One of the big ideas to solve the current crisis seems to be creating an international force, under the auspices of the UN, and inserting them into southern Lebanon to form a buffer between Israel and 'Lebanon proper'. This is a very odd idea, and I really would like to know why the people promoting it aren't being advised to quietly drop it. It's a very odd idea for a few reasons:

• There is already an international force, under the auspices of the UN, in southern Lebanon, and there has been one there since 1978. UNIFIL, the UN Interim Force In Lebanon, was created in 1978 under Security Council resolutions 425 and 426, and currently has about 2000 staff. If the suggestions were to change UNIFIL's mandate and provide them with more manpower, that might make sense, but suggesting a new force is simply pointless - but see below.
• UNIFIL have been consistently rather useless, anyway. Nominally, they are there "...for the purpose of confirming the withdrawal of Israeli forces, restoring international peace and security, and assisting the Government of Lebanon in ensuring the return of its effective authority in the area..." and I think it's fair that none of those goals have been achieved, with the possible exception of confirming the Israeli withdrawal, which firstly needed a separate UN mission anyway, and secondly has remained a point of contention, with Syria and Lebanon refusing the accept the withdrawal. I will not say that no UN force could be useful, but...
• Any new force would have to have a pretty wide and powerful mandate, if they were going to get anything done. UNIFIL effectively have no mandate to use any sort of force, at any time, with the possible exception of defending themselves against a direct attack. They are effectively there as observers, with no real power to influence events. The new force would have to be able to use force to promote their goals - which would effectively be the same as UNIFIL's goals, I assume, but in a sense of enforcing them rather than observing an optimistic process towards them. The new force would have to have the power, for example, to fire on Hizbollah missile launchers, and probably on Israeli planes or even troops. I can't see that happening.
• The big problem with the current conflict - the thing which marks it out from all other clashes between Israel and Hizbollah - is range: long-range Hizbollah missiles, and Israeli willingness to make long-range attacks into Lebanon. Until 2000, Israel held a buffer zone in south Lebanon, similar to the current proposed UN-staffed/-enforced area, which was enough to prevent most missile attacks, since the weaponry Hizbollah was using at the time wasn't long-range enough to reach any major cities in Israel from north of the security zone. Even after the Israeli withdrawal, the accepted range of katyushas meant that while they could be a danger and an annoyance in northern Israel, they weren't a serious threat. It's an interesting, though slightly academic, question to wonder how long Hizbollah has had the long-range missiles they're using now - did they have then before the Israeli withdrawal, or did they only obtain them relatively recently? Either way, to genuinely defend northern Israel, the UN force would have to cover a pretty significant area of southern Lebanon, not just the border zone. Israel, of course, with long-range missiles, naval guns, and high-tech aircraft, can effectively hit any part of Lebanon - but I believe that if there were no threat from Hizbollah, there would be no threat from Israel - as I've said before, I honestly don't think Israel has any natural conflict with Lebanon, except for that manufactured by Hizbollah, and I think with them out of the way, that could be a peaceful border. Not a friendly one - not for a while, anyway, and not while the UN was manning it rather than Lebanese - but a peaceful one, which is all anyone really needs for now.

For what it's worth, we did see UN vehicles driving around northern Israel - they have (had?) a base of some sort near Rosh Hanikra, right in the corner where the border meets the coast, although it wasn't military vehicles - mainly large 4x4s (SUVs), painted white, with just the big black letters UN on the side. We also bumped into soldiers - mainly Irish, as I recall - on R&R in Nahariya, with blue berets tucked into their epaulettes and UN badges on their arms, and they always seemed like decent blokes. I don't particularly have anything against the UN troops who are there; they didn't do very much, but at least they didn't do very much wrong, and they didn't have the mandate, the force or the local support to do what should have been their real job: clearing out a terrorist militia which was occupying south Lebanon, and restoring control of their southern border to the sovereign Government of Lebanon.

