Monday, January 29, 2024
From Ian:
Hillel Neuer: The UN’s Terrorism Teachers
Hillel Neuer: The UN’s Terrorism Teachers
Many who watched the October 7 massacre likely wondered how a man’s mind can become so warped that he not only commits heinous acts of murder, rape, and mutilation, but proudly films this carnage for the world to see.Matti Friedman: What If the Real War in Israel Hasn’t Even Started?
It is a complicated question. But one of the primary answers is found in the schools that mold the minds of young people in their formative years. In Gaza, the organization that does much of the molding is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA. That organization pays the salaries of teachers who call for the murder of Jews.
On Friday, UNRWA said it had fired some employees accused of participating in Hamas’s October 7 invasion of Israel. Over the weekend, in an unprecedented rebuke of the agency, more than a dozen of its donor states, including the U.S., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands, announced their suspension of funds to UNRWA. The latest revelations follow numerous other reported cases of UNRWA’s entanglement with Hamas terrorism.
This agency was chartered after the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Since 1950, UNRWA has provided the bulk of social services at Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza, including the crucial task of teaching Palestinian children and adolescents.
But the notion that it is primarily an agency for the relief of refugees is a front. UNRWA’s main task is political. Palestinians who work for UNRWA call it “the main political witness to our cause.”
UNRWA exists to perpetuate Palestinians as refugees. Unlike the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which since World War II has been responsible for the welfare of all refugees in the world, and has worked toward their resettlement and relocation, UNRWA deals only with the Arabs from Palestine and has a completely different objective.
Millions of Palestinians who attend UNRWA schools in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Gaza are taught that the war of 1948 is not over, and that they have a “right of return”—meaning, to dismantle and take over Israel.
The UN betrays its mission by signaling to the Palestinians that the war is not over, and to keep fighting.
UN Secretary General António Guterres said he was “horrified” to discover that UNRWA employees participated in the invasion and massacre of October 7. But in reality, their actions merely translated UNRWA’s core message into action.
Israelis like Lt. Col. Dotan, who is 54, and me acquired a healthy regard for Hezbollah during our military service in a swath of south Lebanon that Israel held as a buffer after the Lebanon invasion of 1982, and which we called “the security zone.” At first, the zone was meant to protect people near the border from infiltrations by Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists. But as Iranian power rose the enemy became Hezbollah, which was set up and trained by the Revolutionary Guards. I served in the security zone as a radioman and platoon sergeant.The United Nations — What is it Good For?
This overlooked war, which Israelis never even bothered to name when it was going on, was in fact one of the labs that produced what we now think of as “war”—not the movement of divisions across territory or battles between states, but armed groups operating in the ruins of failed states; hit-and-run attacks using IEDs, which Hezbollah did much to pioneer; suicide bombers, which Hezbollah introduced in the Middle East; the use of video as a propaganda weapon, which Hezbollah employed to great effect two decades before ISIS; and the exploitation of the civilian landscape to conceal the military landscape, with all of the consequences for innocent people.
What happened in the security zone isn’t discussed much in Israel but retains a hold on those of us who served there when we were young. We learned lessons about the limits of military power—but also about the limits of our ability to placate our enemies. Many of us also learned, in a strange way, to love Lebanon, which is a bewitching place. The echoes of that experience matter now because it’s men who began their service in the security zone as teenagers who now run the Israeli army, and who confront this new war as generals.
In May 2000, facing rising casualties and a protest movement led by the mothers of Israeli soldiers, the army abandoned the security zone overnight and pulled back to the border. This seemed to me, and to most Israelis, like the right thing to do, but it didn’t end the war. Hezbollah only grew stronger. We let it happen, as we did with Hamas in Gaza, because the alternatives seemed worse. An all-out war would have been so costly, both in lives and in the kind of disproportionate international frenzy that follows any Israeli operation, that we decided to live alongside Hezbollah and tell ourselves we’d contained them.
Fast-forward to early 2024, and Israel has a security zone again—except now it’s inside Israel.
Lt. Col. Dotan’s home is at a kibbutz in the evacuation zone. He remained there after the October 7 call-up, in uniform, while moving his kids farther south. From Hezbollah’s firing positions in the underbrush and the homes of Lebanese villages, the organization controls much of the fence and can fire at will. That means Israelis can’t go home unless the fighters are pushed back, far to the north, by diplomacy or by war. Allowing our civilians to return is the Israeli goal in the north, not destroying Hezbollah—which just isn’t possible, not only because of the group’s military power but because of the way it’s woven into the civil and political life of Lebanon.
Everyone would prefer diplomacy. Things are far too dark here already. But the distancing of Hezbollah by diplomacy was supposed to have happened long ago, by Security Council resolution, after the Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006, and proved meaningless. The Lebanese Army is too weak to control its own territory, and a United Nations peacekeeping force has been ineffectual.
I’ve been speaking to reserve soldiers, some still in uniform, others newly discharged from the alleys and booby traps of Gaza City. They know what it means if we go to war in Lebanon. But they don’t say “if,” they say “when,” and expect to be there in the spring.
The United Nations has little to brag about. Though the organization is quick to tout what it presents as myriad accomplishments, the multi-agency behemoth founded upon promises of international peace and security does little to remedy the world’s wars, conflicts, and crises.
In 2022, when a Russia retreat from the Kyiv region revealed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians killed in the city of Bucha, President Volodymyr Zelensky castigated the U.N. for its inaction.
“If there is no alternative and no option, then the next option would be [to] dissolve yourself altogether,” he said in a Security Council address. “Are you ready to close the United Nations? Do you think that the time for international law is gone?”
Russia’s veto power on the Security Council prevented any U.N. resolution or intervention in the Ukraine war. A few months ago, Mr. Zelensky again addressed the body.
“Humankind no longer pins its hopes on the U.N.,” he said. “Ukrainian soldiers now are doing at the expense of their blood what the U.N. Security Council should do by its voting: They’re stopping Russia and upholding the principles of the U.N.”
Its inaction is not limited to Ukraine. While the U.N. is well known for its frequent condemnations of Israel, it has never once condemned China, much less done anything, about its well-documented oppression of the Uyghur people and other human rights abuses. If China moves against Taiwan, Beijing’s Security Council veto effectively blocks any useful response.
The U.N. has a 10,000-strong force on Lebanon’s border charged with demilitarizing the area. Hezbollah’s massive weapons buildup and recent, steady stream of rocket attacks speak to that force’s success.
Amid talk of what post-war governance in Gaza will look like, there is no serious discussion of the U.N. playing a significant role.
A visit to the U.N. or perusal of its literature confronts one with a great deal of high-flying sentiment about its mission to root out suffering and injustice, and to replace war with dialogue.
Yet its 70-year history is largely a record of not only failing to deliver on these promises, but in many instances of making the world’s problems worse.
Surviving on member nation donations, the U.N. is not a cheap endeavor, either. In 2022, the United States, the organization’s largest contributor, gave some $22 billion.
All this leaves many very reasonable people asking what, if any, purpose the U.N. serves. And why do American taxpayers contribute so much to keep it ticking?
