How UNIFIL became Hezbollah's human shield
For years, Hezbollah has grown stronger under UNIFIL's blind eye in Lebanon. It's no surprise now that UNIFIL, despite IDF warnings, refuses to vacate its positions, acting as human shields for the terrorist organization. Professor Anne Bayefsky, an international law expert, explains that this behavior mirrors the UN's stance on war: 'Demonization and bias against Israel are the bread and butter of all UN agencies, under the pretense of concern for human rights and humanitarian considerations.'
Ariel Bulshtein
Israel Hayom
Oct 18, 2024
Over the past week, the confrontation between Israel and UNIFIL - the United Nations peacekeeping force stationed in southern Lebanon - has become inevitable. If not on the ground, then certainly in rhetorical and diplomatic exchanges. Once again, Israel finds itself ensnared in a familiar conflict with an odd UN entity, whose real role has always been somewhat unclear.
UNIFIL was deployed to southern Lebanon in 1978, following UN Security Council Resolution 425 after Operation Litani. Israel hoped that the force would hinder terrorist attacks on its northern border. Did that happen? Absolutely not. The terrorist organizations were unimpressed by the blue helmets. Their attacks on Israel escalated, their boldness grew, and their weaponry became so advanced that Israel was forced to launch Operation Peace for Galilee, which turned into the First Lebanon War.
In the years that followed, UNIFIL did not pose a real obstacle to the malicious forces. It was Israel's Security Zone in southern Lebanon that curbed most attacks, not the UN battalions stationed in the area, who mainly enjoyed the benefit of high salaries to send back to their families in third-world countries. After Israel's withdrawal from the Security Zone, the folly of relying on UNIFIL was fully exposed, as Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations blatantly defied the international force and operated freely under its protection.
But instead of facing the truth, Israel continued to delude itself. Instead of recognizing that the mechanism was fundamentally flawed and useless, some believed that it could be fixed through diplomatic wordplay. Following the Second Lebanon War, Israel's government demanded two things it believed would make UNIFIL more effective in preventing Hezbollah from growing and threatening Israel: expanding the force's mandate to include authority to act against terrorists and incorporating soldiers from Western countries.
The now-eliminated Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah speaks via a video link, as his supporters raise their hands, during the Shiite holy day of Ashoura, in the southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon.
UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed after the Second Lebanon War, seemed to address Israel's two demands. On the one hand, UNIFIL soldiers were authorized to arrest armed Hezbollah militants if they threatened the force or engaged in terrorist activities south of the Litani River. On the other hand, friendly Italy was put in charge of the force, and French soldiers were added.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni presented this as a great achievement. Their assumption was that the chaos would end and everything would be different now. But this assumption proved to be yet another bluff. During the 18 years of UNIFIL's "new" operations, Hezbollah has only strengthened its grip on southern Lebanon, both in quantity and quality. In recent weeks, IDF soldiers have been uncovering and destroying terror bases built under UNIFIL's nose, in clear violation of its mandate. But this is only half the problem. The other half, equally ugly and dangerous, surfaced when the IDF finally began dismantling what Hezbollah had developed under UNIFIL's protection.
At this moment, UN representatives and the leaders of the countries sending troops to UNIFIL have cried out. They ignored Hezbollah's ongoing violations, but suddenly, the IDF's defensive action to remove Hezbollah's violations became intolerable to them. After no one demanded that Hezbollah be stopped, suddenly everyone is shouting at Israel: "Stop!" And if Israel didn't have enough troubles, now it faces another: not only did these Western soldiers fail to protect Israel from Hezbollah, but their presence has now turned them into Hezbollah's human shield, threatening Israel's relations with key nations.
Who are they really protecting
"The failure of UNIFIL's concept is not accidental," says Professor Anne Bayefsky, an international law expert who heads Touro University's Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and is president of Human Rights Voices. "Whether in Lebanon, Jerusalem, Gaza, or the West Bank, all UN agencies follow the same script. They might cloak themselves in comforting terms like 'peacekeeping forces,' but it's absurd to call UNIFIL 'peacekeepers' when their actual role for decades has been to allow Hezbollah to act. They've stood by, doing nothing, watching terrorists arm and organize to kill Jews."
"Today, as UNIFIL deliberately stays in combat zones, even after Israel has properly warned them not to, they are not unlucky human shields in my eyes. They are intentionally protecting Hezbollah. And as long as their backers, like the UN Secretary-General and the Security Council, insist on using them as cannon fodder for a terrorist organization committed to annihilating the neighboring country's civilians, the responsibility for any harm to them falls not only on the terrorists but on the United Nations itself."
Professor Bayefsky views UNIFIL as just a symptom of a broader, deeper problem. She argues that everything created under the UN's umbrella is designed to operate against Israel, because this is inherent to the nature of international bodies. In other words, who's surprised that a tree poisoned to its roots bears toxic fruit?
UN Secretary-General Guterres.
