Mick Hartley

After a war it's normally understood that the victor will determine the peace conditions. That may be a transfer of land, or reparations payments, but at the very minimum it requires the defeated party to abandon its aims and accept the victor's terms. Except for Israel, that is. Israel keeps winning wars, but the defeated Arabs are never pressured to abandon their aims, or accept Israel's existence. It's just a question, for them, of waiting till the next time.

Or, as Shany Mor at UnHerd puts it, "any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war":

Across the West, diplomats and experts have settled on a consensus for solving the ongoing Arab-Israeli war — one that reveals exactly why international diplomatic efforts have consistently failed. At its core, this approach focuses on restoring the very ceasefire conditions which Lebanon and Hezbollah violated last year, while avoiding any mention of even the desirability of peace — something Lebanon would benefit from more than any other party. In failing to recognise this, our international diplomats embody all the pathologies and failures that have come to define their contribution to this decades-long conflict.

According to the Quai d’Orsay and the State Department, the formula for ending the war merely requires punching in the four-digit PIN code 1701. That, of course, is UN Security Council resolution 1701, the one that ended the last war back in 2006. The resolution included several clear obligations for all parties. Israel was to withdraw from Lebanese territory. Hezbollah was to move all its forces north of the Litani River, creating a buffer zone where the only permitted armed forces would be those of the UN peacekeeping force (UNIFIL) and the Lebanese Army (LFA). UNIFIL was to monitor and enforce these deployments. And Hezbollah was supposed to be decommissioned as an armed force inside sovereign Lebanese territory.

The first measure, Israeli withdrawal, was implemented within days of the resolution’s passage. The others were not. Once Israel’s withdrawal was complete, UNIFIL announced that it had no intention of enforcing 1701, and over the course of the next 17 years, Hezbollah assembled an arsenal of rockets and missiles. It also built a network of tunnels that were supposed to allow it, in a future war, to “conquer the Galilee” in an operation similar to the one Hamas ultimately launched hundreds of kilometres away in southern Israel.

The day after Hamas’s assault on southern Israel on October 7 last year, Hezbollah began firing rockets on northern Israel, forcing the rapid evacuation of border communities comprising nearly 100,000 residents, most of whom have yet to return home. After 11 months of low-intensity warfare, Israel took the initiative, and in 11 days managed to deal Hezbollah a decisive blow.

On 17 and 18 September, exploding pagers and walkie-talkies disabled the militia’s communications network, taking thousands of fighters out of commission. Over the next week, a series of airstrikes based on precise intelligence destroyed the majority of Hezbollah’s rockets and launchers and eliminated key military commanders. Finally, on 27 September, an Israeli airstrike on a bunker in Beirut killed nearly every senior figure in the organisation, including its voluble leader Hassan Nasrallah. This was followed by a ground invasion which has seen tunnels and munitions, prepared over a decade and more, destroyed with huge losses to Hezbollah and minimal losses to the IDF.

However, the 11-day campaign woke up the international community in a way that 11 months of rocket fire did not. And the unanimous response has been an urgent call for implementation of 1701. David Lammy called for a “political solution in line with Resolution 1701”. The French ambassador to the UN called upon Israel “to stop the escalation underway in Lebanon” and reiterated Frances determination for a cessation of hostilities “in accordance with Resolution 1701”. Hours before the successful operation to kill Nasrallah, the US, Canada, Australia, Canada and a host of European and Arab states issued a joint declaration demanding an immediate 21-day cease “to provide space for diplomacy towards the conclusion of a diplomatic settlement consistent with UNSCR 1701”.

This consensus around the indeterminate and obsolete Security Council resolution tells, in short, the entire story of the failure to resolve this conflict. If there is one thread running through nearly every diplomatic effort of the last eight decades, it is a firm commitment to the idea that any party that launches a war against Israel and is then defeated is entitled to a restoration of the conditions it violently rejected when launching the war.

This unspoken normative commitment explains the iterations of final status plans presented to the Palestinian leadership after its rejection of statehood at Camp David and subsequent suicide bombing campaign of the early 2000s. It explains the insistence on pre-1967 armistice lines as the only legal basis for Israel’s border after 1967. It explains the curious exception to that norm regarding the refusal to recognise even the pre-1967 part of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And it explains the cruel human experiment known as UNRWA, a refugee agency that, unlike any other refugee agency, exists not to rehabilitate refugees but rather to keep them in a permanent state of immiseration to maintain an irredentist claim against another country.

Such a norm has not featured in the post-war mediation of any other conflict, not before 1945 and not since. No one has ever seriously suggested creating a kind of sportsman’s mulligan as an international diplomatic norm for other conflicts for this very reason. It’s not hard to see why this might be the case. If the international community extended a line of insurance to other aggressors, which promised that launching wars could bring gains with victory but no losses with defeat, there would be a lot more wars….

Just before the US election, France hosted an “International Conference in Support of Lebanon’s People and Sovereignty”, where $1 billion in aid was pledged and where French President Macron claimed Israel was “sowing barbarism”. If there was any suggestion that Lebanon’s situation might have been improved by not firing rockets into Israel for the past 11 months, the participants were too polite to mention it. Nor was there any reckoning with Lebanon’s decision to cultivate an alternative armed force, larger than its own military, implicated in atrocities in Syria, and answerable to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The insistence of global actors, most notably the host country itself, on protecting Hezbollah and securing for it advantageous ceasefire arrangements in previous wars in 1996 and 2006 also went unmentioned.

Where Israel is concerned – where Jews are concerned – the normal diplomatic rules don't apply.