Today, we wake up to a supposedly less violent Middle East. UN Resolution 1701 on Lebanon is supposed to see to that. However, even after being endorsed by the major players — Israel having done so yesterday — no one is under any illusion that the resolution will immediately stop the war. The fighting continues unabated, and the position of the two sides remains confrontational. Already with 30,000 troops in the south, Israel says its forces will not leave until peacekeepers are deployed in force. This may take weeks, and Hezbollah says it has the right to continue attacks until the last Israeli soldier leaves Lebanese soil. If that proves to be the case, more casualties will likely be added to the 1,000 Lebanese and more than 120 Israelis before the truce takes hold. The UN resolution should eventually lead to the silencing of the guns which should in consequence close one more sad chapter in Lebanon’s history. This does not mean that many things that should not have happened did not happen. There is a limit, a red line which should not be crossed, a limit to barbarism, savagery and brutality which emerges from international law, UN resolutions, the Geneva Conventions beyond which one cannot and should not go. But the last few weeks have recognized no such boundaries. Each one was ignored and crossed, trampled upon by Israel and its supporter, the US.

What happened in Lebanon may have devastating consequences for the scope of international diplomacy and conventions. The fact that the United Nations allowed this conflict to rage for over a month, with a cataclysmic loss of civilian life and infrastructure, says the current system is flawed and contradicts the basic tenets that the UN was established to maintain and uphold. A system created to avoid conflict or bring about speedy resolutions if one does erupt has been redefined to sustain conflicts. A system created to outlaw the insidious ways in which a whole population may be erased has been turned into the ways and means of securing international legalization for an illegal war, a mechanism to authorize Israel to literally destroy Lebanon from its roots.

But who bothers with international law anyway? Israel and the US simply ignored the international consensus, giving themselves legal license to do exactly what the UN was formulated to prohibit. What happened in Lebanon means the aggressor and the abettor got away with it. Yes, some Arab countries have reservations about Hezbollah’s July 12 operation, but that doesn’t mean that any Arab endorsed Israel’s barbaric aggression against Lebanon, its need to flatten every Lebanese village that a missile came from, to destroy all infrastructure and bomb the country into bloody submission. These atrocities reflect a belief that the Arabs are not to be treated according to the rules that apply to other peoples and nations. Israel’s pretext for going to war for killing thousands and displacing a million was to free two Israeli soldiers. But the real aim of the war was to eradicate the culture of resistance from the mind of Arab nations even if Lebanon fell apart in the process. That has not been achieved.