TAKE AWAY HEZBOLLAH'S COLLABORATORS, HUMAN SHIELDS: DISBAND UNIFIL NOW.

The IDC's GLORIA center held a joint video conference with the State Department on the domestic and international situation in Lebanon, bringing together Israeli, American, and Lebanese experts. It is extremely long but if you haven't been keeping close tabs on what's going on in Southern Lebanon - aka "the place where a war will probably be fought soon" - this is your opportunity to get caught up. Here's a teaser about one of the parts we're not including: "many jihadists and terrorists have been infiltrating Lebanon... with the supposed support of NGOs and money from the Gulf."

But we do want to make sure you catch this part:

It is now generally accepted that large-scale smuggling of arms from Syria to Hizballah has taken place since the ceasefire. A UN assessment team submitted its report to the Security Council to this effect... And UNIFIL has failed even to deploy on this border. Thus, Hizballah has been rearmed contrary to the UNIFIL mandate. There is also considerable evidence that Hizballah has largely rebuilt its military infrastructure from the damage suffered in the war, despite the presence of 8,800 UNIFIL and 12,000 Lebanese army forces ostensibly to prevent this... Regarding UNIFIL, it seems that its forces have accepted an extremely limited role, and a cynic could describe them as under the protection of Hizballah to an extent. It is not a question of them collapsing, but of them not doing anything. An Italian official told us that the UNIFIL forces were engaged in a number of laudable activities such as distributing toys to children, but when it came to Hizballah, he was very open: "We don't have the political will in Italy to have body bags come home."

And it's not just that UNIFIL provides Hezbollah and Syria with thousands of human shields. UN peacekeepers are also basically helpless their hostages. After bragging about how they were going to the Middle East to sort things out, the Europeans have gone from pretending to monitor Hezbollah's attacks on Israel to trying to stop Hezbollah from attacking UNIFIL itself. Hezbollah and Syria use the vulnerability of European peacekeepers to extract European diplomatic concessions in unrelated areas. Instead of being sacrificed for demonstrably misplaced European self-interest, Israeli security is now being sacrificed for transparently facile European self-delusion.

The Europeans have this image of themselves as tough soldiers who have come into Lebanon to finally put an end to all this Zionist warmongering nonsense. It's very important for them to hold on to the idea - crucially, ultimately important - that they are putting the Israelis in their place. But in reality the mostly French soldiers in UNIFIL are pathetically bad soldiers. They like to play-act at being tough military men in a brutal warzone, but they're so poorly trained that they don't even know what good training looks like. Since they can't admit their pathetic helplessness, they hysterically accuse Israel of lying when Israel provides evidence that Hezbollah is using UN facilities to attack Israeli civilians - mostly because UNIFIL can't do anything to stop them. They can't even stop their bases from getting overrun by Lebanese funeral processions. Or by little Lebanese kids.

Which is not to say that many UNIFIL soldiers are not also pathologically anti-Semitic. More precisely: many of them are resentful and pathetic weaklings who cope with their seething impotence in the tried and true European tradition of pseudo-sophisticated anti-Semitism.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]