Should there be a new force in Lebanon, or a beefed-up UNIFIL with more people, more weapons, and a much stronger mandate? I wouldn't say no, but I don't think it's going to happen, and I don't think it would do much good. I don't think there is the international will to send more troops into the Middle East with an interventionism mandate, to send soldiers in explicitly to enforce a buffer between two warring parties - Iraq is sucking up enough international effort, not to mention casualties and money, that I can't see it happening. I also can't see there being the will to give any new force a strong enough mandate for them to do what needs to be done, since it would almost have to be an invasion force. Finally, I simply can't see it happening quickly enough for it to have that much of an immediate effect - I don't think things are going to go on all that much longer as they are - I really hope they don't - if for no other reason than the Americans and other influential foreign groups (EU, UN, Arab League, etc.) will start putting serious diplomatic pressure on Israel, Syria and Iran to calm things down in a few days. I think it's pretty unlikely that any significant UN military action could happen in a timeframe shorter than a few months - it's not the most nimble body...

Technorati tags: israel lebanon terrorism un hizbollah

Thanks to Tree Hugger for the first ever comment on this blog - I did only turn comments on last week - and Eastcost for the email. I was away for the weekend and things have just been getting worse - at least one of the things I was talking about last week is simply no longer true. The rockets being used by Hizbollah now are not the katyushas they were using in 1995 - firstly, katyusha is somewhat of a generic term used to mean rockets of that class, rather than any particular munition, and secondly, they have newer rockets with significantly longer range and significantly higher destructive power. They have, of course, come from Iran through Syria, as most of Hizbollah's weapons do.

As I mentioned last week, in 2000 Israel pulled out from their occupation of southern Lebanon, unilaterally. It was the action of a new government, which had promised such a withdrawal as part of their campaign platform, and oddly they followed through on their promise, unlike almost all campaign promises from almost all political parties in almost all the world. Lebanon had become Israel's Vietnam - or in more modern terms Iraq - the place where you sent young soldiers, who would often come back injured or not at all - the place parents were scared for their sons (usually) to be, but where it didn't seem like they were actually achieving anything or doing anything which had a visible end. Things had been relatively quiet along the border, and as relations with Jordan and Egypt were stable, and things were progressing with the Palestinians, it seemed that it might be safe to pull back to the border and, while still maintaining it as an actively defended area, end the occupation. The Israelis went ahead and did this - again, as I said yesterday, to the satisfaction of the UN, but not Syria and Lebanon - and there are plenty of symbolic photographs online of Israeli soldiers locking the border gate behind them, their Lebanese allies fleeing, and Hizbollah terrorists - not Lebanese police or soldiers - waving flags at the retreating Israelis. It seemed, at the time, despite the fighting which preceded the pull-out, and the symbolic value of what seemed to be a retreat under fire, that it had been a success - cross-border attacks didn't significantly increase in either number or strength, and Israeli casualties in the area were significantly reduced.

In March of last year, I went to Israel for the first time in years. I was going to see if I wanted to move there, and I decided that I did, notwithstanding the fact that the plan was delayed - not derailed - by my moving to Hong Kong for a while first. While I was there, I, of course, drove up to Netuah, to see my old haunts, to surprise and confuse my adopted family (who hadn't seen me in 9 years), and generally to reconnect. It never once crossed my mind that I was a mile or two from the nearest Hizbollah post, that I was back in katyusha range for the first time in years, that I was quite possibly invalidating my travel insurance - I was going back to an old home, as everyone like to do every now and again. Honestly, when I move to Israel, I will probably end up living in the centre of the country - in the areas defined by the cities of Tel Aviv, Haifa or Jerusalem - but I expect I will visit Netuah, Nahariya and Ma'alot regularly, since they were places where I had good times, where I was comfortable and at home. That area is now right in the middle of the current problems. Actually, that's not quite true. Over the weekend, as Hizbollah has rolled out the longer-range missiles, they've been going a bit further, but they've still been dropping shorter-range katyushas over the border. I have been keeping an eye out, but while I've seen plenty of familiar names in the Israeli press this week, I haven't seen Netuah mentioned.

According to the BBC archives online, the last Israeli soldier left Lebanon at about 3:45 in the morning on 24th May 2000. I would be shocked to learn that at that moment, there weren't detailed plans filed away in the Israeli Ministry of Defense regarding re-occupation, destroying Hizbollah, or taking Lebanon apart piece by piece. The withdrawal was largely a political move, not a military one, but the Israel Defence Forces are, understandably, a large and powerful body, and while there may not have been orders anything like those plans - or even orders to make the plans - I have no doubt that the military planners will have done their job and laid down the plans. Last week, it seems those plans were put into action.

