Criticism
UNIFIL has been criticised for being unable to stop the Israeli destruction of civilian buildings and intimidation of civilians during the 2006 invasion, as evidenced by the many destroyed buildings in South Lebanon, still not rebuilt by 2011. A former Israeli diplomat, Itamar Rabinovich, cricised the efficacy of the force saying "UNIFIL, I'm afraid, is a joke. They’ve been there for 26 years and since then, there have been so many skirmishes ." Prime Minister Ehud Olmert also said "We didn’t like very much UNIFIL which was very useless and very helpless. Look what happened. Did you hear of any particular efforts of the United Nations UNIFIL force in the south of Lebanon to prevent the attacks against Israel in the first place. So they were not useful and that is why we were unhappy with them."
Both Israel and Hezbollah have accused UNIFIL of bias. Israel again accused them of failing to prevent, and even collaborating with, Hezbollah in its replenishment of military power. Hezbollah, in turn, said "certain contingents" of UNIFIL are spying for, if not assisting, Israel.
Read more about this topic: United Nations Interim Force In Lebanon
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“...I wasn’t at all prepared for the avalanche of criticism that overwhelmed me. You would have thought I had murdered someone, and perhaps I had, but only to give her successor a chance to live. It was a very sad business indeed to be made to feel that my success depended solely, or at least in large part, on a head of hair.”
—Mary Pickford (1893–1979)
“The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)