Peacekeepers to the Rescue

How different the war’s outcome would have been had Israel simply resolved to finish the job. As it was, by merely surviving the conflict, Hezbollah was seen as the heroic victor throughout the Islamic world. They managed to garner the sympathies of numerous international leaders, particularly in Europe. And from the very beginning of the conflict, mainstream news providers made sure Hezbollah won the propaganda war. Coverage throughout the war was overwhelmingly slanted in favor of terrorism. Israel was universally condemned for fighting back—for “killing civilians”; for “invading” Lebanon; for using “disproportionate force”—and on and on it went.

Today, more than a year later, Iran has completely re-supplied and enlarged Hezbollah’s arsenal through Lebanon’s porous border with Syria—and all in plain view of unifil’s “peacekeeping” forces. Even until very recently, UN officials have denied that Hezbollah is being re-armed. On June 14, for example, unifil’s commander in southern Lebanon, Claudio Graziano, told the Jerusalem Post that Hezbollah’s forces were “practically non-existent” in southern Lebanon.

Three days after that interview, right on cue, Hezbollah fired two rockets into the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shemona. To save face, unifil said Hezbollah was not responsible for launching the missiles—as if blaming the attack on another terrorist group in southern Lebanon would somehow ease Israel’s concern.

A week and a half after Graziano’s delusional comments, a UN-appointed team investigating the Lebanon-Syrian border released a 46-page report bluntly stating that Lebanon’s border security was “insufficient to prevent smuggling.” According to the report, there are four different Lebanese security agencies working the border that do not coordinate their strategic operations. The report says there has not been one documented seizure of smuggled arms anywhere near the Lebanese border. Not even one!

Many of Lebanon’s border posts are actually miles behind the border and with no fences or gates to secure the surrounding areas. Smugglers may actually find it easy, the report said, “to conceal not only explosives, light weapons and ammunition, but also assembled and unassembled heavy weaponry, such as missiles and rockets, into the country concealed in compartments and panels of cargo trucks and passenger vehicles.”

And yet, less than two weeks before the report was released, unifil’s commanding officer predicted that within three years, his peacekeeping forces will have completely removed the threat of war between Hezbollah and Israel.

For a UN officer to be completely oblivious to the facts on the ground is one thing, but for Israel‘s leaders to commit the same sin is suicidal.

Buying Time

Despite his strong words of response to Hezbollah’s attack in July 2006, within weeks Ehud Olmert agreed to the cease-fire without retrieving the two kidnapped soldiers. To this day, the soldiers remain in captivity, if they are even alive.

Israel also retreated from its vow to crush Hezbollah’s forces and to uproot them completely from southern Lebanon. Hezbollah did lose 700 to 900 of its terrorists, and much of its remaining force was pushed north of the Litani River, but it was not obliterated. Rather, it is regrouping—concentrating on training new recruits.

Israel also pulled back its forces last year without any assurance that the illegal flow of arms to Hezbollah would stop—notwithstanding UN resolution 1701, which called on the Lebanese government to secure its borders. If anything, the steady stream of weapons has increased.

Besides all that, Hezbollah violated the terms of the cease-fire when it fired those two rockets in June.

The only real “concession” Israel won during the war was the insertion of Lebanese in UN forces in southern Lebanon and the relocation of Hezbollah’s arsenal further north.

In essence, Israel bought itself a little time before the next round of fighting. The sad part of it is, many of Israel’s leaders—even in the military—seem to be content with that. “We stayed in Lebanon for 18 years, with a terrible number of casualties,” Colonel Morom told the Trumpet in July. “And I think three, four or five years after the Israeli withdrawal the Israeli leadership didn’t want to touch Lebanon anymore. We had enough. We suffered enough.” In Morom’s view, pulling out of Lebanon was the right thing to do.

Another high-ranking idf officer, who requested anonymity, agrees with Colonel Morom. Referring to the six years between Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon and the Second Lebanon War, he said, “We had six wonderful years in the north”—obviously not referring to the abduction of three soldiers in 2000 or the barrage of rockets Hezbollah launched on northern Israel in the spring of 2002.

