UNITED NATIONS: The Security Council began its first session of the new year with an impassioned demand that it pay more attention to the Middle East. The preoccupation with Afghanistan threatens to make the Israeli-Palestinian dispute a mere ”footnote” in deliberations here, said Syrian Ambassador Mikhail Wehbe.

But if half a century of diplomatic history is any guide, the fears of the Arab bloc’s representative on the council would seem misplaced. If there is anything that can be confidently predicted about the United Nations in 2002, diplomats say, it is that it will once again devote an extraordinary amount of time, money, documents and oratory to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Already, with a raging controversy over clandestine arms shipments to the Palestinians and continuing gun battles, there are renewed calls for UN invention. But after hundreds of conferences and resolutions on the Middle East - far more than on any other regional dispute - the United Nations has had frustratingly little to show for its efforts, many officials here concede.

Most frustrated of all are the Israelis and Palestinians. Israel says a majority of member states remain hostile to the very premise of a Jewish state. And the Palestinians complain that despite their many roll call victories here, the United Nations has not brought them closer to their goal of an independent state. In its last official act of 2001, the General Assembly condemned Israeli occupation of territory in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and called for an international monitoring mechanism to oversee a cease-fire and Israeli withdrawal.

For the Palestinians, who acknowledge that last month’s resolution moved them no closer to independence, Israel’s isolation is precisely the point. “The fact that we don’t have that much to show for it doesn’t make it any less important,” said Nasser Kidwa, the Palestinian representative here. “It is important for us to feel that we are not alone.”

When it reconvenes this week, the General Assembly is certain to pick up the Palestinian cudgel again. In the Security Council, Syria can count on a solid majority of the 15 members to support its insistence on immediate Middle East debates and briefings by UN envoys. And Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to return to the region for more hands-on diplomacy, as he has every year.

Despite her respect for Kidwa, Nancy Soderberg, former US representative to the United Nations, like many US foreign policy experts, contends that the Palestinian representative’s victories here have been pyrrhic, creating an illusion of progress toward statehood but undermining that cause by alienating the United States and reinforcing Israeli fears.

“The Palestinian attempt to use the Security Council and the General Assembly to score points for their political victimhood doesn’t work,” Soderberg said. “They have been doing it for 40 years, and they will probably keep doing it, but it hasn’t worked yet.”

The Palestinians have succeeded in keeping their cause at the forefront of the UN agenda. Their legal status here has improved to the point where, “We have everything but the vote,” said Kidwa, who as the “permanent observer from Palestine” enjoys full speaking rights in the General Assembly and other UN forums.

Since the United Nations was founded, the Security Council has passed more than 250 resolutions dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. And the General Assembly’s tally is approaching 1,000. So voluminous is the record of debates, hearings, reports and declarations on the issue that the UN has an entire computerized information system - known as UNISPAL - devoted exclusively to “the question of Palestine.”

The records include probes of alleged Israeli human rights violations, transcripts of UN-sponsored Palestinian solidarity meetings and reports from UN peacekeeping posts in the Golan Heights and - in a holdover from the last days of the British mandate - the eastern sector fo Al Quds overlook known in the Bible as the Hill of Evil Counsel.

And there are annual international funding drives for what has become the largest single agency in the UN system: the half-century-old Relief and Works Administration, whose 22,000 employees run Palestinian refugee settlements in the West Bank, Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

Both sides, moreover, accept in principle that the United Nations is the ultimate adjudicator of the dispute. Israel and Palestinians cite the same Security Council resolutions - 242, adopted in 1967, and 338, passed six years later - as the legal basis for a negotiated settlement, echoing the stated position of the United States and the world body.

In New York, where Israeli diplomats have long been a part of local political life, support for Israel is broad and deep. Former Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani made four trips to Israel while in office. For a Palestinian official, New York seems less welcoming. Kidwa admits that he barely knows the rest of the United States, noting that until 1994 he was barred by the State Department from travelling more than 25 miles from UN headquarters. In elite US society, Kidwa said, he is a nonentity at best, a suspected “terrorist” at worse. “If we were in Washington, he wouldn’t give me the time of day,” he said, referring to his Israeli counterpart. “But here he has to chase me.” —Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times.