There is a good reason that Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah has accepted UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which sets the terms for a cease-fire between his jihad army and the State of Israel.
The resolution represents a near-total victory for Hizbullah and its state sponsors Iran and Syria, and an unprecedented defeat for Israel and its ally the United States. This fact is evident both in the text of the resolution and in the very fact that the U.S. decided to sponsor a cease-fire resolution before Israel had dismantled or seriously degraded Hizbullah’s military capabilities.
While the resolution was not passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and so does not have the authority of law, in practice it makes it all but impossible for Israel to defend itself against Hizbullah aggression without being exposed to international condemnation on an unprecedented scale.
This is the case first of all because the resolution places responsibility for determining compliance in the hands of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who has distinguished himself as a man capable only of condemning Israel for its acts of self-defense while ignoring the fact that in attacking Israel, its enemies are guilty of war crimes. By empowering Annan to evaluate compliance, the resolution all but ensures that Hizbullah will not be forced to disarm and that Israel will be forced to give up the right to defend itself.
The resolution makes absolutely no mention of either Syria or Iran, without whose support Hizbullah could neither exist nor wage an illegal war against Israel. In so ignoring Hizbullah’s sponsors, it ignores the regional aspect of the current war and sends the message to these two states that they may continue to equip terrorist armies in Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority and Iraq with the latest weaponry without paying a price for their aggression.
The resolution presents Hizbullah with a clear diplomatic victory by placing its erroneous claim of Lebanese sovereignty over the Shaba Farms, or Mount Dov – a vast area on the Golan Heights that separates the Syrian Golan from the Upper Galilee and is disputed between Israel and Syria – on the negotiating table. In doing so, the resolution rewards Hizbullah’s aggression by giving international legitimacy to its demand for territorial aggrandizement via acts of aggression, in contravention of the laws of nations.
Moreover, by allowing Lebanon to make territorial claims on Israel despite the fact that in 2000 the UN determined that Israel had withdrawn to the international border, the resolution sets a catastrophic precedent for the future. Because Lebanon is receiving international support for legally unsupportable territorial demands on Israel, in the future the Palestinians, Syrians and indeed the Jordanians and Egyptians will feel empowered to employ aggression to gain territorial concessions from the Jewish state even if they previously signed treaties of peace with Israel.
The message of the resolution’s stand on Shaba Farms is that Israel can never expect for the world to recognize any of its borders as final.
By calling in the same paragraph for the “immediate cessation by Hizbullah of all attacks and the immediate cessation by Israel of all offensive military operations,” the resolution treats as equivalent Hizbullah’s illegal aggression against Israel and Israel’s legitimate military actions taken in defense of its sovereign territory.
Operational Paragraph 7, which “affirms that all parties are responsible for ensuring that no action is taken contrary to paragraph 1 [which calls for a cessation of hostilities] that might adversely affect the search for a long-term solution, humanitarian access to civilian populations, including safe passage for humanitarian convoys, or the voluntary and safe return of displaced persons,” all but bars Israel from taking military action to defend itself in the future. Any steps Israel takes will open it to accusations – by Annan – of breaching this paragraph.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had let it be known that Israel’s conditions for a cease-fire included the institution of an arms embargo against Hizbullah. The government also insisted that the international force it wished to have deployed along the border would work to dismantle Hizbullah.
However, paragraph 8 puts both the question of an arms embargo and Hizbullah’s dismantlement off to some future date when Israel and Lebanon agree to the terms of a “permanent cease-fire.” In addition, it places the power to oversee an arms embargo against Hizbullah in the hands of the Lebanese government, of which Hizbullah is a member.