Oded Eran, Israel’s former ambassador to the European Union and now director of the Institute for Security Studies in Tel Aviv, published a report for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), one part of which is entitled “UN Resolution 1701: A view from Israel.” In it, he examines the situation in Lebanon two years after the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701. In a companion report, Nicholas Blandford examines the resolution from Lebanon’s point of view.
UN Resolution 1701: A View from Israel |
October 20, 2008
In a September 29 interview, outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert defended UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1701 — an agreement that ended the 2006 summer war between Israel and Hizballah — by asserting that it had quieted Israel’s northern border. Although the resolution ended the fighting, it did not end the conflict, and its failure to incorporate specific stipulations and mechanisms to disarm Hizballah makes future violence between the two sides inevitable.
Missed Opportunities
UNSCR 1701 was adopted twenty-eight years after Resolutions 425 and 426 established the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) and delineated the territorial boundaries of its mandate, limiting it to the south of the country. As such, UNSCR 1701 does not allow UNIFIL to fulfill the resolution’s mission to assist the Lebanese government in disarming all armed Lebanese groups — a mission that had already been specified by UNSCR 1559 in 2004 — and in preventing the “sales or supply of arms and related material to Lebanon except as authorized by its government.”
When the Security Council adopted Resolution 1701, the international community missed an opportunity to provide UNIFIL the legal sanction to extend its territorial responsibility and functional mandate. As a result, Hizballah has more than doubled its prewar arsenal of long- and short-range missiles and rockets by way of the porous Syrian-Lebanese border. In less than two years, Hizballah has recovered from its losses and depletion of weapons stocks, primarily as a result of the Security Council’s inability to adopt a more meaningful resolution.
Skeptics of UN peacekeeping forces argue that even if UNSCR 1701 had mandated the deployment of an international force on the Syrian-Lebanese border, its ability to prevent massive arms smuggling would have been limited. Although this assessment may be accurate, it should not have prevented the UN from adopting tougher language in order to implement UNSCR 1559 in robust fashion, specifically by disbanding Lebanon’s militias.
Furthermore, since Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hizballah has built a massive military infrastructure, both above and below ground. Among Israel’s 2006 war objectives was the destruction of that infrastructure, yet whatever was destroyed during the war has been reconstructed and fortified in the past two years, regardless of UNSCR 1701 and the presence of UNIFIL and the Lebanese Army.
The absence of any Hizballah military offensive against Israel since 2006 has been attributed erroneously to UNSCR 1701. In reality, this restraint comes from the policy decision of Hizballah’s leaders to focus on the domestic agenda and solidify its political position in Lebanon. Hizballah has also been deterred militarily by the calculation that Israel would respond overwhelmingly to any provocation, striking the Shiite organization and/or its two major patrons, Syria and Iran. Hizballah’s desire to avoid a perceived violation of UNSCR 1701 has had only a marginal impact on its restraint.
Hizballah has benefited tremendously from the loopholes in the resolution, fully recovering from the 2006 war and improving its political and military position in Lebanon. Under the lull provided by the ceasefire, the organization has managed to avoid paying a price for triggering the 2006 war and has reasserted itself even more forcefully in Lebanese politics.
Hizballah Undeterred
UNSCR 1701 provided Israel with a reasonable exit from a military dead end, and was a way for the United States and France to reassert influence in Lebanon, at least ostensibly. Yet the increased involvement of Washington and Paris has been of little value, especially as far as Israel is concerned. Even at the time of its adoption, many in the Israeli government viewed UNSCR 1701 with skepticism.
Moreover, Israel now faces a more formidable organization, one that is better supplied and entrenched than it was two years ago. Although Israel’s reaction to the kidnapping of two soldiers in 2006 took Hizballah’s leadership by surprise and may have increased Israel’s regional deterrence, the mixed performance of the IDF during the campaign undercut the shock value, making its impact of limited value and efficacy. Hassan Nasrallah, Hizballah’s leader and secretary general, continues to issue threatening statements and displays confidence in his organization’s ability to weather another Israeli military campaign.
In contrast, many Israelis have a strong sense that an opportunity was missed following the 2006 debacle. Hizballah’s buildup over the last two years accentuates Israel’s desire to undermine the organization’s position in Lebanon. Logic suggests this can only be achieved by a successful military operation followed by a clear diplomatic solution. Such an outcome would close the loopholes of UNSCR 1701 and force the Lebanese government and the international community to take concrete measures to implement UNSCR 1559, which calls for the disbanding and disarmament of all militias inside Lebanon.
Conclusion
Another war with Hizballah appears inevitable, and the Israeli military currently is making preparations to ensure that the next round is decisive. More importantly, however, is the diplomacy that would follow the conflagration. Not only is it important to secure a meaningful UN resolution, it is also critical that the international community implement that resolution.
Oded Eran is a former senior Israeli diplomat and ambassador, and director of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv.
UN Resolution 1701: A View from Lebanon |
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October 21, 2008
Two years after the 2006 summer war, Hizballah and Israel continue to pay lip service to UN Security Council Resolution 1701 while focusing on preparations for the inevitable second round of conflict. Although Hizballah has not mounted a single border operation against Israel since the war, the Shiite organization has developed a new line of defense north of the Litani River and completed a massive, unprecedented recruitment, training, and rearmament drive. Meanwhile, Israel has signaled its displeasure with the inability of both the UN and the international community to halt Hizballah’s military buildup.
