Trust But Verify
Participants in the recent JINSA Flag & General Officers Trip to Israel met with UNIFIL officials near the northern Israeli border. A Spanish colonel and a German political counselor who were polite, professional and cordial led their group. An Israeli UNIFIL liaison officer accompanied us.
The colonel said illegal weapons have never been found at a UNIFIL checkpoint and operations carried out with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) have never captured ammunition. The political officer added, "You cannot prove a negative - that there are no weapons. But we do 350-380 patrols in a 24-hour period and 90% of the cars I see are UNIFIL. There are some military supplies left over from the 2006 war, but I am confident there is nothing big time coming in." They said UNIFIL can go everywhere in southern Lebanon, but won't go into houses without specific information about weapons. "We generally ask the LAF to do it for us."
A JINSA participant pointed out that neither of the UNIFIL professionals had mentioned the word Hezbollah. "It appears, then, that the LAF and Israel were at war in 2006." Hezbollah, said the political counselor, is part of the government that signed UN Resolution 1701 - it is committed to 1701. She added cryptically, "Not everyone with a gun will start the next war."
Since that meeting, the explosion of an arsenal in the Lebanese village of Khirbet Slim and the subsequent attack on UNIFIL troops trying to investigate has prompted UNIFIL to acknowledge Hezbollah arsenals in the south. They claim this is not necessarily a violation of 1701 and still maintain that the weapons might be old ones.
The UNIFIL officials with whom JINSA met did have complaints - about Israel. First was the decision of the Israeli government not to provide maps of land mine fields, although the fields themselves were marked. Second, they said, Israeli manned and drone overflights of southern Lebanon were a violation of 1701.
Those overflights - including over Khirbet Slim after the explosion - are the source of the IDF assessment that Hezbollah has up to 40,000 rockets and is training its forces to use ground-to-ground missiles capable of hitting Tel Aviv as well as anti-aircraft missiles. Hezbollah is said also to have trained in Syria on the anti-aircraft SA-8 missile that launches from tracked vehicles, but Israeli warning to Syria not to send the SA-8 into Lebanon appear to have been heeded - for now. Overflights help keep the Syrians honest.
The closer the rockets (and potentially the SA-8 vehicles) are to the Israeli border, the longer their reach into Israel. The arsenal in Khirbet Slim was only 12 miles inside Lebanon. Perhaps those minefields help ensure that Hezbollah cannot come to the border.
UNIFIL's mandate is up for renewal at the UN this summer and there are reasons to keep it and enhance its mandate. But Israel will - and should - continue to live by the Reagan maxim "trust but verify." Overflights and mine fields provide a margin of security for Israel that UNIFIL cannot and the LAF will not want to.
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