A Geneva registrar confirms every available formulation of concern has now been used at least once, and future statements will be reissued by serial number with the old date crossed out in biro.
A Geneva registry has declared the world's supply of diplomatic phrasing formally exhausted following Israel's plan to hand policing of West Bank settlers from the military to the police. All future statements of concern will be reissued by serial number with the old date crossed out. Officials describe the arrangement as an efficiency saving.
The International Registry of Diplomatic Phraseology, a small office above a shuttered watch shop in Geneva, announced on Friday that the global stock of available formulations for expressing concern about the occupied West Bank has been fully depleted, and that all future statements will be reissued from the archive under serial number, with the previous date struck through by hand.
The declaration of what the Registry calls "lexical bankruptcy" follows the news that Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, has ordered the military to draw up plans to hand responsibility for policing Israeli settlers over to the police. Palestine's vice-president described the plan as a "flagrant violation of international law" and a step towards annexation, a phrase the Registry has now catalogued as Formulation 3, first deployed in the spring of 1980 and in continuous service since.
"We held out as long as we could," said Dr Ingrid Marchetti-Vos, the Registry's Chief Registrar, standing in a corridor lined with grey box files. "For decades we managed on rotation. Grave concern, deep concern, profound concern, serious concern. We eked out an extra eleven years by introducing the word 'developments'. But there is nothing left. Someone in a foreign ministry rang on Tuesday and asked whether we had anything stronger than 'deeply troubling', and I had to tell him the truth: no. There is not. There never was."
The sequel problem
Registry staff describe the current crisis as a straightforward instalment in a long-running franchise: the same premise, the same cast in slightly different jackets, the same third act, and a budget that goes entirely on hardware. Three Palestinian families besieged in their homes; soldiers arriving and removing the families rather than the militants; a wedding hall stormed by Israeli forces on camera; and then the administrative flourish, the transfer of a responsibility from one arm of the state to another arm of the same state, which the Registry files under its most heavily worn heading of all: Reorganisation In Lieu Of Outcome.
"The plot device this season is the sideways move," said Marchetti-Vos. "A power is picked up from the military desk, carried a short distance, and set down on the police desk. Nothing is added. Nothing is taken away. But the paperwork changes colour, and colour is what we are here to describe."
"We have retired the word 'unprecedented'. It was audited last year and found to have been applied to the same events forty times."
Under the new arrangement, ministries wishing to react will simply telephone Geneva and request a number. Formulation 7, "urges all parties to exercise restraint", remains the most requested, and has been reissued so frequently that the master copy is now held together with archival tape. Formulation 12, "a two-state solution remains the only viable path", is described in the Registry's internal notes as "structurally sound but no longer load-bearing".
Reaction, or Formulation 14
Response to the Registry's announcement has been swift and entirely familiar. A spokesman for the Standing Committee on Deep Concern, an intergovernmental body founded in the 1970s and never once dissolved, welcomed the move as an efficiency saving.
"Frankly it is a relief," said committee secretary Bertrand Oyelaran, in a stairwell in Brussels. "We were spending most of Thursday drafting. Now the drafting is done. We have already ordered the rubber stamps. There is one for concern, one for grave concern, and one, at some expense, for the mechanism whereby we announce that a mechanism will be established."
Not everyone is content. A working group of speechwriters has protested that the Registry's decision eliminates the profession's last remaining creative outlet, namely the placement of the word "unacceptable". And the Registry has faced criticism from those who note that the exhaustion of language has not, historically, been the binding constraint on anything.
"People keep telling me the vocabulary was never the problem," said Marchetti-Vos. "I am aware. I have a filing system that proves it. Cabinet A holds every statement issued since 1967. Cabinet B holds every consequence that followed from them. Cabinet B is used to store the kettle."
Even the United States ambassador's public criticism of an extreme group of settlers seizing Palestinian homes, reported this week, has been logged by the Registry as a variant of Formulation 9, "a fringe element that does not represent", which the archive shows has now been used about the same fringe element for so long that the fringe has developed a planning department.
Closing credits
The Registry's final act before dormancy will be the publication of a bound anthology, priced at whatever the market will bear, titled Statements Issued. It runs to several thousand pages. There is no index of results, because the compilers could not identify a category to put in it.
Marchetti-Vos will lock the office on Monday and go to her sister's in Lausanne. The phones will be left connected, she says, because ministries will ring regardless, and someone ought to be there to read out the numbers.
History, as ever, declines to take notes.
