UNITED NATIONS: Like a drumbeat, the UN Security Council has adopted no less than 200 resolutions on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the last 50 years, many of them ignored but others useful as a basis for a peace yet to come.

The statistics are staggering for the 15-member council, whose orders form international law: 243 resolutions since 1948, including some 80 documents setting up, extending or ending key peacekeeping operations in Lebanon, the Golan Heights and the Sinai.

There would have been another 30 resolutions but the United States vetoed them, starting in 1972.

And the General Assembly, which now has 189 members, has passed twice as many resolutions as the Security Council. All are adopted by a simple majority, with no member having veto power as in the council.

Nevertheless, many have not been honoured. And there is little the United Nations or its member states can do, short of sanctions or armed intervention.

In the last few weeks, the Security Council has demanded three times that Israel end its incursions into Palestinian cities and that suicide bombings against Israelis stop.

“Genocide ... brutal, bloody war ... state terrorism,” Arab delegates said of Israel during the council’s many public debates. But the conflict continued.

However, David Scheffer, an international law expert under the Clinton administration, said even violated resolutions were often used as a basis for peace talks by key players.

“If they are continuously ignored or violated, it is almost certain that a resolution of the conflict will be extremely difficult to arrive at,” he said in an interview.

“But those resolutions are foundations for peace, touchstones for negotiations that have to take place,” said Scheffer, now a senior vice president of the United Nations Association, a large US support group for the world body.

“They are also an expression of how the international community views the conflict. At the end of day the parties themselves have to agree, but the international community has to be supportive of what an agreement really says,” he said.

Well before the latest crisis, Israel viewed the United Nations and its members as irredeemably hostile, ignoring deaths of Jews killed and even failing to condemn Iraq for firing missiles at Tel Aviv during the 1990 Gulf War.

In contrast, Arab nations insist that the United Nations, which has adopted a stream of General Assembly resolutions favourable to their cause, must play a key role and that Israel is grabbing territory and putting in settlements to seal it.

1947 PARTITION VOTE: But it wasn’t always that way. The General Assembly, which dominated the United Nations at its inception, voted in November 1947 to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. This led to Israel’s creation a year later.