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Is Another Ceasefire in Lebanon Bound to Fail?

(UnHerd) Shany Mor - Western diplomats and experts have settled on a consensus for solving the war in Lebanon. At its core, this approach focuses on restoring the very ceasefire conditions which Lebanon and Hizbullah violated last year. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, that ended the last war in 2006, included several clear obligations. Israel was to withdraw from Lebanese territory. Hizbullah was to move all its forces north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone where the only permitted armed forces would be those of the UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese Army (LFA). Hizbullah was supposed to be decommissioned as an armed force inside sovereign Lebanese territory. Israeli withdrawal was implemented within days. The other measures were not. Once Israel's withdrawal was complete, UNIFIL announced that it had no intention of enforcing 1701. Over the course of the next 17 years, Hizbullah assembled an arsenal of rockets and missiles. It also built a network of tunnels that were supposed to allow it, in a future war, to "conquer the Galilee" in an operation similar to the one Hamas ultimately launched. If there is one thread running through nearly every diplomatic effort of the last eight decades, it is a firm commitment to the idea that any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war. Such a norm has not featured in the post-war mediation of any other conflict. If the international community extended a line of insurance to other aggressors, which promised that launching wars could bring gains with victory but no losses with defeat, there would be a lot more wars. The writer is a lecturer in political thought at Reichman University.
2024-11-21 00:00:00
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