13 October, 2024
The IDF’s current attacks on UNIFIL positions in southern Lebanon should come as no surprise. It is evidence of Israel’s long standing hostility to the UN itself.
The ‘accidental’ attacks on UNIFIL are not just another instance of this particular Israeli government’s determination to bludgeon anyone in the way of its blind determination to seek vengeance for the Hamas atrocities of 7 October 2023 and year-long missile attacks by Hezbollah from Lebanon (forget the hostages and ‘the day after’), and in consequence invite the wrath of the 50 countries that supply it with troops. It is further evidence of the hostility of Israel to the UN itself. This goes back at least to the passing of UN General Assembly resolution 3379 in 1975, which contained the statement that ‘Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination’. It was no accident that when, four years later, the US-brokered peace treaty was signed between Israel and Egypt, what emerged in 1981 as a precaution to help it stick was not a UN peacekeeping force in Sinai (seized by Israel from Egypt in 1967 and returned under this agreement) but one with no connection to the UN at all. It was instead a ‘Multinational Force and Observers’, the single largest contingent in which was – and remains to this day – an American one. This, incidentally, will almost certainly be the model for any international peacekeeping force on the Israel-Lebanon border agreed in any future settlement. Even Benjamin Netanyahu is unlikely to countenance IDF attacks on a force containing a large US contingent.
Postscript. Since I posted this, The Guardian‘s excellent diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, has provided this very comprehensive piece on the UN’s dire relations with Israel.