Resolution 1701 Set the Right Order, Israel Pays for Its Hesitation to Enforce It | Shai Gal

Twenty years after the Second Lebanon War, Resolution 1701 is mainly associated with the failure to disarm Hezbollah, but it also created 17 years of quiet on the northern border. Shai Gal argues that Israel is paying for its hesitation to enforce the resolution, and that dismantling Hezbollah's military power is the true implementation of 1701.

Twenty years after the Second Lebanon War, UN Security Council Resolution 1701 is mainly associated with the failure to disarm Hezbollah. But alongside the failure, it also created 17 years of quiet on the northern border, and its lesson is more relevant than ever. Shai Gal's column argues that Israel remembered the verdict of the Winograd Report on the war, but forgot the verdict on the arrangement that ended it. He emphasizes that 1701 failed as a disarmament and enforcement regime, but it ended the war and preserved the order meant to follow. The author criticizes the notion that the Litani is a security line, stating that a river does not disarm an organization. He argues that dismantling Hezbollah's military power is the implementation of 1701, not a deviation from it, and that the failure of 2006-2023 was that Israel accepted its violation. He also mentions the May 17, 1983 agreement between Israel and Lebanon, which was forgotten, and its founding principle: a sovereign Lebanon, without an armed veto of a militia or a foreign patron. In conclusion, he states that diplomacy without enforcement is paper, and that hesitation and procrastination end in the same bill: the enemy collects from Israel what it did not collect in time.