of an agenda item in the Security 
Council. It would go on for days. Now i t i s simply a 
let t e r to avoid that. Before i t can be convened for i t s 
f i r s t meeting there have to be nine votes in favor of i t , 
nine countries agreeing to i t . 
JK: Now, with the situation changing between the US and 
Soviet Union and the Cold War waning, how does this 
affect the Middle East? Does Israel look favorably on 
this change in the international environment? 
Rosenne: Basically, I can't speak for Israel anymore. I've been 
out of public service now for over ten years. I should 
think that one would be in favor of anything that would 
95 
reduce international tensions. We have good memories of 
joint American-Russian cooperation on the Middle East 
which was one of the things which enabled the Israeli 
independence to go through. I wrote a l i t t l e a r t i c l e two 
or three years ago on Israel's invitation to the Security 
Council which I think was in July, 1948, as opposed to 
the Jewish Agency for Palestine. This was engineered 
through a representative of the Ukraine, Manuelski, 
Gromyko, and Jessup. That i s how things were working in 
those days. There i s no doubt that Israel i s going to 
come under a very great squeeze over the next few years. 
Incidently, I think that only the Shamir government is 
capable of reacting to i t . I don't think Peres would be 
capable of reacting to i t . We are in the situation of a 
war in Israel. I think this i s one of the serious 
mistakes the American government i s making, backing Peres 
over Shamir. 
I'm not yet f u l l y convinced that the Soviet-American 
rapproachment or reduction of tension goes beyond Europe. 
For instance, the classic traditional Russian demand for 
access to the Persian Gulf i s s t i l l there. The tensions 
in the southern reaches of Russia has reminded me very 
much of the f i r s t dispute discussed at the Security 
Council which was over Azerbaijan. I think i t is 
premature to rush to conclusions that because far 
reaching events are happening in Europe that they, 
therefore, extend to other parts of the world. It is by 
no means clear that i t does. I have often wondered that 
for the two big powers that p r i o r i t y should be given to 
the Middle East or the Far East. These are two danger 
spots. I'm s t i l l not sure that they have made up their 
minds and there are certain signs that they may be given 
p r i o r i t y to the Far East. There was a Gorbachev-Korea 
meeting in the United States last week. That may be a 
sign that they feel that the Far East i s more dangerous 
than the Middle East. We must not forget that the Soviet 
Union i s i t s e l f a Middle East power. Its access may be 
d i f f i c u l t but, i t i s never the less there. It has more 
direct interest in the Middle East than the United States 
has. It has a big frontier in the Muslim world. So, I 
wouldn't rush to any conclusions, yet. Anything that 
reduces international tension makes i t possible to 
examine issues much more impartially without emotion and 
must be on the whole generally beneficial. 
JK: I appreciate your taking this entire day to go through 
this. We have covered a lot of territory and i t has been 
extremely helpful. I appreciate your cooperation. 
Rosenne: Thanks for coming down. 
JK: Thank you. 
97 
Alon, Yigael 
Attlee, Clement 
Azcarate, Pablo da 
Begin, Menachem 
Ben-Gurion, David 
Bernadotte, Count Folke 
Bevin, Ernest 
Bunche, Ralph 
Dean, Arthur 
Dulles, John Foster 
Eban, Abba 
Eisenhower, Dwight 
Elath, Eliahu 
Eytan, Walter 
Farouk, King 
Finkelstein, Lawrence 
Gorbachev, Michael 
Greenspan, Hank 
Gromyko, Andrei 
Hammarskjold, Dag 
Hitler, Adolf 
Husseini, Hajj Amin e l 
INDEX OF NAMES 
56 
6 
64 
33, 89, 94 
16-20, 23, 33, 
87 
2, 29, 31, 46-
5-8, 25 
2, 30-32, 37, 
58, 61, 64, 67 
27, 80, 81, 88 
79, 80 
28, 29, 56, 77 
79 
28 
55, 56, 64, 69 
55 
30 
100 
36 
99 
64, 73, 78-81, 
11, 29 
11 
98 
Jarring, Gunnar 48 
Jefferson, Thomas 20 
Jessup, Philip 27, 99 
Lacks, Manfred 96 
Lie, Trygve 37, 67 
Manuelski 99 
Marston, Geoffrey 83 
Meir, Golda 80, 81 
Mohn, Paul 50 
Naguib 85 
Nasser, Gamal Abdel 38, 80-82, 84-86 
Peres, Shimon 86, 99 
Rabin, Yitzhak 56 
Rafael, Gideon 28 
Riley, William 42, 50, 55, 56, 64 
Robinson, Jacob 53, 77 
Roosevelt, Theodore 9, 93 
Ruessen 39 
Rusk, Dean 27 
Sadat, Anwar 92, 94 
Saoud, King Ibnn 9 
Selim, Mongi 96 
Shamir, Yitzhak 16, 33, 99 
Shareen, Colonel 55 
Sharett, Moshe 26, 28, 58, 63, 70 
Shilouh 56, 57 
. If-*" 
Silver, Rabbi Abba H i l l e l 27 
Stavrapoulos, Constantine 64 
Truman, Harry 27, 43 
U Thant 96 
Vigier, Henri 50, 55, 64, 68 
Waldheim, Kurt 97 
Walters, Barbara 93 
Weizman, Chaim 17, 18 
Yadin, Yigael 56, 59, 70 
100 
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' mu*,,.J? /MCAIL /TTMO* CtctHikM /WtT^M^, tftuu, 
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(Interview? 
(Interviewer) YJ (Date) 
(For the Institution of Social 
and Policy Studies) 
(Date)