Condemnation

I used to listen to Rex Murphy on CBC Radio when I was in high school. I believe his show was called "Cross-Country Check-Up" and it was always right on. So is his article in the National Post about the flotilla affair (thanks to Jesse for the link - here is to Cummer Valley Middle School reunions!):

But torpid as is its nature, and comatose as are its eternal deliberations, on one subject, and toward one state, the United Nations acquires a strange and uniquely transformative power. Bring Israel under its gaze and the diplomatic sloths at UN headquarters morph into the swiftest of gazelles. From lotus-eaters to adrenalin junkies in the twinkling of an eye. Quite amazing, really.

So naturally when the debacle over the so-called “freedom flotilla” — news media should be wary of letting activists choose the names of things — roared into the headlines, the UN reacted at the diplomatic equivalent of the speed of light. The Security Council issued its “condemnation,” and in a wonderful reversal of cause and effect also called for an investigation into what it had “condemned.” And the cruellest joke on the planet, what the UN with unbounded irony refers to as its Human Rights Council, issued, as unfailingly in every previous international incident involving Israel it has, a condemnation as well.

UNIFIL Hunting Israeli Spies in Southern Lebanon?

BY AMOS

Relatively little has been reported in the Israeli media about the Israeli espionage network allegedly discovered in Lebanon over this past month. The Lebanese have announced several arrests of various figures, including some senior former officers. Now, in a strange episode, the Spanish commander of the UNIFIL forces in Lebanon seems to have inadvertently revealed that Spanish units participated in the hunt in southern Lebanon (Ha'aretz, ABC.es, Ha'aretz English). If this is true, Israel should take immediate measures. Helping the Lebanese security forces hunt down Israeli spies is not part of UNIFIL's mandate. The fallout could be very serious and it certainly undermines future UNIFIL missions. 

Dutch May Boycott Durban II

Photo Credit: Buitenlandse Zaken (Dutch Foreign Ministry)

Earlier today, Maxime Verhagen, Foreign Minister of the Netherlands, threatened that his country would not participate in the planned UN Anti-Racism Conference, which is to take place in Geneva in April 2009. 

Verhagen said that 

Nederland zal er niet aan meewerken dat deze top, net zoals de vorige, ontaard in een antisemitische hetze (Foreign Affairs press release).

The Netherlands will not take part if this conference, like the previous one, turns into antisemitic agitation [my rough translation - Dutch speakers, please correct mistakes!]

He objected to a draft that accused Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians. The minister has also opposed moves by Islamic member states to issue a declaration against "blasphemy" at the conference, and he has initiated a UN declaration calling for a decriminalization of homosexuality. 

A Dutch boycott of "Durban II" would be a significant blow to the conference and may result in boycotts by other European nations. At a talk about the conference that I attended recently, one audience member, who had recently interviewed Verhagen, expressed skepticism about the likelihood of the Dutch delegation walking out of the conference. Hillel Neuer of UN Watch, on the other hand, suggested that it was a real possibility. 

Richard Falk on Gaza

Yesterday's statement by Richard Falk, the UN "Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" and a former Princeton professor,  on the situation in Gaza:

Last week, Karen AbyZayd, who heads the UN relief effort in Gaza, offered first-hand confirmation of the desperate urgency and unacceptable conditions facing the civilian population of Gaza. Although many leaders have commented on the cruelty and unlawfulness of the Gaza blockade imposed by Israel, such a flurry of denunciations by normally cautious UN officials has not occurred on a global level since the heyday of South African apartheid. 

And still Israel maintains its Gaza siege in its full fury, allowing only barely enough food and fuel to enter to stave off mass famine and disease. Such a policy of collective punishment, initiated by Israel to punish Gazans for political developments within the Gaza strip, constitutes a continuing flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

This man appears to be stuck in the same dream he was dreaming when he predicted that the Iranian revolution would provide a "humane model of governance" for the Third World. Who exactly are these "cautious UN officials" to which Falk refers? Are they the same officials who have made careers out of attacking Israel and defending some of the world's vilest dictatorships simply because they are "anti-Western"? 

