Hezbollah's Sudetenland

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 8/15/2006

The Peace Deal: The U.N. has legitimized Hezbollah's false sovereignty claim over Shabaa farms, long used to attack Israel. Presumably, Hezbollah will have no more territorial demands. Where have we heard this before?

U.N. Resolution 1701, which supersedes seven other failed U.N. resolutions regarding Israel and Lebanon since 1978, fails to mention Iran or Syria, without whose money and weapons Hezbollah could not exist, much less wage war.

But it does mention Shebaa farms, a 16-square-mile area stuck between Israel, Lebanon and Syria. The farms were seized by Israel from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967 and annexed in 1981.

Lebanon's claim to the area comes from a single 1966 map. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, U.N. cartographers ruled that Shebaa farms fell within Syrian territory seized by Israel and that Resolution 425, which called for total Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, had been completely implemented.

So if the U.N. has already ruled that Shebaa farms, which the Israelis call Mount Dov, was Syrian, and not Lebanese territory, why does U.N. Res. 1701 grant Hezbollah a huge political victory by saying its claim of sovereignty is back on the negotiating table?

Hezbollah has said that it will never disarm or cease attacking Israel as long as any Lebanese territory is occupied by Israel. It considers the Shebaa farms Lebanese territory. So it is the pretext for not obeying any U.N. resolution, past, present, or future. This smacks of appeasement.

Pushing this ceding of Israeli territory to Hezbollah is U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Malloch Brown, who has never dodged a Katyusha, and who claims that while Hezbollah has committed terrorist acts, it is not a terrorist organization. Of the current conflict he says: "It's not helpful to couch this war in the language of international terrorism." Really.

Brown told The Financial Times recently that a solution "which addresses the territorial issue of the Shebaa farms" is the only one Hezbollah would accept, saying: "The idea that there is a peace which either Hezbollah would respect or which would draw the winds out of Hezbollah's sails, which doesn't address these political things is, I think, far-fetched."

A peace that doesn't include the original intent of U.N. resolution 1559, which demands that Hezbollah disarm, is also far-fetched. If Hezbollah was disarmed, it would be in no position to threaten anybody's peace.

Without its Iranian rockets and Iranian money, it would be irrelevant.

Israel has demonstrated it is willing to trade land for peace, but it is not willing to cede any land to Iran's terrorist proxy Hezbollah. And the U.N. settled the "territorial issue" of the Shebaa farms when Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Or so Israel thought.

After President Bush announced his support for a Palestinian state, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon admonished Washington, "Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938 when enlightened Europeans decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a convenient temporary solution."

Israel, he added, "will not be Czechoslovakia."

Indeed, the parallels between Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's demand for the "return" of Shebaa farms and Adolf Hitler's claim on Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland as part of the Third Reich are both striking and disturbing.

In 1938, at the infamous meeting in Munich, Britain and France dismembered Czechoslovakia at Der Fuhrer's request, in exchange for a promissory note promising "peace in our time." A few months later, Nazi Germany swallowed Czechoslovakia whole, and a year later the world was at war.

Just as Hitler had bigger plans, so does Nasrallah and his Iranian mentor and nuke-building benefactor, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who hopes to pick up where Hitler left off.

We hope Munich will not be joined in the annals of diplomatic infamy by Shebaa farms.