“Israel, the population and the army, do not like a war of attrition,” the officer said, in reference to Israel’s occupation of southern Lebanon. And while that might be true (Israel lost more than 1,500 soldiers during its 18-year occupation), no one likes to lose 158 of its citizens all at once either—during a short 34-day war, for instance.

“Since August of last year until now, the situation is again very good,” the anonymous officer continued, in an effort to put a positive spin on last summer’s debacle. One year on from the Second Lebanon War, these kinds of short-sighted excuses are gaining popular acceptance at the highest levels of Israel’s government and military. Pulling out of Lebanon was the right thing to do—after all, it brought us six years of “peace.” And the results from the Second Lebanon War were actually much better than most commentators give us credit for—after all, we’ve had one year of “peace” since the war.

But no amount of false advertising will hide the fact that Israel’s will to fight and win—not the will of its enemies—has been crushed (Leviticus 26:19). And while Israel’s leaders might not admit to that, or even recognize it, their enemies have picked up on the signal loud and clear.

Sneak Preview

Even without the benefit of Bible prophecy, Israel’s recent strategy of retreat and restraint offers a frightening preview of what lies ahead. The 2005 pullout from Gaza, like Lebanon, was hailed the world over as a bold step toward Palestinian statehood and peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs. Fundamentalist Islam, however, viewed the retreat as yet another victory for its ongoing war against the West and regional goal of eliminating the Jewish state. Palestinians immediately elected a Hamas majority and today, after forcefully removing Fatah from Gaza, an Iranian proxy now lies within 50 miles of Jerusalem.

In response to the emergence of a terrorist state along its southwestern border, Israel’s policy, backed by the United States, has been to ignore the rockets that Hamas fires on the Israeli town of Sderot, and to promise additional territorial concessions. Besides that, with overwhelming support from the international community, Israel has taken extraordinary steps to bolster the beleaguered government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah movement. In July, for example, Israel released 256 Palestinian prisoners, most of them Fatah members, without receiving anything in return.

Israel has also lifted certain restrictions on weapons transfers into the West Bank, even though it was recently burned by its decision to allow guns into Gaza—most of them ended up in the hands of Hamas.

Meanwhile, the international community is pumping hundreds of millions of dollars into Abbas’s government. All this for a man who spent 40 years being mentored by Yasser Arafat and who, since coming to power, has refused to disarm terrorists. Giving terrorists the freedom to roam, as it turns out, may have cost him the Gaza Strip—but it also landed him a huge pile of cash, a storehouse of weapons, the release of 256 prisoners and an expedited timetable for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and the formation of a Palestinian state.

Given the circumstances, it would be difficult to imagine things going much better for Mahmoud Abbas.

Meanwhile, Israel presses forward with its policy of retreat and restraint, undeterred by its previous failures in Lebanon and Gaza. Just keep pulling back to internationally recognized borders. Don‘t escalate a tense situation by retaliating strongly to terrorism, the thinking goes. And in the case of the next territorial concession, the West Bank, Let‘s prop up the Abbas government and help establish a Palestinian state. Then, finally, it will bring peace and stability to the region.

But as former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold recently pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, “Observers forget that Hamas also won the Palestinian elections in the West Bank in 2006. However, in contrast to the situation in Gaza, the Israeli Army is fully deployed in strategic areas of the West Bank and could intervene in minutes if Hamas tried to execute a Gaza-style military coup to topple Mr. Abbas” (August 12). Once Israel leaves, Gold pointed out, the only remaining deterrent against a Hamas takeover in Judea and Samaria will be gone.

But never mind these fatal flaws in the peace-making policies proposed in Washington and Jerusalem. Retreat and restraint—that’s the conventional wisdom. And if at first you don‘t succeed, try, try again.

Writing for HumanEvents.com, Jeff Emanuel recently interviewed Ehud Olmert’s spokesperson, Miri Eisen, in Jerusalem. He asked her to respond to critics who argue that Israel’s enemies interpret unilateral concessions as a sign of weakness and that it only emboldens terrorists. Eisen responded by saying, “We know that it is not weak, because we know that there is strength in being able to make concessions even when it has not worked before“ (August 9).

No amount of military might can rescue Israel from a peace-making policy as suicidal as that. It’s no wonder God says in Leviticus 26:20 that Israel’s strength shall be spentin vain.