In 2006, as Israel and Hezbollah fought the Second Lebanon War, the UN was accused of broadcasting sensitive IDF troop movements on its website. The initial defense of UNIFIL, the UN multinational forces in Lebanon, was that the IDF broadcast troop movements too and the UN wasn’t saying anything the IDF wasn’t also publicizing.
At the time, I figured there was an easy way to figure this out: Why don’t I just call the UNIFIL commander on the ground in Lebanon and ask him? So I did. And he admitted to me, on the record, with no sense of shame or wrongdoing, that the accusations were accurate. He didn’t see a problem with it.
My story got me temporarily blacklisted by the UN media office, even though it was someone in Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s office who’d given me the commander’s mobile phone number in the first place. In other words, the UN didn’t think its intervention in a war between Israel and Hezbollah was inappropriate. But it was, and the ensuing scandal blindsided the UN and offended its sense of entitlement and impunity.
The key point is this: International forces ultimately answer to their host, and they are hosted by Israel’s mortal enemies.
I thought of this story, and the long history of failed stationing of international forces throughout the Arab-Israeli conflict, when I read that the European Union has been negotiating with Israel and the U.S. to take over responsibility for the crucial Rafah border crossing. That crossing, and the tunnels underneath it, is the main artery of support keeping Hamas alive and able to start wars every few years. When Israel moved out of Gaza, Egypt cracked down on smuggling temporarily but then turn a blind eye to it.
With the IDF currently controlling the Gaza side of the crossing, Egypt has been withholding humanitarian aid to Palestinians in protest. Now EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell has made clear that the EU, in conjunction with figures in the Palestinian Authority, wants to take over the crossing.
According to Bloomberg, Borrell wants the crossing transferred to EUBAM, an EU agency that helped run it between 2005 and 2007, but first “the fighting in Gaza needs to stop and the issue of who governs the territory must be solved, the spokesperson said.”
But as EUBAM’s own history shows, “solving the issue of who governs the territory” isn’t the point. It’s who comes out of that process actually governing the territory that matters. After all, that issue was “solved” in 2005, which led to EUBAM’s founding. Two years later, that issue was “solved” again when Hamas took power and EUBAM was sent packing.
There’s nothing unusual about this. In fact, it’s the crux of the problem, and it will undoubtedly be a sticking point in the negotiations over Rafah: When the going gets tough, international forces get going.
The clearest example of this is also the first. In 1956, Egyptian forces seized the Suez Canal, and Cairo nationalized it. The ensuing conflict with Israel, Britain, and France ended with Israeli control of part of the Sinai Peninsula. Israel agreed to withdraw in return for the establishment of a multinational peacekeeping force to maintain a buffer zone between Egyptian and Israeli troops.
In 1967, Egypt evicted those peacekeepers while moving its forces into position to attack Israel. The result was the Six-Day War.
That set the mold for peacekeepers for the future: Their presence was accepted while Israel’s enemies prepared for war, at which point they were either evicted or sidelined or—as in the case of UNIFIL—coopted by the army waging war on Israel. In other words, they mostly exist to deter Israel and therefore they are as much an instrument of war as an instrument of peace. Their presence often hinders Israel’s ability to prevent the enemy’s preparations for war, and the UN itself does not take preventive action.
The UN is not the same as the EU, of course. And the EU’s inclusion of Palestinians can plausibly help the peacekeeping mission by forcing Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority to put up or shut up. On the other hand, the PA’s experience governing Gaza suggests it will act as any other outside force: when Hamas wants them gone, they’ll be gone.
That is the contradiction at the heart of the Bloomberg report, as evidenced by this sentence: “The bloc has for months called for a truce but had little influence over the Israeli government as it tries to destroy Hamas.”
Well, do you want a truce or do you want non-Hamas Palestinians to have a role in Gaza? You can’t have both until Israel destroys Hamas, which the parties to these negotiations seem keen on preventing. Which suggests we once again have the creation of a peacekeeping force with neither the interest nor the ability to keep the peace.