Upon Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004, he ordered all UN institutions to observe a day of mourning and said he would “be missed”. Four months later, after visiting Israel to attend the dedication of the new Yad Vashem museum, he went to Ramallah to lay a wreath on Arafat’s grave.
Perhaps the most unforgivable, for Israelis, of Mr Annan’s actions was the allegation that he had tried to hide from Israel the reports from a UN observation post that had witnessed how Hezbollah attacked an IDF vehicle on the Israel-Lebanon border in 2000, killing three soldiers and snatching their bodies.
But the tributes from Israel’s leadership this weekend reflected none of this tension. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised Mr Annan “as an accomplished man in the international arena and as someone who fought antisemitism and Holocaust denial.”
The Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem described him as “a pillar of multilateral diplomacy, Nobel Prize laureate and statesman who devoted his life to achieving world peace, reducing poverty and fighting child mortality.”
It added: “Annan opposed attempts to delegitimise Israel, fought strongly against Holocaust denial and supported the 2006 UN initiative for Holocaust Memorial Day.”
It is easy for any senior diplomat critical of Israel to win the “hostile” label and be frozen out of key engagements.
The latest example is Federica Mogherini, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs, whose strident attempts to keep the Iran deal alive and prevent any EU members from following the United States in moving their embassies to Jerusalem led to Mr Netanyahu refusing to meet her on a planned visit to Israel, leading to the visit’s cancellation.
But even when his statements angered Israeli leaders, Mr Annan was never labelled as hostile — for a number of reasons.
First, he was the consummate diplomat and knew how and when to charm his Israeli counterparts. Second, even when he was criticising Israel, he never forgot to make it clear that Israel had a right to defend itself.
As he said in a speech in 2002: “No matter what price they are forced to pay, Israelis will not abandon the State they have built. Nor indeed, I venture to affirm, would the United Nations ever allow one of its Member States to be destroyed by external force.
“It was to prevent such things from happening that the United Nations was founded.”
One of Mr Annan’s attributes was that he was aware of the limitations of the United Nations. He believed that the major decisions on war and peace would always be made by the belligerent sides and the major powers.
He was also capable of convincing his Israeli and Jewish counterparts of his sincerity when he spoke out about genocide and the world’s duty to remember the Holocaust. It helped, of course, that he was married to the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat widely credited with saving tens of thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust.
“Annan’s critics in Israel should remember that when the Second Lebanon War began, he immediately blamed Hezbollah,” said Dr Chen Kercher, an Israeli historian who has researched Israel’s relations with the UN.
“Only later, when hundreds of Lebanese civilians had been killed, did he blame Israel. He would balance a support for Israel’s right to defend itself with the responsibility to protect civilian lives.”
