June 11, 2013, A Viennese Whirl By SHMUEL ROSNER JERUSALEM — Who’s to blame for the mess in the Middle East? The culprits were already many, but Austria has just made the list. The Austrian government announced last week that it would withdraw its 380 soldiers from the 1,000-strong U.N. force that has been monitoring the shaky cease-fire between Syria and Israel since shortly after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. The decision, prompted by security concerns, comes at an especially delicate time: The war between Assad’s regime and the rebels in Syria is threatening to destabilize a border that has remained relatively calm for four decades. The Israeli government wasn’t exactly surprised by the news, but it wasn’t pleased either. When I called Yigal Kipnis, an Israeli historian and the author of “The Golan Heights: Political History, Settlement and Geography since 1949,” he said: “International peacekeeping forces are great as long as they aren’t needed.” (He then reminded me how in 1967, at the request of the Egyptian government, another U.N. force evacuated the Sinai Peninsula as the crisis that would lead to the Six-Day War was revving up.) The prime minister of Israel put the matter less sarcastically in a cabinet meeting Sunday: For him, the Austrians’ departure shows why Israel “cannot place its security in the hands of international forces.” We Israelis may be paranoid at times, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get us. The presence of peacekeeping troops in southern Lebanon, mandated in U.N. Resolution 1701 in 2006, has not achieved its goal of disarming Hezbollah, the terrorist group backed by Iran, or of helping the government of Lebanon exercise “its authority throughout the territory.” Hezbollah remains a powerful political and military organization, with tens of thousands of missiles aimed at Israel. And as one Israeli official told the Jerusalem Post recently, the Border Assistance Mission at the Gaza Strip, which has been charged with monitoring the Rafah crossing since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, “ceased to function the minute Hamas came to power.” Rocket fire from that area has prompted Israel to launch two major military campaigns since the pullout. And now that the situation in Syria is heating up the Austrians are leaving the Golan Heights. You can’t really blame the Austrian government for not wanting to risk the lives of its troops. On the other hand, what’s the point of having international forces at all if they are pulled out when things get tough? The immediate lesson, for Israel, is that it can trust none but its own forces to protect its borders. The long-term implication is that it should not commit to any peace agreement that is supposed to be enforced and monitored by international forces; at best, such soldiers might be counted on to lend some ceremonial flair to a well-established security arrangement. So much, then, for any deal for the establishment of a Palestinian state that would put, say, the Jordan Valley in the hands of some international monitoring body. The next time Europeans complain about Israel’s policies, it would be reasonable for Israel to redirect their protests to Vienna. By withdrawing its troops at the first sign of trouble, Austria, too, has undermined the prospects for peace in the Middle East. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Shmuel Rosner, an editor and columnist based in Tel Aviv, is senior political editor for The Jewish Journal.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 04:23:11 +0000
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