A comprehensive study by Professor Bayefsky, recently published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, reveals that the UN and its institutions follow a tested and proven method of reversing reality: excusing, justifying, and blaming the victim. This approach was in full force after October 7. Initially, in the wake of the massacre, senior UN officials - from Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, to UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, to UN representatives on health issues - sought to downplay Hamas's actions.
Next, they sought to justify them, expressing sympathy for the attackers ("They have no state, so what do you expect?") and portraying their actions as merely a Palestinian response to Israeli deeds. From there, it was a short leap to blaming Israel itself for the massacre of its own citizens, from babies to the elderly. This inversion of reality was completed in just a few days. As Albanese shamelessly declared on February 7, 2024: "The victims of October 7 were not killed because they were Jewish, but in response to Israeli oppression."
This same approach is found throughout all UN agencies and actions, including with UNIFIL. Hezbollah's violations are concealed, justified, and rationalized, while Israel is blamed for the terrorist group's actions against it in territory supposedly overseen by UN soldiers. Beyond tarnishing Israel's reputation, Professor Bayefsky says the practical aim is to strip Israel of its legitimacy and its right to self-defense. This has recently been made explicit, with Israel being urged not to fire in areas where UNIFIL soldiers are stationed, even when it's under attack.
A false paradigm of equality
If this sounds familiar, it's because it is. The same arguments were made at the International Court of Justice in The Hague regarding Israel's actions in building the security barrier, recalls Professor Bayefsky. Back then, the goal was twofold: to justify the terrorists' murderous violence against Israel while concluding that Israel had no right to defend itself. The Egyptian judge, Nabil Elaraby, expressed it clearly when he said, "Throughout history, occupation has always met with armed resistance - violence begets violence." Elaraby held various positions in the UN as a representative of Egypt and was not the only one. All UN agencies and institutions are filled with individuals like him.
UNIFIL, too, promotes the false moral equivalence between the terrorists and Israel, the target of their attacks. UN institutions often boast of this approach, presenting it as a sign of impartiality, but it's nothing more than a fiction. In practice, they always fear dealing with Hezbollah militants.
A UN patrol beneath a provocative Lebanese sign featuring a picture of Soleimani, near the Israeli border
"As a rule, demonization and bias against Israel are the bread and butter of all UN branches, disguised as concern for human rights, humanitarian considerations, and international law," explains Professor Bayefsky. "The United Nations functions as a political arm of states and terrorist organizations that do not recognize Israel's right to exist and are committed to genocide against the Jewish people."
"Most of the member states of the UN are not free democratic countries. Nothing can be done in the UN Security Council without the agreement of Russia and China, as each holds veto power. As for the main body responsible for protecting human rights, the Human Rights Council in Geneva - several of its members are among the worst human rights violators in the world."
Yet, UNIFIL's mandate address preventing terrorist activities. "The UN has no established definition of terrorism because Muslim nations share the view that killing Jews - or 'occupiers of Arab land,' as they call it - is not terrorism at all. In the UN headquarters in New York, alongside an exhibit on the Holocaust, there is a permanent exhibition on 'Palestine,' which challenges the legitimacy of the 1947 Partition Plan. Every visitor or tour group, whether adults or students, is told that Israelis are like Nazis."
Did they also turn a blind eye to Hamas and Hezbollah aggression over the past year? "Despite mountains of evidence, including testimonies from the killers, abusers, and rapists themselves, the UN Security Council has never condemned Hamas for the October 7 massacre, nor for anything else. Other UN bodies, including the General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, have also remained silent. The Security Council, tasked under the UN Charter with maintaining international peace and security, has never condemned the massacre. UN agencies responsible for women's rights ignored the atrocities committed by Palestinian terrorists against Israeli women and girls and even questioned their credibility. It's entirely sickening - Me Too applies to everyone, just not to Jews.
"UN Secretary-General António Guterres said October 7 'did not happen in a vacuum' and went on to give political victories to mass murderers as desecrated, unidentifiable Jewish bodies piled up. Israel has provided the world with undeniable evidence of the UN's involvement in the October 7 massacre and the ongoing war in Gaza: details of UN workers who participated in the massacre, UN facilities used as training bases and weapons depots for terrorists, UN agencies that helped create human shields for terrorists by preventing civilian evacuations, and UN institutions that spread false information about victims and facts."
What should Israel do in this situation? "Perhaps the most important thing right now is to recognize the role of the U.S. administration, led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. This administration uses the UN as a weapon, a sword of Damocles hanging over Israel. They are toying with the option of not vetoing Security Council resolutions against Israel, just as former Democratic President Barack Obama did.
"For nearly four years, the Biden-Harris administration's foreign policy has been to legitimize UN agencies, including UNRWA and the Human Rights Council, thereby preventing any accountability for the UN's vile, antisemitic bias. This administration talks a lot about 'reform' and 'change,' yet continues to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars to those who haven't reformed or changed. At least until the U.S. elections, Israel holds the ball. If I am not for myself, who will be for me?".
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