Created in 1978, after Israel invaded Lebanon to end Palestinian terrorist attacks from the country, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) had its size, budget, and remit expanded dramatically after the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war, when it was tasked with keeping both the IDF and Hizballah out of the southern part of the country. Later this month, UNIFIL’s mandate will be up for renewal at the UN Security Council. Tony Badran argues that, as effective reform is unlikely to occur, the U.S. would do best to use its veto power to dismantle the force:

Over the previous decade and a half of its deployment, UNIFIL has not achieved a single one of the objectives outlined [by the Security Council in 2006]. Let’s start with the more recent flagrant failures. In July, a Hizballah cell infiltrated Israel from the area that UNIFIL is mandated to keep free of any armed personnel. . . . In December 2018, the IDF uncovered a number of commando tunnels that Hizballah dug into Israel, right under UNIFIL’s nose. To this day, UNIFIL has not been able to inspect all the relevant sites for this activity.

UNIFIL is now effectively another UN aid agency. The mission highlights its work with the local population and its delivery of assistance, as recently as the COVID-19 crisis, to municipalities often run by Hizballah.

An inherent flaw in UNIFIL’s mandate lies in its requirement to coordinate with the Lebanese authorities. This renders its work dependent on Hizballah’s acquiescence. Even should the U.S. extract a concession for the force to inspect sites, the structural flaws will remain. So will the aversion of troop-contributing countries to adopt a more aggressive posture, for fear of retaliation.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.