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Illusions of False Security

(New York Sun) Hillel Halkin - The Israeli raid on a Jericho jail last week was yet another lesson in the futility of third-party intervention in situations of national conflict. The captured men - five of them convicted, in a rare Palestinian trial of terrorists, of assassinating Israeli cabinet minister Rehavam Zeevi - were imprisoned as part of an American-brokered deal that ended a 2002 Israeli siege of Arafat's Ramallah compound, in which they had taken refuge. The agreement was that they would be incarcerated in Jericho, with U.S. and British observers posted in the jail to make sure they didn't escape. It was last week's hasty departure of these observers, concerned for their safety under a Hamas government, that led to the Israeli action. In a word, as long as the PA was committed to keeping the men in prison, the observers were unnecessary. The minute there was a need for the observers, they vanished, obeying instructions from their superiors. Such is the fate of international interventions of this kind. They work perfectly when they are superfluous and collapse the minute they are not. This was similar to the UN peacekeeping force that fled Sinai in May 1967, paving the way for the Six-Day War. For Israel, the lesson is clear. Neutral "peacekeepers" between it and the Arab states are always undesirable.
2006-03-22 00:00:00
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