The Arab-Israeli Conflict

So, you're most successful when you have a strong consensus of the UN, because at these points in the Congo situation, you had that. Why, in recent times, do we see the international community turning apparently less to the United Nations? In Lebanon, for example, the Israelis just went by, literally, the UN peacekeeping troops that were there and, in fact, the new peacekeeping group that was brought in is outside the UN.

If that is to be an example of the warfare -- in the Arab-Israeli context, to be more accurate -- there has been one form of a UN peacekeeping or another since the state of Israel was created in 1948. There have been a number of wars, and on each of those occasions, the peacekeeping element was pushed aside. So, the example of UN troops in Lebanon is not the first one. It happens to be a more recent one and therefore the public is more aware of it. They've forgotten that in every single war, United Nations peacekeeping forces suffered casualties, had people killed and wounded, because Arabs and Israelis had chosen to fight another war. Each of those wars was caused not by the failure of peacekeeping. They were caused by the failure of diplomacy.

We talked about my being related to UNEF-1 soon after the Suez War. That UNEF remained there. When I was commanding, it had been in position for ten and a half years. The last year and a half that I commanded it, when the political pot was boiling, there was not a single incident for the year and a half that I was in command of UN troops along the Gaza Strip, with over 250,000 Palestinian refugees. All along the Sinai, a very long frontier, there'd not been one single incident.

The war started not because UNEF had not been able to prevent al Fatah raids into Israel. In fact, there were none. The war started because, politically, there had been no progress in negotiations, and the Arabs decided to do something. They began to muster troops all around the border, and then Israel acted in defense. So, what happened recently is that it has been proved again, by another fight, by another war, that only time is being bought. And the time at the end of each war is getting shorter and shorter before you have the next round of fighting. There were ten and a half years between '56 and '67. There were several wars, '67, '70 on the Suez Canal, a series of raids and counter-raids right through that period. The war in '73, war in '75 again, new fighting started. In '78, an Israeli invasion; 1982, an Israeli invasion. So the time gap is getting shorter and shorter. Quite clearly, this problem with the Arab - Israeli conflict cannot be resolved through war.

Is it the case that in the history of the Middle East, when the peacekeeping forces were pushed aside, one side or the other was charging unfairness on the part of the soldiers? This is the case recently in Lebanon, where Israel was charging that the UN peacekeeping force was allowing Palestinian infiltration, or that there was some collaboration, depending on whom you're listening to. Have these charges occurred in the past as a symptom of the political breakdown?

Oh, they're always occurring. Unhappily, both sides do it for their different purposes, and for their own political ends. As far as the inability of the last peacekeeping force, there was no way for it to succeed from the very start, because the mandate given to the UN force was to take over from withdrawing Israeli forces the area south of the River Litani. That was the first part of their purpose. The second mandate was that they would be responsible for maintaining a cease-fire in that area. And thirdly, they would prevent incursions, that is, they would prevent PLO incursions into Israel and Israeli incursions against the PLO. A very simple, a very good mandate. A very clear mandate.

However, in actual fact, what happened was that the Israeli advance to the River Litani had been very rapid. The general view of the Israeli people did not really support this war. There were pressures [also] from the United States to end this war and withdraw the Israeli troops, because they were in the middle of negotiating the end of the civil war in Lebanon and this PLO factor came in. This only complicated the negotiations of a settlement of the Lebanese crisis.

And so, in that period, what had actually happened was that there were large pockets of Palestinian resistance, which had been bypassed, including a very major one in the city of Tyre, where more than 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 Palestinian forces were present. So when the Israelis were due, the UN was only authorized to enter such areas which had been vacated by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. The IDF left several pockets of PLO all over the place like tiger spots. The UN mandate did not permit them to drive the PLO out, whereas there was an expectation on the part of Israel that, by the UN taking over this responsibility, with their coming out, the PLO would go out as well. But the mandate never said that, and there had been no discussion in the Security Council to that effect. So that's the situation as far as the PLO was concerned.

Then, as they were withdrawing, the Israeli forces gave over the border area to the troops of Major Saad Haddad. So in fact, the protection of the border was denied to the UN, and they never had any troops along the frontier of Israel with Lebanon. Therefore, it is not possible to charge the UN with failing in their responsibility. The prime responsibility sat with Major Saad Haddad to look after the Israeli border, but in fact, it made the job of the UN totally impossible, because there were these tiger spots, and the PLO operating out of their camps. All the UN could do was to confine them to their respective areas. And all along the southern belt, there was Major Haddad.

