Resolution 1701: Israel's scam to withdraw from Lebanon that it blamed on the UN - opinion

Former US president Bill Clinton unwittingly highlighted the greatest double scam ever pulled on the Israeli people: that the Palestinians want a state; and that they negotiated for it in the “peace process.”

According to Clinton: The only time Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth was when he promised me he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out, which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel, and they got to choose where the 4% of Israel was. So they would have the effect of the same land of all the West Bank. They would have a capital in east Jerusalem. They would have the – I can hardly talk about this – and they would have equal access, all day, every day, to the security towns that Israel maintained all through the West Bank up to the Golan Heights. All this was offered, including, I will say it again, a capital in east Jerusalem and two of the four quadrants of the Old City of Jerusalem, confirmed by the Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and his cabinet, and they said, “No.” I think part of it is that Hamas did not care about a homeland for the Palestinians.

Leaving aside Clinton’s confidence that this was the only time Yasser Arafat had lied to him, and that 4% of Israel equates to 40% of the “West Bank,” not 4%, he clearly has not learned the most important lesson from the experience: The Palestinians, not just Hamas, do “not care about a homeland for the Palestinians.” The primary scam is that the Palestinians yearn for a state of their own, and so deeply is this scam etched onto the Western, including Israeli, elites’ psyches, that they even conceptualize Hamas as working against the interests of the Palestinians by jeopardizing their future homeland. Clinton is far from alone in redoubling his efforts in invoking the secondary scam that shields this primary scam: the so-called “peace process” to give them that homeland: I think we’re going to have to essentially start again on the peace process.

It is not clear why we have to restart a peace process that we did not end. So long as the Palestinians can keep this secondary scam going, there is little chance that the primary scam, that they want a state, will be exposed. The obvious paradigm shift is that if they do not want a state and they do not want peace, then, one way or another, they must be neutered. Thankfully, since October 7, 2023, it is a paradigm shift that the vast majority of Israelis now see the need to make. However, the Palestinians are not the only ones who need this scam and keep it going.

The Israeli Left needs the scam just as much as the Palestinians do, and have shown themselves willing to bring down their own democratically elected government to preserve it. The  not wanting a state – leaving aside what they might want instead – presents the Israeli Left with a major crisis. They can only live with themselves if they share the land. These people feel guilty that they have Israel, and they need the Palestinians so they have someone to share the land with and assuage their guilt. It is the Israeli equivalent of Western “white guilt” and “reparations for slavery”/”affirmative action”/”diversity, equity and inclusion,” etc. The Palestinians can thus rely on the very people they’re scamming to keep their double scam going. But this is not the only double scam with which the Israeli people have been hit.

The desperate Israeli government

The second double scam, rolling since August 2006, is UNSC Resolution 1701. This Israeli-drafted resolution has nothing to do with removing Hezbollah from Israel’s northern border and everything to do with helping an Israeli government desperate for a “diplomatic exit” from Lebanon; in other words, a fig leaf under which to escape. The Israeli government knew full well that their withdrawal would be unilateral. When it became obvious to all that Hezbollah was not complying with the terms of the resolution to withdraw to north of the Litani, Israel did nothing to enforce compliance, let alone rescind the resolution (itself an established pattern of behavior – e.g., the non-response to Egyptian violation of the treaty that ended the War of Attrition; and, more recently, Hamas’s refusal to release further captives after Israel, as agreed, increased the aid trucks from two to 200). To be fair, no one complained, except the Christian refugees.

The 1701 scam artist is the Israeli political and security establishment which eventually cast the UN’s non-enforcement as the cause of the “failure” of 1701, while the failure is the resolution itself, that was drafted (by Israel) so as to make a Hezbollah withdrawal to north of the Litani River unenforceable, or else no “agreement” would have been reached. This is quite apart from the fact that a Hezbollah withdrawal to north of the Litani would not make northern Israel safe from missile and rocket attack. The resolution, as a security document, is not worth the paper it is written on. The Israeli diplomat responsible for drafting the resolution, Tal Becker, admitted that “The resolution is far from perfect.” The victims of this primary scam are the Israeli people, who might soon become victims of a secondary scam that shields 1701.

Now that Israel has finally attacked Hezbollah in Lebanon, getting closer to eradicating it, the non-implementation of Resolution 1701 has become untenable. Now the US and others are suddenly very keen on enforcing the resolution by compelling Hezbollah to withdraw to north of the Litani River. This is the secondary scam, for the Litani River is too close to the Israeli border, especially at the southeast bend, where it comes to within three kilometers of the Golan Heights. The implementation will still come as a relief to some, perhaps many, Israelis. Had 1701 been drawn up properly in the first place, Hezbollah would have been confined to areas north of the Awali River, and not the Litani.

