The latest hezbollah-Israeli conflict highlights just how worthless the U.N. really is when it comes to 'peacekeeping'. The U.N. has long history of 'de-nationizing' Israel on the world stage even though Israel has been a member state in this dubious organization for nearly 60 years. The relationship is further polluted with the participation in this 'peacekeeping' mission by some U.N. member states that do not even recognize Israel's right to exist.
...The EU and U.N. agree the peacekeeping mission must have a strong Muslim component to give it credibility. But Israel objects to nations that do not recognize the Jewish state, saying such troops would make it impossible for Jerusalem to share intelligence with the U.N. force.
Israel's objection would include Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, which have volunteered troops. Turkey, meanwhile, which does have diplomatic relations with Israel and would be acceptable to all parties, has not decided whether to join the force.
Add to this frustration the stated intent by the U.N. of not disarming hezbollah, and the farce turns into simply war postponed.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan stressed Friday it was not the peacekeepers' task to strip the guerrillas of their weapons, saying that was an issue for Lebanon's government and "cannot be done by force." "The troops are not going there to disarm Hezbollah. Let's be clear about that," he said.
The final deadly insult from this treacherous neutrality is reported by The Weekly Standard describing how the U.N. actively aided hezbollah in its latest attack against Israel by providing real time battlefield information.
This war was fought on cable television and the Internet, and a lot of official information was available in real time. But the specific military intelligence UNIFIL posted could not be had from any non-U.N. source. The Israeli press--always eager to push the envelope--did not publish the details of troop movements and logistics. Neither the European press nor the rest of the world media, though hardly bastions of concern for the safety of Israeli troops, provided the IDF intelligence details that UNIFIL did. A search of Israeli government websites failed to turn up the details published to the world each day by the U.N.
Sure enough, a review of every single UNIFIL web posting during the war shows that, while UNIFIL was daily revealing the towns where Israeli soldiers were located, the positions from which they were firing, and when and how they had entered Lebanese territory, it never described Hezbollah movements or locations with any specificity whatsoever.
This is the U.N.'s definition of neutrality. For Israel it is 'pyrrhic' neutrality.