As for the Gaza siege, the Hamas government has a very simple solution at its disposal: stop the rocket attacks and recognize Israel.

Durban II

Hillel Neuer (l) of Geneva-based UN Watch and Aaron Jacob of AJC (r)  in New York, December 2008

The last UN Conference against Racism in Durban, held in late August 2001, quickly turned into a disgraceful spectacle of Israel-bashing and downright antisemitism. Anyone interested in a personal, though occasionally melodramatic account, of the conference, should check out the "Durban Diaries," by a member of the European Union of Jewish Students who attended it as part of a large delegation of the NGO. A follow-up to the Durban conference, which was actually the third UN Conference against Racism, will be held at the end of April 2009. 

On Monday, December 8, Hillel Neuer of the Geneva-based NGO UN Watch briefed a small audience of AJC Access members in New York on what happened at Durban I and what might happen at Durban II. It does not look good.

The first Durban conference consisted of the actual governmental conference attended by UN member states, an NGO forum, and a series of street demonstration in the South African city. It was at the NGO forum and street demonstrations where some of the worst excesses of the "anti-racism" conference took place. But even the governmental conference involved a protracted fight by the US, Israel, and some of the European countries, against a declaration that specifically accused Israel of apartheid, crimes against humanity, and genocide, without mentioning any other states. This particular part of the declaration had been formulated at the Asian regional conference in February 2001.

At the 2007 preparatory conference for Durban II, Libya was chosen to chair the 2009 conference against racism. The 19 vice chairs chosen included Cuba and Iran. Worse, the current draft declaration includes a verbatim copy of the 2001 Tehran wording. 

Neuer outlined 3 categories of problematic language in the declaration proposals so far - a longer review of the document has been published in a report titled "Shattering the Red Lines." UN Watch has expressed concern in

1. specifically anti-Israel language, including the charge that the Law of Return is inherently racist
   
2. broadly anti-Western material
   
3. a campaign by the Islamic states  to import anti-blasphemy provisions and legitimize them in international law under the notion of “defamation of religion”
   

The latest draft proposals hammered out at the preparatory conference, by no means final, nevertheless testify to the direction in which Durban II might be headed.

So far, only Canada has announced that it is not attending the conference. Israel will be making a decision soon, and the U.S. will do so after the inaugaration of Barack Obama as President. Meanwhile, the Europeans have pledged to maintain certain red lines that, if crossed by the conference, will compel them to walk out of the process. However, it remains to be seen whether they will act on this. 

I hope to post more details later.

Behind the UNIFIL Attack

(Click to enlarge. Go to the link for even more detail. Map: Perry-Castaneda)

Today, what appears to have been a suicide car bombing killed 3 Spanish and 3 Colombian UNIFIL soldiers traveling in an armored troop carrier, somewhere between the towns of Marj 'Ayoun and Khiyam (circled in blue on the modified map above). The area of the attack is a few kilometers north of the Israeli town of Metulla, and just west of the Hazbani River. Two other Spanish peacekeepers were injured.

In the wake of the katyusha attack that hit Qiryat Shmonah on June 17, Spanish UNIFIL officers in particular assured the Israelis that they would do their utmost to prevent further attacks. Around the same time, rumors circulated in the press to the effect that the Italians had reached some kind of deal with Syria that would protect their UNIFIL soldiers from being hurt in attacks. I remember wondering whether the Spaniards might not regret their energetic efforts to carry out the mandate of the UN force in Lebanon. I do not think that it is an accident that Spanish troops were targeted in today's bombing, which has so far claimed the lives of 5 soldiers.

To borrow a phrase from Jeha, Syria still has enough "plausible deniability" to make the useful idiots as well as the malicious cast doubt on that government's involvement. Others, however, will probably agree that Syria has decided to play its third card. After the failure of the Fath al-Islam uprising attempt in northern Lebanon, Syria has decided to cause trouble in the south - most likely through Palestinian proxies rather than Hizbullah, which went as far as to condemn the attack (Ha'aretz) - perhaps an indication of the declining approval for explicitly pro-Syrian actions inside Lebanon. The country's rallying behind the Lebanese army throughout the ongoing campaign at Nahr el-Bared seems to have constrained the flexibility of Hizbullah as well as Aoun's FPM.