Thankfully, there are Israelis who see this scam for what it is, such as Brig.-Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi, and they have the potential to put a stop to this fraud once and for all. In an interview on October 31, General Avivi said:

We are in the position to create a reality where Hezbollah will also be dismantled according to Resolution 1559 and really change reality for generations, and not just do a ceasefire. Let Hezbollah survive it, and then in five or ten years we’ll have to go to war again. This doesn’t make sense. We need to eradicate them.

Unfortunately, the nonsense Avivi refers to remains all too prevalent in Israel. “Sending Hezbollah a clear message,” “make Hezbollah understand” that “If you hurt us, you will pay a heavy price,” etc., are still all too prevalent in Israeli discourse and doctrine. Too many Israelis still fail to understand that such “messages” do not deter Hezbollah, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Lions’ Den, and their like for the simple reason that if they fail to kill Jews, then they have no reason to exist.

It is not possible for them to “get the message,” no matter how “clear” Israelis imagine that message is. It is not possible for them to “understand,” for there is nothing to understand. They were created for no other purpose but to kill Jews. They are the organizational expression of the Palestinian raison d’être. Should the Palestinians ever manage to kill all the Jews, they will themselves cease to exist, for they would not know what to do with themselves after that, and set upon one another. Those who imagine that the Palestinians have the remotest interest in a state are impeding themselves. The same goes for those who imagine that Hezbollah and other jihad terrorist organizations will lay down their arms and settle nicely into parliamentary politics, just because they have been dealt a severe blow.

UNSC Resolution 1701 was not conceived as a “deal,” leaving aside the inappropriateness of even the idea of negotiation in the context of jihad. It could never have been the outcome of negotiations because that is not how jihad works. It is the same reason that the “peace process” will never deliver a deal. In jihad, there are only two possible outcomes: all or nothing. For as long as there are “experts” who insist on seeing the Middle East in terms of states interacting with states to attain “balance,” they will remain ineffective at best, dangerous at worst, because Islam is not the only ideology that must dominate.

Islam had been doing what it does for more than 1,000 years by the time nation states became the prevailing form of sovereignty. The international relations-geopolitics-conflict resolution paradigm is not only blind to, but dismissive of, this history and hence has squandered decades to produce exactly no peace at all in the Middle East.

General Amir Avivi represents a new direction. About the Palestinian Authority, the presumptive government of a future “Palestinian state,” General Avivi has this to say:

Both Iranians and the Palestinian Authority are heavily invested in promoting antisemitism. BDS, one of the leading organizations operating in universities, is managed by the Palestinian Authority and by Palestinian groups. Anybody who goes onto the BDS site and scrolls all the way down and sees who is managing BDS, it says BNC. BNC is the group of Palestinian organizations led by the Palestinian Authority. The Palestinian Authority is a strategic threat to Israel. Hamas was an operational tactical threat, but the Palestinian Authority is much more dangerous. It is a real strategic threat because it promotes delegitimization in The Hague, in the UN. It promotes antisemitism. It endangers the whole Jewish world, and it’s time to expose it. It’s time to bring down the Palestinian Authority also.

Avivi still hopes that his clear and tough stance will lead to peace with “those Palestinians who are prepared to accept Israel’s right to exist.” The realization that “Palestinian” and “Israel’s right to exist” are contradictions in terms still lies ahead of him, as does the idea that eradicating Hezbollah is necessary but not sufficient to bring peace. Other Shi’a will step forward to retake the land vacated by Hezbollah, just as others will replace Hamas to redeem “Muslim land,” honor will assuage humiliation, and it will be war all over again. When they are humiliated, they stay down.

Those currently forming the tip of the Israeli spear appreciate that it is not enough to destroy Hamas, but that “the ideology – they’re still too coy to say “Islam – of the Gazans needs to be eradicated, too. But they still believe this to be a matter of antisemitic school textbooks and “radical imams,” failing to see that that same ideology underpins every terrorist outfit in the Middle East and most far beyond. It is what every Arab Muslim child hears all around him all the time right from birth. The problem runs far deeper, and the solutions called for are far more radical than even the most radical Israelis currently appreciate. Thanks to Hamas’s October 7 misadventure, many are now well on their way to appreciating it. The drag on this healthy and promising development comes from those who cannot live with themselves unless they differentiate between Muslims and “Islamists” or “jihadists,” who are nothing more than the very best of Muslims. That is the mother of all double scams.■

Dr. Anjuli Pandavar is a British writer and social critic who holds a PhD in political economy. She was born into a Muslim family in apartheid South Africa, where she left Islam in 1979. She is preparing to convert to Judaism. A staunch defender of Israel, she is a constructive critic of the Jewish state when she believes it is warranted. She owns and writes on Murtadd to Human, where she may be contacted.