United Nations Middle East peacekeeping fails
The Albanese government’s ratcheted-up travel advice warning Australians not to travel to Israel and the Palestinian Territories – and those who are there to get out while they can – reflects the depth of the Middle East crisis. No less portentous about the threat to Australians’ safety in the region is the Department of Foreign Affairs’ warning to Israel that “any targeting or intimidation of UN personnel and facilities is unacceptable and must cease”. That follows last Sunday’s incident in which Israeli tanks burst through the main gates of a base in southern Lebanon used by the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, the 10,000-strong “peacekeeping” force drawn from 50 nations that includes 12 Australian soldiers. Five UNIFIL soldiers have been wounded in recent days. Israel has taken responsibility for most of these accidental cases. But two days ago Hezbollah wounded a UN peacekeeper.
The government is right to be concerned about the safety of all Australians caught up in the crisis. But there is also a need to be clear-eyed about UNIFIL and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand that the UN withdraw from the combat zone. UNIFIL’s mandate is to secure peace along the border between Lebanon and Israel. Its main task after the 2006 war, in which Israel went after Hezbollah terrorists in southern Lebanon, was to monitor Israel’s withdrawal. Since then, as Douglas Murray reported in the New York Post: “The UN’s peacekeeping force has not been just useless but worse than useless. It was meant to be there to ensure that peace was kept on this tinderbox of a border. But for the past year it has sat useless as Hezbollah has fired tens of thousands of rockets from southern Lebanon into Israel.”
The UN resolution that ended the 2006 war was meant to prevent Hezbollah from rebuilding its vast stockpile of weapons aimed at Israel. But since then Iran has built up an arsenal of 160,000 long- and short-range rockets in southern Lebanon aimed at Israel. As Murray reported, a short distance inside Lebanon, Israeli forces showed him two deep Hezbollah tunnels, built “in the hope of carrying out a Hamas-style October 7 attack on Israel. And to store and fire rockets into northern Israel”.
They were built and opened about 100m away from a major UNIFIL peacekeeping and observation post. As Murray asked: “How is it that the kind of heavy digging needed to create these tunnels could have happened literally right under the noses of the UN? Were they not looking? Did they even care? The answer seems to be No. The international peacekeeping force has been a joke for years.”
The Albanese government should not ignore the controversy surrounding UNIFIL and Israel’s disdain for its failure to prevent the current conflict. The question of whether UNIFIL is serving any useful purpose, and whether Mr Netanyahu is right to demand that the “peacekeepers” withdraw, needs to be addressed. In his epic address to the General Assembly last month, he called out the UN’s appalling record in regard to Israel as a “swamp of anti-Semitic bile”. In the past decade more resolutions have been passed against the Jewish state than against the entire rest of the world combined – 174 condemnatory resolutions against Israel compared with 73 for the rest of the world.
New sanctions announced by the Albanese government on Tuesday targeted at five Iranians leading Tehran’s missile-building program – two weeks after it fired almost 200 missiles at the Jewish state – are commendable. So was the unequivocal blame Foreign Minister Penny Wong placed on Iran for its proxies launching “daily attacks across the region, using missiles and other military equipment provided by Iran”.
But that underlines the utter failure of the UN and UNIFIL to do anything meaningful to fulfil the mandate it was given in 2006 to stop southern Lebanon being used as a launching pad for Iran’s terrorist onslaught aimed at destroying Israel. That dreadful failure, Australia should acknowledge, is now having dire consequences.