I cannot say exactly what Israel's aims are. It's pretty clear that they are not just trying to get back their hostages - in fact, to be blunt, I would have to say that the only honest thing to do right now is to consider those two man as casualties - if they are rescued, it would be a great thing, but other soldiers have been lost in Lebanon, and it feels like more will be in the future. Ron Arad is an Israeli air force officer who was captured in 1986 in Lebanon, with clear proof that he was taken alive. There have been a couple of other snippets of information since then, but it seems that he is probably dead. He has a 20-year old daughter who has never known her father other than as a hostage - in this case, a true prisoner of war. Israel has engaged in prisoner swaps with Hizbollah before, but for one reason or another the decision was taken this time that things have gone too far - it's past time for negotiations, particularly when the catalyst is a terrorist attack with the explicit aim of taking hostages.

As a moral issue, there is a terrible problem here. The actions of Hizbollah are absolutely not the actions of the sovereign government of Lebanon, yet Hizbollah are an active member of that government. Israel has no interest in going to war with Lebanon at this point - if nothing else, they've got enough to deal with in Gaza - but acts of war are being committed from Lebanese territory. People are calling on the Lebanese government to restrain or even disarm Hizbollah, which, it's true, is their responsibility under international law - but completely and utterly misses the point. Lebanon, until last week, has been going through a period of relative stability and prosperity, after the Israeli withdrawal in 2000 followed by the Syrian withdrawal last year, but everybody in the country older than their late 20s will remember the civil war(s). For quite a long time, Lebanon was torn to pieces by fighting between different Muslim and Christian groups, which took it from being one of the most stable and successful Middle Eastern states until the early/mid 1970s to being a wreck, on the verge of a 'failed state', with Israel and Syria no doubt making things worse. The Lebanese government may have the physical strength to restrain or disarm Hizbollah - and even that is questionable - but there's no way they have the will. It would mean consciously and voluntarily restarting the civil war, and there's simply no way that's going to happen.

Unfortunately, I also don't think Israel is going to be able to 'defeat' Hizbollah. They are a terrorist army, with a religious/ethnic background with powerful and rich foreign backers, and I can only think of 2 ways of defeating an army like that - removing their reason for existence (i.e. replacing at least Israel and Lebanon with Islamic states), or wiping out a significant proportion of their membership and resources, while at the same time removing their backers. Neither of those things are going to happen. There are three possible positive outcomes I can see - positive for Israel, but also, in an optimistic light, positive for Lebanon:

• Hizbollah's capabilities are severely weakened. From reading analyses online, and from what I know, they don't have a huge stockpile of weapons - particularly not the more advanced ones being used for things like shots at Haifa and ships. Hopefully, by the time things are over, they will need some time to re-arm, so things will go into a de facto calm due to lack of ammunition. Of course, this assumes they can't get supplies from Syria and Iran in a hurry, and that's one of the main reasons Israel has been attacking roads and bridges from Syria into Lebanon.
• The 'international community' sees Hizbollah as they are - a radical Islamic organisation, which carries out significant terrorist activities - to be fair, along with non-terrorist activities - and which is funded, supplied and largely controlled by Syria and Iran, not the most stable or peaceful regimes themselves. There does appear to be a reasonably wide consensus at the moment that Israel is striking against people who are attacking civilians, and that their actions are therefore just - but that sort of consensus is pretty fragile and could tip over at any time, most likely due to a tragedy like a misplaced bomb hitting a sensitive civilian target.
• Between pressure from Israel, pressure from the 'international community', and pressure from their own people, combined with the weakened state of Hizbollah, the Lebanese government manages to fulfill their responsibilities and take back their sovereign land from Hizbollah. Israel and Lebanon are not friends, and will not be for quite a while - hopefully, not as long as you might think - it only took 6 years from Israel and Egypt to go from a state of war to a state of stable, if cold, peace - but I for one would far far prefer to see Lebanese soldiers on the border than Islamic terrorists.

