Last week I mentioned a lot of UN ‘failures’. To be fair, most UN operations are devoted to the idea of maintaining world peace and security (and also protecting human rights and providing humanitarian aid). The UN has had some success. But NO UN forces are empowered to engage in any military activity other than self-defense. The first UN military force was the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) created by UNSC Resolution 50 in 1949 to see that the Arab and Israeli signatories to several truce agreements would not resume fighting. Those same truce agreements included commitments to engage in negotiations to resolve the conflict. Such negotiations resulted in Peace treaties between Israel and Egypt and Jordan. The Palestinian Arabs have nevr completed such a negotiated process (and all Palestinian organized political parties and (terror) organizations are still committed to the destruction of Israel as a political entity. Some of them, like Hamas, will not even engage in direct negotiations with Israel because they think it gives Israel some measure of recognition.
To fill in some omissions regarding the UN I need to note that UN observer forces have been involved in over 60 missions, mostly in Africa, with some measure of success. Some missions are still going on. One of them is the UNTSO mentioned above. Today that body includes UNIFIL in Lebanon (where they are prohibited from using force to make Hezbollah withdraw northward as required by UN resolution 1701) and UNDOF (UN Disengagement of Forces) that watches the Israel Syria border on the Golan, UNTSO has 159 observers, 81 foreign civilian employees and 148 local civilian workers.
The UN fielded an Emergency Force (UNEF) twice to look after the Israeli-Egypt border. The first force left when Egypt ordered them to leave in 1967.The second was formed in 1973 and was disestablished when Israel and Egypt signed a peace agreement in 1979. The commander of the Indian Army contingent in the first UNEF thought withdrawing the force was a major contribution to the start of the six day war that soon followed. I have a copy of his book- “The Sinai Blunder”. The Temporary Presence in Hebron (TIPH) was not a UN body and existed from 1994 to 2019 to help keep the Arabs and Jews in Hebron from acting outside the law. Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority were involved in creating it.
There are other international groups involved in trying to keep the peace in the middle east. I’ll mention some of them in a future post.
Wetherhorn 