So the UN troops were rather like the salami in a sandwich. As a matter of fact, if the General Commander of the UN troops wanted to enter his own camp, he required the permission of Major Haddad to go, because his troops had a roadblock. And similarly, the Palestinians had a roadblock on the River Litani. So, if you wanted to receive supplies from Beirut, it had to be with the approval of the Palestinians. The whole thing was absolutely ridiculous.

Between the UN deployment, there was a large gap which the Christian forces had kept. The UN was not allowed to be deployed in that area. So result was that the Christians, or the anti-Israelis, were using it for retaliatory raids, and the PLO were also using the same when they wanted to enter the area. The UN had no choice but to accept this almost impossible role -- a role which everyone realized could never be effectively carried out -- because it was so important to end fighting, it was so important to arrange the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from Lebanon. It was so important to do as much as was possible to prevent an escalation of fighting between the PLO and the Israelis in order to help American diplomacy to succeed in coping with the situation in Lebanon.

Now, in turning to a multinational force that is not a UN force, is that a measure of the de-legitimization of the UN in this process, the dissatisfaction of the actors with this very difficult mission that you've just described?

Not really. Firstly, regional systems can legitimately establish any form of agreements for their security. Similarly, alliances are accepted. There are NATO, the Warsaw Pact, other alliances. As long as nations agree and there is consent on the part of the countries which accept a military presence, what has been done is perfectly legal in international law.

The situation which arose in the first case of a multinational force in the Sinai was that, all along the negotiations to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United States was the negotiator acceptable to all the parties, and the United States and the Soviet Union had a meeting which led to their being co-chairmen of any of the agreements which were finally ratified in Geneva. The purposes of this arrangement are quite clear. Firstly, the Soviet Union is the other superpower in the Security Council. Secondly, the Soviet Union was supporting Syria and the PLO. There were other countries supporting the PLO, but that's one of the main suppliers for weapons systems and so on. If you want to resolve a conflict, it is extremely important that you bring parties to the conflict to the negotiating table as well as those who support those parties, in this case the two superpowers: one side supporting Israel but otherwise acceptable to the Arabs as a negotiator, and the Soviet Union, which was supporting Syria.

As they moved toward the Camp David Accord, the Israeli position became very clearly opposed to any role for the Soviet Union. With that very strong opposition, President Carter decided to exclude the Soviet Union from the subsequent process which led to the Camp David Accord. This is also the time in which you will appreciably see a gradual change in the policy of the Carter administration in its relations with the Soviet Union. So it was not only the Israeli insistence to exclude the Soviet Union, it also suited American diplomacy to exclude the Soviet Union. Now, the Camp David Accord has written in it that there will be a force to be deployed in the Sinai. What an assumption, what a naïve assumption, when the Soviet Union is being totally excluded from any part of the negotiations!

So when the time came to start implementing the agreement, the question had to be brought to the Security Council. Well, the Security Council never met to consider this issue because the Soviets did not recognize the Camp David Accord. And the Soviets were not alone in not recognizing the Camp David Accord, because the other parties had not been consulted. Therefore, it became impossible to keep the second UNEF, which was already in the area. There was no way for it to be redeployed. It had to be pulled out at the end of its mandate. And so the United States and the other countries had to think in terms of there being another arrangement.

But what is very interesting, and this is something most of us tend to forget very quickly, is that Mr. Begin absolutely insisted, to the end, that it should be a UN peacekeeping force. So it shows you what the real attitude of Israel is toward the United Nations. Egypt, of course, very much wanted and was extremely embarrassed that it could not be a UN force and very much hoped [it could be]. However, Mr. Begin made it extremely difficult toward the final implementation of the agreement, because the agreement said there should be a UN force, and it was no longer possible to have a UN force.

However, the UN refused to accept the responsibility, and a multi-national force was included. Now this multi-national force, what is its responsibility? Already, there's peace signed between Egypt and Israel, so why have a peacekeeping force? It is simply a force which has been introduced for a very short time to create a sufficient degree of confidence between the two countries, who had started normalizing their relationship, to overcome the years of war, the years of fighting, the years of animosity, so that some minor incident does not lead to a re-opening of the conflict and ruin the whole thing. Therefore, it's a force which is primarily there for confidence building. Their job is already assured as long as the two governments do not radically change their attitude, which is most unlikely. You know, after you've signed a peace treaty, it's rather difficult for a nation to proceed to war. The multi-national force in Lebanon, of course, is a very different arrangement.