Arms Smuggling
A week after the fighting ended on August 14, 2006, Turkish authorities reportedly intercepted five Iranian cargo planes and a Syrian aircraft carrying weapons to Hizballah. According to a Turkish newspaper, the arms included rocket launchers and crates of C-802 anti-ship missiles, the same weapon that disabled an Israeli missile boat on the third day of the war. Although Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria is the traditional arms conduit for Hizballah, the party has devised alternative means of procuring weapons in the event of a closed land route.
In September 2006, a month after the fighting ended, Hizballah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, claimed that “the resistance was able to rearm itself in a few days and is now stronger than it was on July 12,” the first day of the war. By revealing the organization’s renewed military strength, Nasrallah admitted tacitly that Hizballah was in breach of Resolution 1701. Paragraphs 14 and 15 of the resolution mandate the Lebanese government to secure its borders against arms smuggling and mandate other governments to prevent the sale or transfer of weapons, ammunition, equipment, and training to “entities or individuals” in Lebanon.
Although the Lebanese government has deployed about 8,000 Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) troops along the eastern border, Beirut is politically incapable of sealing off the frontier. Closing the border would provoke a backlash from the impoverished, mainly Shiite residents of the eastern Bekaa Valley who rely on the porous frontier to earn a living smuggling commercial goods. As such, a UN border assessment team reported in a August 2008 followup that the eastern “Green Border [the illegal crossings] remains as penetrable as it was during the mission of team one [in 2007].”
Buildup South of the Litani?
Hizballah’s military preparations north of the Litani River and in the Bekaa Valley are well known. Vast tracts of land in this mountainous spine running north from the Litani to the lower reaches of the Barouk Mountains have been placed off-limits. The sound of explosions and machine gun fire has become commonplace in parts of the Bekaa Valley where Hizballah conducts its training.
What is less evident is the scale of Hizballah’s military preparations near the southern border. Although Resolution 1701, paragraph 8, designates the area between the Blue Line (the UN’s 2000 border demarcation between Israel and Lebanon) and the Litani River “free of any armed personnel, assets, and weapons” other than those of the Lebanese government and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), Hizballah is reportedly carrying out clandestine military preparations in the area. In late March, an armored UNIFIL patrol attempted to stop a tractor trailer driving through the western border sector late at night, but two cars and five armed men blocked the road, allowing the truck and its unknown contents to escape. In May, UNIFIL personnel encountered a group of men laying cables in the eastern sector of the UNIFIL area, where they were attacked with stones and their passage blocked by cars when they encountered a group of men laying cables in the eastern sector of the UNIFIL area. The implication was that the cables were part of Hizballah’s fiber-optic communications network.
After the 2006 conflict, Hizballah abandoned most of its remote bunkers near the border, and those that UNIFIL and the LAF have located are periodically checked for renewed activity. No one knows, however, how many bunkers, rocket-firing positions, and observation posts remain undiscovered. Civilian sources in southern Lebanon claim that Hizballah continues to provision some of its war bunkers, keeping them stockpiled and paying local residents to monitor them. The border district remains an important component of Hizballah’s battle plan in a potential war with Israel, even though the organization has repositioned its front line north of the Litani. Hizballah operates discreetly near the border out of political expediency and to avoid embarrassing the LAF, which is responsible for the area’s security.
Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hizballah’s deputy secretary general, recently gave an unenthusiastic endorsement of the party’s observance of Resolution 1701, stating in a television interview that Hizballah originally was in “overall agreement” with the resolution, and “we think we have implemented it.” Despite the tepid endorsement of 1701, Hizballah’s bottom line remains the same: it will not scale back its preparation for the next encounter with Israel because of UN Security Council edicts.
Israeli Ire
Israel has complained repeatedly to the UN and UNIFIL about allegations of arms smuggling across the Lebanon-Syria border and objected that Hizballah is rebuilding its military infrastructure in southern Lebanon. UNIFIL, however, insists it has seen nothing to support the Israeli claims. As UNIFIL commander Maj. Gen. Claudio Graziano reportedly told Israeli foreign ministry officials in mid September, “UNIFIL does not have proof of Hizballah operations south of the Litani, and if Israel has such intelligence, they are welcome to send it to us.” To emphasize Israel’s frustration with the UN, Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak reportedly told a cabinet session in early August that Resolution 1701 “did not work, doesn’t work, and is a failure,” given that Syria and Iran had moved “munitions, rockets, and other weapon systems” into Lebanon.
Israel, however, would likely gain a more sympathetic ear from the UN if it were to desist from its own breaches of the resolution. Two years on, Israeli troops still patrol the Lebanese end of Ghajar, a village that straddles the Blue Line. UNIFIL has been mediating an Israeli exit from the Lebanese side of Ghajar, so far without success.
Israeli aircraft continue to violate Lebanese airspace on a near-daily basis, a violation that Hizballah frequently cites. The UN’s latest report on 1701 stated that UNIFIL had recorded an average of more than twenty violations per day in April and May, including seventy-two violations by unmanned aerial vehicles in one day alone. Since Israel maintains that overflights provide vital intelligence and must continue as long as Hizballah smuggles arms into Lebanon, it is unlikely Israel will cease such operations in the near future.
In addition, despite repeated entreaties from the UN, Israel refuses to hand over the cluster bomb strike data from the 2006 war. That information would assist the effort to remove the remaining unexploded submunitions, which so far have caused over three hundred casualties.
Conclusion
Given what has transpired in Lebanon over the past two years — both on the ground and in the air — it would appear that Hizballah and Israel will continue to breach, and not honor, Resolution 1701. Preparing for the inevitable second round of conflict has taken priority — for both parties — over complying with the UN resolution.
Nicholas Blanford is a Beirut-based journalist and long-time observer of Hizballah. He is author of Killing Mr. Lebanon (I.B. Taurus, 2006), an account of the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri.