There are more thoughts to come. Given my speed of writing, I hope that by then I'll be writing a retrospective - that things will have calmed down - but I doubt it. I think the immediate conflict will continue for at least another week, leading to significant casualties on both sides. I can only hope that, as I suggested above happened with Egypt, this will be the conflict which, in the future, will be looked back on as the one which cleared enough stuff up to allow a stable peace in northern Israel and southern Lebanon. I fear for my friends in Israel and, as I've said, I bear no malice towards the Lebanese - I would very much like to see a stable and successful Lebanon, and I don't see any reason why - with Syria largely gone, and their proxies hopefully on the way out - that shouldn't happen.

Technorati tags: israel lebanon terrorism

From September 1994 to August 1995, I lived in Israel. I was doing an organised program, between school and university, run by the Zionist Movement (or one of its agencies, anyway), for active leaders in Zionist youth movements throughout the world. The way the program works is that different groups send their people to a central study program in Jerusalem for about 4.5 months, and also have a 6.5 month or so program elsewhere in the country, doing community work, with continuity provided by having people from the same groups go to the same areas year after year. I took part in the program under the auspices of AJ6, the Association of Jewish 6th-Formers, originally started as a splinter or spin-off from the Union of Jewish Students, which is a very active national organisation in the UK. So, from September 1994 to February 1995, I lived in Jerusalem, with around 50 other kids, studying 8 hours a day, and from February 1995 to August of that year, I lived in a tiny little moshav (village) called Netuah, right on the Israel-Lebanon border, approximately 20km inland from the Med. It's a beautiful part of the world, if a little rugged, with mostly friendly people - although again, they can be a little rugged. It's green, it's hilly, there are streams, wide vistas, clean air, the most incredible views of the night sky I've even seen - it's nice. When I was there, there was no cable TV in the village, and most people didn't have a satellite dish, and it was before Internet access got universal - although one of the projects I worked on was a regional dial-in network for schools, pupils, teachers and parents - so it was quite isolated, in a good way for us as visitors, but not necessarily so good for locals. Apart from the economic and social issues caused by the isolation, the main problem in the area was terrorism.

One of the things which gets confusing when talking about Israel is what the various lines on the map around her edges (or in some cases outside) actually are, and what they mean. A border is a line drawn on a map between two countries, recognised by those two countries and the 'international community' as a whole - normally in the form of a treaty or other formal agreement between the countries, recognised by the UN. Until 1979, Israel didn't really have any proper borders at all - mainly cease-fire lines, a significant proportion of which weren't even on international boundaries, since Gaza and the West Bank weren't part of any country, but were firstly occupied by Egypt and Jordan (respectively), then by Israel in 1967. With the signing of the peace treaties with Egypt in 1979, then with Jordan in 1994, those countries accepted borders with Israel, and they are now stable and reasonable secure borders, with relatively small, but highly significant, amounts of commercial and tourist travel crossing them. In the north, however, things were, and remain, different.

Israel has, from pretty much the beginning, had a stable border with Lebanon. There are unused border crossings at a couple of points, and one particular location is known as the Good Fence, because in the past things were calm enough there that there was a small amount of informal commerce across it. Without going into the background (now!), in 1970 there was something close to a civil war in Jordan, the result of which was that the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation - an umbrella body covering most of the non-Islamic Palestinian terror/liberation groups, in particular Fatah, the movement of Yasser Arafat, and Mahmoud Abbas) was expelled from its former base in Jordan and ended up relocating in southern Lebanon, a convenient location from which to continue attacking Israel. Lebanon, at the time, was relatively stable, and is unique in the Middle East for being a somewhat democratic, reasonable 'modern' (i.e. Western) and secular, or at least multi-cultural republic. Unfortunately, this fell apart in the mid-1970s, leading to a civil war largely along religious and tribal lines, which was doubtless made worse by the fact that both the Syrian army (in the east) and the Israeli army (in the south) intervened, partly to support those groups they supported, and partly to gain some control over Lebanon for their own purposes. Until 1982, the Israeli army didn't tend to stay in Lebanon - rather, they attacked over the border - but in 1982, the attacks from Lebanon into Israel became strong enough that the Israeli government decided to invade and maintain control over a buffer zone in south Lebanon.

