The IDF war on the UN

The UN in Israel's sights
The shelling of schools in Gaza caps off a tumultuous relationship between the UN and Israel
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o Ian Williams
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 8 January 2009 13.30 GMT
As well as the untimely and tragic end of over 40 Palestinian civilians, the Israeli shelling of UN schools in Gaza could be taken as a final farewell salute to the honeymoon between Ban Ki-moon and Israel.
Ban came into office with somewhat limited appreciation of the Middle East, and seemed to take much of his attitude second-hand from Washington. But his own deep sense of ethics and growing experience of Israeli duplicity and obduracy could be plotted on the rising curve of indignation in his public statements. Israel has been provided with the exact coordinates of all UN agency installations in the strip. So are those who fired the shots incompetent, ruthless or undisciplined and vindictive?
There is a morbid circularity in this. When Boutros Boutros Ghali took office as UN secretary general, he was reviled by much of the Arab world as the architect of the original Camp David accords, which they regarded as treachery. He left as their hero after Israel shelled the UN compound at Qana in Lebanon, killing over a hundred civilians who had taken shelter there.
Famously, when the Israeli ambassador came to ask for the suppression of the UN's report on the incident because it would "open deep wounds in Israel" Boutros Ghali retorted that they could not match the wounds inflicted on the Lebanese who were shelled.
Ironically, Kofi Annan, who was accused of trying to soften the report in Israel's favour and did much to bring the Jewish state into the UN mainstream, left office in 2006 with a similar problem: the day-long shelling of the UN compound at Khiam and killing of four UN peacekeepers, despite long hours of messages from local UNIFIL commanders, and even high-level messages from the UN HQ directly to Israel.
There is a pattern here. Firstly, the regular gruesome pre-election blood sacrifice to prove that Israeli politicians like Ehud Barak are hairy-chested and macho enough to be elected. The IDF personnel involved are either criminally culpable or incompetent, but can be confident that they will escape with impunity – an impunity that increases with each shooting incident in the territories. IDF spokespeople will refer to alleged "terrorist" activity near the sites as they did here and tut tut about how the nasty Arab terrorists use human shields.
Interestingly, this does not apply when they set up machine gun nests on the top of UN schools, as they have done in the past, or on the top of apartment blocks, as they have done this time.
The IDF, of course, always behaves as if it is shocked, shocked, that wild firing into the most densely populated territory in the world produces civilian casualties.
But now let us compare international reactions. A Serb mortar shell into the market place in Sarajevo in 1995 led to much-belated Nato and UN intervention against the perpetrators. Here the US that called for that action has, as in 2006 in Lebanon, resisted almost unanimous international calls for a ceasefire, and is now belatedly converted to the idea, albeit hedged around with enough qualifications to keep the blood flowing into Gaza's already overflowing sewers a little longer.
When the US does move, it will almost certainly be, as in Lebanon, to use the UN security council as a fireman's ladder to let Israel get down gracefully from the gory pole it has once again mounted. It is too much to hope that the perpetrators will appear before an international court?
But one can anticipate that even more Israeli politicians and generals will be checking with their lawyers as well as their travel agents before going on any trips abroad.