The Israel Scapegoat Returns

The United Nations General Assembly is not known its for displays of ludic wit, but one anecdote stands out as an exception to the dire earnestness of the chamber's proceedings. In 1961, Adlai Stevenson, then US ambassador to the UN, was forced to give a robotic and deeply uncomfortable comment on the recent Bay of Pigs invasion, which at the time included a denial that the Kennedy administration had had anything to do with it. Addressing the First Committee of the General Assembly, Stevenson lapsed into a rare malapropism tied to Communism's intolerance of religion: "Fidel Castro has..." he said, turning a page in his prepared statement, "circumcised the freedoms of the Catholics of Cuba." Gideon Rafael, the Israeli delegate who had spent the better part of this speech doodling in his notepad out of boredom, grew suddenly alive to the moment. Turning to his Irish counterpart, the great historian and statesman Conor Cruise O'Brien, Rafael announced: "I always knew that we should be blamed for this, sooner or later."