I used to get the school bus to work - I was working at a primary (elementary) school, as a teaching assistant. Since the school served a region consisting almost entirely of small villages, there were a few bus routes, bringing children in from all the villages, and dropping them off at different schools along the way. I had noticed - I couldn't fail to notice! - that there was a large sculpture outside one of the bigger schools (not mine), but it took me quite a while to work out what it was. In May 1974, there had been an incursion of terrorists from Lebanon, who first attacked and commandeered a van, then drove it to the town of Ma'alot, where they ended up taking over a school where children were sleeping after a day out hiking. They demanded terrorist prisoners be released, and threatened the children. The Israeli government decided, after negotiations apparently failed, to send in an elite army unit to try to rescue the children, but by the end of the operation, all the terrorists and 21 children had been killed. That is what the sculpture was - a memorial to the 21 children killed in their own school as a result of a terrorist attack from Lebanon. There is no suggestion that these were Lebanese terrorists - they were Palestinians, based in south Lebanon, and attacking Israel from there.

I lived on the Israeli-Lebanese border for less than 7 months, during the period that Israel was holding the buffer zone. During that time, there were 6 significant rocket attacks from Lebanon, which came far enough into Israel to cause formal alerts. I spent three nights sleeping in a bomb shelter, and one of the attacks was strong enough that we were told, afterwards, that if it had continued a few hours longer, we'd have been evacuated to a safe area. The AJ6 group who were in Netuah in 1996, the next year, were evacuated due to activity on the border. In 2000, Israel unilaterally withdrew from south Lebanon, following the election of a Labour (left-wing) government which had the withdrawal as a campaign promise. Israel and the UN consider that after the withdrawal, Israel should no longer be considered to be occupying Lebanese territory, but Lebanon and Syria dispute this. There is an area, commonly called the Shebaa Farms in English, around where the boundaries of the three countries meet, still held by Israeli troops - Lebanon and Syria consider this area to be part of Lebanon and therefore occupied Lebanon, while Israel and the UN consider it part of Syria and therefore occupied Syria, leaving no Lebanese land occupied. To be honest, as a cynic, I think that Lebanon and Syria do truly believe it to be part of Lebanon, but only as a convenience to provide support for Lebanon remaining part of a 'united front' against Israel.

I don't like the fact that Israelis in absolutely undisputed land (as long as Israel herself has the right to exist) had to live under threat of rocket attacks. I don't like that every house and building has to be built with a safe room, with reinforced walls and metal shutters. I find it absolutely tragic that the local children laughed at us panicking during our first attack, because they are so used to it - no children, anywhere on the planet, should be subjected to enough violence that they become used to it. I can, however, understand and appreciate the rational, the justification for those attacks. At the time - and again, no-one sane is going to dispute this, I think - Israel held Lebanese territory, as a buffer zone to protect northern Israel - to protect villages like my Netuah - purely as a military occupation. There was no suggestion that this was liberated Israeli land, or that Israel had any long-term or natural right to be there - it was purely a security arrangement. I can understand the Lebanese disagreeing with that, and I can understand their fighting against it. I don't condone attacks on civilians by anybody - Israel against Lebanese or Lebanese against Israelis (and me!), but they were fighting an occupation. That, however, is not the case anymore.

Yesterday, with all that is going on in Gaza (also, not the subject of this post), Hizbollah decided that the time was right to heat things up on the northern border again. Hizbollah is an interesting organisation - it is Lebanese, not Palestinian, and it is mainstream in Lebanon. In its region - the southern part of the country - Hizbollah is the dominant political and welfare organisation, it has MPs in the Lebanese national parliament, and it effectively provides local government, security and so on in the south, to the extent that the border is really between Israel and Hizbollah, with the border between Lebanon and Hizbollah being somewhat further north. On the other hand, Hizbollah is largely funded by Iran and controlled by Syria. It used to be said that you knew there was an Hizbollah attack coming whenever there was any sign of peace or positive contacts between Syria and Israel, because Syria would use Hizbollah as the stick, the bad cop, either to push things along or pull them back, depending on what mood they were in.

