Rael Jean Isaac

How do we account for the strange embrace between Israel and the United Nations now in progress? For the Israeli government’s welcoming UN forces on the frontier with Lebanon (many from Moslem countries that do not even recognize Israel)?

Clearly it is not Israel’s experience with the UN that explains why Israel should look upon the world organization as helpful to Israel’s vital interests. Anne Bayefsky (New York Sun, Sep. 12) points out the irony that the UN’s founding charter “took root in the calamity of a genocide that brought civilization to the brink of annihilation” and yet the UN has focused for decades on libeling and vilifying the Jewish state as the chief enemy of mankind. Tellingly, the UN’s Commission on Human Rights has devoted 30% of its resolutions to condemning Israel—with nary a word on the likes of China, Syria or Zimbabwe. It is because the world body is unwilling to condemn the murder of Jews that it has been unable to this day to come up with a definition of terrorism.

As for securing the border with Lebanon, Israel already has experience with the 2,000 man UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon – note the revealing word “interim” for a force that took up the job 28 years ago). In September 2004 the UN passed Resolution 1559, primarily directed against the Syrian occupation of Lebanon, which also mandated the disarming of Hezbollah. In practice, UNIFIL paid no attention whatever as Hezbollah continued to amass thousands of missiles literally under its nose.

UNIFIL has vacillated between doing nothing and actively supporting Hezbollah. Lori Lowenthal Marcus (Weekly Standard, September 4) notes that in October 2000, when Hezbollah kidnapped three Israeli soldiers just yards from a UNIFIL post and dragged them across the border, the UN contented itself with videotaping the incident -- and then stonewalled Israel’s efforts to obtain this evidence. When it finally acceded, UN officials said the original decision (to deny the existence of the tapes) was based on their peacekeeping mandate requiring “full impartiality and objectivity,” which meant ensuring “that military and other sensitive information remains in their domain and is not passed to parties to a conflict.”

For the UN that means “except when the information aids Hezbollah.” Marcus points out that in the last war the UN’s “peacekeeping forces” openly published real-time intelligence of obvious usefulness to Hezbollah on the location, equipment and force structure of Israeli troops in Lebanon – while offering not a single item of intelligence regarding Hezbollah forces.

Yet Israel’s infatuation with the UN is such that during the war Olmert announced that Israel was fighting to implement Security Council Resolution 1559. As Caroline Glick points out (Jerusalem Post, September 7), this was not only false–Israel was fighting to secure the release of its hostages and to dismantle Hezbollah, not on behalf of the UN-- but in saying this was its aim Israel gave undeserved legitimacy and power to the UN in adjudicating the war, helping to pave the way for Resolution 1701, which vastly upgraded the UN’s position while securing none of Israel’s real goals.

So what accounts for the current “danse macabre” between the UN and the Israeli government? Two things. The first is the desperate need of the Kadima government to make it appear that something positive emerged from the war’s debacle. The UN and the Israeli government cooperate to bamboozle the Israeli public, eager to believe in any “roadmaps” to peace, however empty. And the UN is a willing partner in the dance, including language in Resolution 1701 that permits Israeli leaders to claim they have attained important aims. (Never mind that it should be obvious to anyone save a Shimon Peres– who occupies an alternative universe--that no provisions serving Israel’s interests will actually be implemented). The second reason, more threatening to Israel’s survival, is that many in the Olmert government, like Olmert himself “tired of fighting,” (now that they’ve lost they no longer have to be “tired of winning”) are prepared to “internationalize” the conflict, i.e. to interject UN forces between Israel and its neighbors in the delusory hope this will provide security.

Thus, pointing to the text of Resolution 1701 (which stipulates that the area between Israel’s border and the Litani River be “free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL”) Olmert claims great achievements. In the New York Sun of August 28 Benny Avni reports Olmert boasted to the cabinet that “if someone had said before the war that Lebanon’s army could be deployed on the border and that Mr. Annan could say a multinational force would disarm Hezbollah; and that a weapons embargo would be imposed on Hezbollah – he would have told him he was ‘fantasizing.’”

