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Putting the UN in Charge of Gaza Would Be a Joke
(New York Post) Prof. Eugene Kontorovich - The Biden administration is pressuring Israel to define its plan for "the day after" the war. This is a bit like demanding America have a plan for postwar Japan weeks after Pearl Harbor. Washington insists the end goal of Israel's war be the establishment of a Palestinian state. Israel is unlikely to accept this suicidal proposal. President Biden called for the "international community" to provide "interim security measures" in Gaza. The idea of international forces in Gaza repeats decades of mistakes. In every single case in the past, UN forces and agencies failed to provide Israel any security and were coopted and used by its enemies. It's ridiculous to talk about an international presence in Gaza when rockets from Lebanon rain down on Israeli homes under the nose of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), the largest peacekeeping force outside Africa. When Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it agreed on a European Union force to monitor border crossings and prevent weapons from being smuggled in. But when Hamas took power two years later, the EU observers took off. No foreign presence will be willing to do the grinding work of ensuring Hamas is not reconstituted. When even America tolerates Iranian proxies' drizzle of attacks on its bases in the Middle East, Israel cannot expect any outside actor in Gaza will stand up for the Jewish state's security. The writer is director of the Center for the Middle East and International Law at George Mason University Law School.