Israeli suspicion of UN clouds Lebanon force plan

By Adam Entous
July 19, 2006
Reuters
Original Source: http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2006-07-19T114311Z_01_L18614210_RTRUKOC_0_US-MIDEAST-ISRAEL-UN.xml

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - An Israeli commander at the Lebanese border recalls peering through binoculars one afternoon to see U.N. peacekeepers sipping tea with Hizbollah guerrillas.
The officer's conspiratorial take on the meeting a few months ago underscores Israel's long-standing distrust of the United Nations force in Lebanon and its reluctance to see an expanded version as a way to end the current conflict.
I want to be cautious on this issue, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said of proposals for a beefed up international force that are now taking shape with support of U.N. envoys.
It appears to me that it is too early to discuss it, Olmert said.
Israel and the United Nations have rarely seen eye to eye, and the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), created in 1978, has been a frequent flashpoint in relations.
Dysfunctional and a failure is the way the force was characterized by one Foreign Ministry spokesman.
Some Israeli leaders accuse UNIFIL of providing legitimacy to Hizbollah, allowing it to build up arms while turning a blind eye when Israeli soldiers were seized at the border in 2000.
Israel has a lot of experience with multinational forces. And it has not been good, said Efraim Halevy, a former director of Israel's spy service Mossad.
U.N. officials admit UNIFIL never met its objectives, but say most problems resulted from misunderstandings and mistakes, not from what many Israelis perceive as an anti-Israel agenda.
UNIFIL have never had a mandate to disarm Hizbollah or anybody else, said UNIFIL senior adviser Milos Strugar.
U.N. officials also complain they have come under Israeli fire. Israeli fire struck a UNIFIL base in southern Lebanon in 1996. The attack killed 106 Lebanese civilians sheltering inside. Just last Sunday, an Indian peacekeeper force was wounded by Israeli shell fire.
Despite Olmert's reservations, Western diplomats expect Israel to eventually agree to deployment of a new force as long as it has the fire power to stop Hizbollah rocket attacks and enforce a buffer zone along the border.
STORMY RELATIONS
Israel has long had a stormy relationship with the United Nations, which many Israelis see as tilted against them.
In 2003 alone, the General Assembly issued 18 resolutions condemning Israel for rights violations, compared to four resolutions for other countries.
At the height of a Palestinian uprising, Israel accused the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian refugees of helping militants and employing Hamas Islamic militants.
Relations between Israel and the United Nations plummeted after information emerged that U.N. peacekeepers on the Lebanon border suppressed video tapes of three soldiers being abducted by Hizbollah guerrillas in 2000.
UNIFIL denied the charge, but the U.N. later admitted unintentionally concealing evidence from Israel.
We know that they had line of sight and could see the actual kidnapping. They could have put roadblocks up to prevent Hizbollah from escaping. But they didn't lift a finger, said Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the U.N.
It is unclear whether the three soldiers were killed at the time of the raid and their bodies taken away or whether they were captured and killed later. Israel initially assumed the three soldiers survived the attack and were seized by Hizbollah.
There was an international force in place in 2006 and it didn't prevent the current crisis from erupting, Gold said. What that means is that providing security for southern Lebanon requires more than a knee jerk proposal to put international forces on the ground.
(Additional reporting by Lin Noueihed in Beirut)