And guard thyselves

The Jewish state must never place its security in the hands of others

By ISRAEL KASNETT
UN Soldier Quneitra border (photo credit: Reuters)
UN Soldier Quneitra border
(photo credit: Reuters)
Imagine, for a moment, a world in which Israel heeded the international community’s advice and allowed an international peacekeeping force to maintain a security presence in lieu of the IDF, say, in the Jordan Valley. Judging by the last week’s events alone, it would be fairly short-sighted and perhaps even suicidal for Israel to take such a step. This paper reported the flight of unarmed Austrian United Nations peacekeeping troops from Syria and UN Secretary General Ban Ki moon’s subsequent frantic search for their replacements.
What good is a peacekeeping force if it runs at the slightest hint of danger? The answer, of course, is that it is not useful at all, and a look back at years past demonstrates how inept and unreliable the UN has been at peacekeeping.
In 2005, the European Union Border Assistance Mission at the Rafah Crossing Point (EUBAM Rafah) was deployed to monitor the Rafah border terminal and serve as a liaison between the Palestinian, Israeli and Egyptian authorities. But in 2007, following the Hamas takeover of Gaza, the EUBAM force fled back to Israel.
Another famous case in point occurred in 1967 when the Egyptian government ordered the UN Emergency Force out of Sinai. Shockingly, the UN acquiesced without even a pause, and failed to comply with its own charter, which calls for a referral to the Security Council in the event that there are changes on the ground. Chapter seven of the UN Charter is clearly labeled: “Action with respect to threats to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of aggression.”
And yet, then-secretary-general U Thant completely ignored the purpose of the UN’s mission in Sinai, failed to adhere to the charter’s call for action and, by evacuating the Sinai, according to some experts, instead forced Egypt’s President Gamel Abdel Nasser to follow through on his threats to attack Israel.
On Israel’s northeastern front, the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) was established in May 1974 by Security Council Resolution 350, following the agreed disengagement of Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights.
Since then, UNDOF has remained in the area to maintain the cease-fire between the Israeli and Syrian forces and to supervise the implementation of the disengagement agreement.
The UNDOF mandate is clearly stated on its website: • Maintain the cease-fire between Israel and Syria; • Supervise the disengagement of Israeli and Syrian forces; and • Supervise the areas of separation and limitation, as provided in the May 1974 Agreement on Disengagement.
UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Hak has stressed that UNDOF is “very important for maintaining the peace in the region.”
While this sounds reassuring, Hak’s words are meaningless. It was Hafez Assad and now his son Bashar who have, until now, maintained quiet on Syria’s border with Israel – not the UN.
A review of the mandate of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) demonstrates how ineffective the UN is at doing anything other than monitoring. Israel continues to hold UNIFIL complicit, to some measure, in the 2006 Hezbollah cross-border attack during which nine Israeli soldiers were killed and two abducted.
The UN actually impeded Israel’s investigation of the abduction by withholding crucial video footage.
Former Israeli diplomat Itamar Rabinovich has been quoted as saying, “UNIFIL, I’m afraid, is a joke.
They’ve been there for 26 years and since then, there have been so many skirmishes [along the border].”
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert, in an interview with The Times of London, said, “We didn’t very much like UNIFIL, which was very useless and very helpless. Look what happened. Did you hear of any particular efforts of the United Nations UNIFIL force in the south of Lebanon to prevent the attacks against Israel in the first place? So they were not useful, and that is why we were unhappy with them.”
THE MIDDLE East is not the only region in which the UN has failed to prove its effectiveness. UN peacekeeping forces would undergo one of their greatest tests in the 1990s in the powder keg of the Balkan peninsula, specifically in a forgotten little nation called Bosnia.
Caught in a war between Croatia and Serbia, Bosnia became a strategic location and, eventually, the site of a brutal massacre. The UN’s ridiculous operating procedure did not allow it to intervene in any constructive way – even though a massacre was taking place under its very nose in Srebrenica where thousands of civilians had gathered under the mistaken assumption that the UN troops were there to protect them.
The UN presence in Bosnia became one massive debacle. Bogged down by its own pointless mandate and heavy bureaucracy, the UN force was unable to use force where force was necessary. The UN force in Bosnia, was, for all intents and purposes, useless.
Bosnian civilians were not the only innocent victims of the UN’s useless presence. Rwanda, Darfur, Sierra Leone and East Congo were all places in which innocent men, women and children were raped and slaughtered while UN peacekeeping forces watched silently.
Since these horrific civil wars, it has become obvious that the UN is inherently incapable of protecting civilian populations from any level of threat. While today the UN serves, in some ways, as a useful diplomatic forum, especially for Israel – where any nation can voice its opinion and address both friendly and hostile nations directly – the UN has little if any military influence or use.
The bottom line is that Israel can never leave its security in the hands of other nations or international bodies since history has shown, and Syria today demonstrates, that the world is largely incapable of saving innocent people from massacre. And since the birth of the Jewish state, the world’s complacency and indifference to the death of Jews has become even more clear.
Israel must be responsible for its own security. When we say never again, we mean never again. ■