Now why is it there that first the UN was accused, or charged, that they were not playing a role? I explained to you that, on my view, Israel had at least something to do with the failure of UNEF. I'm not saying they were the only people. Surely the PLO could have cooperated more, considering that the major support of the Palestinian independence movement has come from the United Nations. But certainly, Israel equally had its responsibility for the failure of UNEF carrying out its full responsibility.

Before the Israelis went in for the second invasion, or even subsequent to the second invasion, what is very interesting is that the first people in the city of Beirut were the United Nations observers. There always have been, you never hear about them because somehow people are not told many facts of life. They played an extremely important role, humanitarian business, trying to do what they could to prevent fighting.

Then all throughout this period, through 1975, there has been a UN force on the Golan Heights. You have never heard anyone asking for the removal of that force because it protects a flank of Israel, just as it protects a flank of Syria. So therefore, Golan Heights was safe enough and they could devote their attention to the problems in Lebanon. There are some 300 UN military observers deployed in the area, including 36 Americans and 36 Russians. All play an extremely important role. Their headquarters are in Jerusalem, with a major general in command who is constantly seeing the Israelis.

Several other agreements are being supervised by the United Nations. All the UN agencies are represented in Israel. The Israeli authorities and their representatives in the United Nations are continuously in contact with the secretary-general. So there is one avowed, or declared, UN policy [in Israel], and there is another one which is actually carried out. So that brings us to, why not the UN to do the multinational force? Well, there are serious questions about the Israeli intervention in Beirut. It was clearly intended to remove the PLO by military action, to establish a government which is friendly to Israel, like Jordan, with whom they have had very good relations all this time.

Both these actions, that is, a neighboring state directly interfering in establishing a government, are unlikely to be supported by anyone in the United Nations, including the government of the United States. And so therefore, who should they ask to pull out? They realized they'd have to pull out, they couldn't really stay. The Israeli people would not want their troops to stay. In fact, they want them out. They would like to have them out, as long as their security is guaranteed, as long as they can be assured that the PLO will not be able to attack them again, naturally. But who can they trust most? How can you explain to your own nation that you have fought a war and then turned over the area of your occupation to a UN force, which you've said earlier is unreliable? And so, that becomes one very good reason to go outside the UN.

The second reason is that Israel has obliged the United States to be directly involved in this conflict, not only as a mediator, where it is playing an important role. You will recall that the monitoring stations in the Sinai, when the first UN force was established after the '73 war, the Americans had to assume responsibility on the Israelis's insistence because it was committing the government of the United States directly in a peacekeeping responsibility. And so we have here exactly the same situation. It is committing the United States government directly in a peacekeeping responsibility. There are Italians and the French, but the Italians and the French have also been in UNFL. They are in UNFL -- Italian aircraft, French troops are in UNFL south of the Litani. So what's the new factor? The United States presence. And persuading the United States to accept a much larger responsibility in the furtherance of their interests. This is the way I look upon it.

Now, when the extension of the UN force in Lebanon came up again, which has stayed there even after the Israelis went through, there's been no objection to their extension. They have been extended for six months, up to July. And in every plan which has been put forward by the United States, by the Saudis, by the Lebanese, there's a role for United Nations troops to play. I don't think the Israelis deny that, [but] they would prefer that if they are (and there will be demands for further withdrawals), they would rather turn over those areas to a larger multinational force.

So to sum up the role of the multinational force, we have to agree that it has played a very useful role in this diplomatic process, in furthering the process of negotiations, for which responsibility has been with the United States. Therefore, I say that any diplomatic tool which is acceptable to the parties should be used to the best advantage. But we realize quite clearly that a multinational force of this kind which has not been structured in the regular command, like even the MNF in the Sinai, or like the United Nations forces, is not able to stay there very long. It is therefore a temporary period. It can stay there as long as American troops do not get involved in a serious brush, because then there'd be questions under the War Powers Act and perhaps even the Congress would not like to continue the presence of the American troops in the area.

So therefore, even from the American diplomatic point of view, even in the long-range interests of the Arabs and Israelis, this going to be a long term problem to solve. They will have to think in terms of there being some United Nations military presence.

I hear you saying that peacekeeping forces are not a deus ex machina, that to work, they have to reflect the political realities on the ground in a particular area, and at the UN.

Absolutely, I agree with that. I agree with your assessment.

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