In fact it is Olmert who is “fantasizing.” Turkey promptly announced that its force in Lebanon would not disarm “the resistance.” France announced that the international naval force designated to patrol Lebanon’s territorial waters would not be authorized to employ force. (Israel lifted its sea blockade anyway, against the recommendation of the IDF command, which saw the blockade as the only way to keep pressure on Lebanon to enforce an arms ban on Hezbollah and to prevent the hostage Israeli soldiers from being transferred to Iran.) Syria announced it would not countenance patrolling of its borders (in other words arms would continue to flow unimpeded to Hezbollah). Kofi Annan declared in Brussels “The disarmament of Hezbollah cannot be done by force. It has to be a political agreement.” Lebanese defense Minister Elias al-Murr declared the Lebanese army would not disarm Hezbollah guerillas. And Hezbollah itself announced that it had no intention of giving up its arms.

Most threatening of all, the UN, and many of the Israeli proponents of territorial retreat, see this as a first step. Italy’s Communist Foreign Minister Massino D’Alema says that if all goes well in Lebanon a “similar positive process could also begin in the Gaza Strip.” Olmert, who at the start of the war openly said it was primarily of importance because Israel’s victory would foster his “convergence” plan was forced to back off after the war. In his inimitable fashion, Shimon Peres said the plan to pull out of parts of the West Bank had “disappeared.”

But it is foolish to think “realignment” is dead. Now that pure unilateral action can no longer be sold to the Israeli public, its proponents see UN forces as the figleaf with which to revive it. Some months of quiet on the Lebanese border (while Hezbollah quietly restocks its arsenal) and there will be Israeli politicians to assure the Israeli public that here is a working formula that should be applied elsewhere. In other words, Resolution 1701 provides the precedent to put UN forces, including those of Moslem countries pledged to eliminate the “Zionist entity,” on the rest of Israel’s borders: Gaza, Judea and Samaria, then perhaps the Golan.

And then? We turn once again to the prophecy made in 1970 by Jochanan Bloch, philosopher and professor in the Department of the History of the Jewish People at Ben Gurion University (AFSI most recently reprinted his essay in the December 2005 Outpost). It is interesting that Bloch’s foreshadowing of disaster came when Israel was at the height of her power, following the Six Day War of 1967, in reaction to what he considered the government’s foolish policy of “territories for peace.”

In “The Trap” Bloch wrote: “The worse our position becomes, the more we will be dependent upon the help of the United States. Yet the more our situation deteriorates, the more the United States will hesitate to come to our assistance, for fear of confrontation with our enemies, and she will demand with greater sternness our retreat, a retreat we have in any case agreed to and signed…What the government does not realize at this point is that we will essentially have to retreat to the borders of 1949. A peace treaty we won’t get; we’ll get guarantees. Here there will be demilitarization; there will sit a UN force; here will be a corridor; there a mixed police force; here shared administration; there an enclave….Our defensive capability will be desperately handicapped in the choking collar of the ‘peace border,’ and the international guard forces…The process of blackmail will begin. If immigration has not yet ceased by itself, they’ll demand that we stop it. And the guaranteeing powers will explain to us that it is evil for us to exist on this outdated Zionist principle that can drag us to war…in two or three years they will say …that the ‘experiment of the Jewish state’ has failed, and that it is necessary to find a reasonable solution for the problem of Israel.”

Bloch believed the proposed “solution” would be liquidation of Israel for “a Palestinian state in which one will ‘guarantee’ the lives of the Jews.” But nine years before Bloch wrote his essay, in 1961, Nahum Goldmann, President of the World Jewish Congress, called for a “solution” in which Israel would be demilitarized and the Arab states themselves (along with the Western and Soviet bloc) would guarantee Israel’s borders. At the time all Israeli political leaders heaped scorn on the maverick Goldmann but today can anyone doubt that sooner or later a political descendant of the Shimon Pereses, Yossi Beilins and Yossi Sarids (if not these gentlemen themselves) will come up with such a ludicrous “solution” – resting Israel’s survival on the “goodwill” of neighboring jihadists?

Given current trends, this is the path down which Israel treads. Only a radical change in Israel’s political, intellectual and moral leadership can prevent such scenarios, unduly gloomy as they may seem now, from becoming reality. What was once self-understood in Israel now requires an intellectual revolution to be recognized once again: The “world community” (a meaningless term in any case) will not save Israel. The EU or even the United States will not save Israel. The Arab states will certainly not safeguard Israel’s citizens. Israel must rely on Israel to ensure Israel’s security.