I thought it was interesting also to see the response to this latest bombing. Israel may yet be provoked into a response against Hizbullah or Syrian-backed Palestinian groups in the south, but right now, it is hoping to use these provocations to bolster the UNIFIL mandate.

Southern Lebanon has posed a security challenge to Israel since the country's independence; indeed, attacks on Jewish settlements in the Galilee go back three decades earlier still ("Tel Hai," English, Hebrew). Over the past 60 years, Israel's strategic aims in the northern Galilee and southern Lebanon have been mostly uniform - but one can isolate two distinct strands. Early Zionist leaders and some Israeli policy-makers saw control of Lebanon's south as necessary (or at least desirable) in order to assure access to water (1). However, the far more important determining factor since the 1960s has been security (2). To counter the threats posed by irregulars operating in southern Lebanon, Israel has resorted to a variety of defensive and offensive measures. UNIFIL, too, has played a small role in this strategy before. Given last summer's failure in Lebanon, Israel now seems more willing than ever before to give UNIFIL a bigger share in countering the threats (to Israel as well as Lebanese security) emanating from Lebanon's south.

UNESCO Ambiguates on Old City Dig

UNESCO's HQ in Paris

The report of UNESCO's investigation of Israeli excavations in the Old City of Jerusalem was published Wednesday. I can't find the full text on UNESCO's website. Only a press release. In any case, the gist of the matter seems clear. First of all, the report clears the Israelis of the accusation that their work is in any way deleterious to the Muslim holy site. But second, it criticizes the Israeli's for not communicating with the Waqf, the Jordanians, etc., in advance of the project. it would be interesting to see the full text of the report in order to gauge the relative emphasis placed on these two points.

I was somewhat dismayed to read a BBC story in which the now officially discredited accusations of some Muslim leaders were presented as banal -- as potentially truthful. As the BBC puts it,"Palestinian critics and Muslim figures internationally say the work could damage the mosque foundations." Thanks to the report summarized in this very BBC story, we now know this not to be the case.

The other issue, namely, Israel's prerogative in undertaking activities of this nature in land occupied in 1967, is much more complicated. According to Haaretz, Israeli diplomats fear that coordination with the Waqf and Jordanians would be tantamount to renouncing Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount. For my part, I don't understand why the excavations should be stopped immediately if they are deemed harmless. UNESCO says that the Israelis have seen enough, but that is almost never the case in archaeology. Still, I can imagine that, perhaps, in hindsight, a more multilateral approach might have been taken to this sensitive problem.

Dumb UNIFIL, Clever Gorillas

Peekabooooo...

There was an interesting report on Israel's Channel 2 Television News last night. In the report, an embedded Israeli journalist accompanied an IDF reconnaissance unit across the border into Lebanon. The troops did not encounter any resistance or Hizbullah fighters. Their mission was to destroy an elaborate Hizbullah tunnel that had been located earlier. Before mining the tunnel and blowing it up, the troops gave the reporter a tour. The footage I saw showed a very sophisticated tunnel with a ventilation system, concrete-lined walls, provisions, explosives and ammunition. The commander of the unit remarked, with more than a hint of sarcasm, that is was "amazing what can be achieved in six years" (the time that has passed since the Israeli withdrawal). The reporter followed the soldiers, who were under pressure to finish their mission soon because of the fear of mines or an attack by Hizbullah, through the tunnel and to another exit. As they emerged from the other exit, the cameraman panned the surrounding area. Looming no more than 100 metres behind the tunnel exit was a tall, white UNIFIL observation post.

Can one blame Israelis for being suspicious of UNIFIL and for not trusting the European troops that are now being deployed in Lebanon? This was the same force that stood idly by and looked on as Hizbullah prepared to kidnap IDF soldiers in 2000 and then ambushed them. As of now, there is no reason to believe that the Franco-Italian led force will be any more effective. They don't even have clearly defined goals and it is clear that the French and Italian leaders lack the political will to involve their forces in more dangerous missions that might bring them into confrontation with Hizbullah.