A word from the wise on Lebanon

The backbone of almost every UN mission in the Middle East (and plenty outside it) are invariably Palestinians. The grow up in the West Bank, Gaza or one of the camps in Syria, Lebanon or Jordan and start working in some basic capacity for UNRWA. Gradually they work their way up and prove their worth, and the cream of Palestinian society (highly educated because study is one of the few life options that is open to them) gets skimmed off and dropped into UN missions across the region. Unlike other nationals who can only stomach the Middle East for a year or two, the Palestinian UN employees will stick around for decades - for one thing they have no where else to go, no chance of other similarly salaried employement (by which they are supporting dozens of family and friends back in Palestine who have no hope whatsoever of an income). They also speak Arabic of course, which is surprisingly uncommon for UN missions in the region, and generally flawless English to boot. So if you want to understand what's going on in Sudan, Iraq or wherever, don't go and talk to the senior UN officials, but find a Palestinian somewhere, even in the admin office, and ask them the score.

I was doing just that earlier today and over the course of an hour learnt more about the current conflicts than I would from a year reading the New York Times. Take for example the news just in that Syria has refused to admit a UN delegation on Lebanon if it including Terje Roed-Larson. "This is no surprise" my Palestinian friends said "Roed-Larson is despised in Palestine because of his closeness to the Israelis and Americans and the Syrians know how biast he is. If he returned to Gaza [where he used to be UN envoy] he'd be killed in 24hrs." They also put forward the plausible thesis of a tension between the US and Israel over involving Syria in the current hostilities "The Americans want the Israelis to use the opportunity to ravage Syria as well as Lebanon, but the Israelis are smarter and actually want to eventually achieve a peace treaty with Syria, as they have with Egypt and Jordan, and so they are unwilling to follow the US instructions. The Israelis are past masters at getting the Americans to do their bidding without ever returning the favour." But in the case of Lebanon they are sure that the normally savvy Israelis have made a big blunder: "Hizbollah were actually a very decent foe to have on their northern border. They had clear objectives (the release of prisoners, the return of Shebaa farms) which the Israelis could have negotiated successfully on and, until now, have actually been very restrained in their methods, in spite of all the attempts to paint them as terrorists. However what is likely to emerge out of this catastrophe is a very agressive enemy on Israel's north following the instructions of Iran far more heavily than Hizbollah currently does." In fact they think that combined with the chaos in Iraq the latest Israeli assault is likely to result in an ongoing regional conflict from which Israel will not actually benefit and the people of the region will suffer horrendously.