First, they fired some katyushas. These are relatively small, truck- or even shoulder-launched missiles, without a huge range or warhead, and without much accuracy. They can fire it towards a town and have a reasonable chance of hitting the town, but anything smaller (like the smaller villages in the area) aren't easy targets. Apparently they managed to hit - I read reports of people taken to hospital from Shutla, Zar'it and Fassuta. Zar'it I visited a few times, Shtula I worked on a summer camp in, and Fassuta I only visited once. Zar'it and Shtula are both small moshavim, like Netuah, with regular people trying to earn a living and bring their kids up. Fassuta, on the other hand, is an interesting target, and I would hope or assume an accidental one. Fassuta is a decent-sized Arab village, just across the valley from Netuah, which we wandered into one weekend when we were bored. At the time, I would say it was a sane thing to do, if a little pointless, but since the debacle of 2000 (Arab rioting in Israel, which subsequent governments have completely failed to come to terms with and deal with the aftermath of) it would be a little risky. So, I assume no-one in Lebanon was aiming for Fassuta, but I would say that if they hit it, there's a pretty good chance they were aiming for Netuah - aiming for my friends, my students, my adopted family.

There should be more to come later... this is getting very long.

Technorati tags: israel lebanon terrorism

According to Wikipedia, Hong Kong is the 4th most densely-populated territory or country on the planet. Incidentally, I've been to Macau (number 1) a few times, Monaco (2nd) on a family holiday many years ago, Singapore (3rd) airport a couple of times, and I've got a weekend away booked there next month, Gibraltar (5th) quite a few times and, well, I've been near to Gaza (6th), but I have no desire to enter the Strip. Within the top 10, Hong Kong is the largest in terms of area, by a significant margin, and it's not until Bangladesh at number 12 that there is an entry in the list which isn't a micro-, city- or island state/territory.

On the other hand, only 30% to 40% of Hong Kong is developed. There are various reasons for this - some political, some economic, some purely geographic, but it's a fact that huge tracts of land are green, even on Hong Kong Island, the Manhattan of Hong Kong. A significant amount of the undeveloped land is like that because it's 'mountainous' - vertical enough that it would take a significant effort to develop it, effort which is certainly not beyond the resources or ambition of Hong Kong property developers, but they tend to create new land horizontally rather than vertically.

The upshot of this is that where Hong Kong is developed, it's very developed, but where it's undeveloped, it tends to be green and pleasant. There are areas in the New Territories which are low-rise, but even here in Tsuen Wan, the 10 storey existing buildings are starting to give way to 60-storey monsters. Another factor, however, and one I will discuss more at another time, is that Hong Kong is, in general, a small town. In particular, in this context, it means that (with the possible exception of somewhere deep in urban Kowloon) you're never really far from somewhere green - or blue-ish, if you come to water before hillside. Again, here in Tsuen Wan, sitting in an office on the 10th floor of a building in an industrial area, I can see a clean green hillside on the other side of town from the window. I can see less of it now that I could when I started here a year ago, and it's partially obscured by cloud at the moment, but it's less than 30 minutes walk away. I haven't checked, but I would estimate that in less than 30 minutes in a couple of other directions, I would be at a waterfront of some type - maybe not a nice promenade, but a break from big buildings.

This green land is not parkland, in the UK style - it's not green space carved out from within the urban area. It's undeveloped land, has never been developed, and is not surrounded by developed land - the boundary is the boundary between the city and the 'country'. There are lots of walks, and areas like beaches and abandoned villages in the undeveloped regions, and they're easy to get to, by bus or ferry, depending on where they are.

So, people have an image of Hong Kong as an overdeveloped, densely-populated urban wasteland. It's true, and it's not true. Where it's urban, it's overdeveloped and densely-populated - but most of Hong Kong is simply not like that, and a few minutes walking (or a lot less minutes on public transport) will take to you open green land from almost anywhere in Hong Kong. Plus, we've got one of the best harbours in the world - not quite Sydney, but close - again, overdeveloped where it's developed, but 30 minutes on a ferry will take you to somewhere where you will only see green hills, brown rocks and yellow beaches coming out of the water. Oh, and the Lamma power station, but there's not much you can do about that...

This post was meant to follow a nice weekend, spending Saturday on an almost-empty beach, and Sunday up on the Peak getting lost. That was a couple of weeks ago and I'm a slow writer - so sue me.

Technorati tags: hongkong