Glick and Bayefsky on The Cease-Fire

Artuz Sheva offers the following summary of the points made by Caroline Glick and international legal scholar Prof. A. Bayefsky in their damning analysis of the UN cease-fire, An Unmitigated Disaster.

* Responsibility for determining compliance is 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."

* No mention of Hizbullah-patrons Syria or Iran, thus ignoring the regional aspect
of the war.

* Rewarding Hizbullah's aggression by giving international legitimacy to its demand for territory - namely, the Shaba Farms - via acts of aggression. 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allowing Lebanon to make territorial claims on Israel despite the fact that in 2000 the UN determined that Israel had withdrawn to the international border, the resolution sets a catastrophic precedent for the future.

* Though Israel had demanded an an arms embargo against Hizbullah, this issue is put off to a vague date in the future - and the power to oversee such an embargo is placed in the hands of the Lebanese government, of which Hizbullah is a member.

* The resolution calls upon Israel to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon even before Lebanese and UNIFIL forces are fully deployed in the area - creating a vacuum allowing Hizbullah to reinforce its positions in south Lebanon.

* The resolution makes no operative call for the release of IDF soldiers Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev being held hostage by Hizbullah. "By relegating their fate to a paragraph in the preamble, which then immediately turns to Hizbullah's demand for the release of Lebanese terrorists held in Israeli jails, the resolution all but eliminates any possibility of their returning home."

* It should be assumed that Hizbullah's presumptive victory in its war against Israel will act as a catalyst for violence by Hizbullah allies in Iraq against the Iraqi government and coalition forces in the weeks to come.

* Iran emerges as the main victor in the current war.

* By handing a victory to Hizbullah, the resolution strengthens the belief of millions of supporters of jihad throughout the world that their side is winning and that they should redouble efforts to achieve their objectives of destroying Israel and running the US out of the Middle East.

Of course, Olmert can always spring into action--reiterating for the umpteenth time that he is still going to plow ahead with the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

It's hard to find anything positive about the cease-fire--other than the fact it serves as a reason to remove Olmert from office.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Lebanon and UN and Hizbollah and Hezbollah.