The Profound Significance of Gross Failure of UNIFIL

Dr.Aaron Lerner
IMRA
Weekly Commentary
08 July'10

The facts are simple:

#1. In gross violation of UN Resolution 1701 Hezbollah has effectively turned over 100 villages in South Lebanon into military bases.

#2. UNIFIL declines to act on intelligence information provided by Israel regarding the locations of illegal weapons caches in South Lebanon.

#3 Instead of doing its job and finding the weapons caches, UNIFIL announces that they haven’t discovered any solid evidence of Hezbollah violations.

#4. To add insult to injury, the only violations UNIFIL are certain of are the Israeli over flights that are part of Israel’s activities to monitor the illegal Hezbollah operations that UNIFIL so studiously ignores.

Let’s make this clear: while the wording of UNIFIL’s mandate was far from ideal, UNIFIL had enough leeway in the wording of its mandate to go after the weapons caches if it indeed wanted to. But UNIFIL didn’t.

Again. The problem isn’t wording. If UNIFIL doesn’t want to find the weapons caches then no matter how their mandate is delineated on paper, they won’t find the weapons.

This development has profound ramifications.

It illustrates that third party monitors can’t be relied upon to provide accurate reports regarding Arab violations.

Here is the puzzler: One would think that all the people and groups promoting Arab-Israeli peace agreements that rely on various third party monitoring schemes would be among the first to be pushing UNIFIL to do its job. But they aren’t. Instead these advocates of third party monitors typically ignore UNIFIL’s failure altogether.

Now if the purpose of the exercise is to have a photo op signing ceremony then it really doesn’t matter that, based on the UNIFIL experience, third party monitors cannot be relied upon.

But if the idea is a durable peace, the ramifications of UNIFIL’s failure must not and cannot be ignored.

After all, the development, promotion and ultimate implementation of a Palestinian-Israeli agreement is not an intellectual exercise. . It’s a project with potentially life and death consequences.

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