World leaders and diplomats are striving this weekend to thrash out a United Nations resolution and peace deal to end the current conflict in the Middle East. It brings an ominous sense of déjà vu.

Looking at the history of Israeli military clashes with Lebanon, and their aftermath, there is scant encouragement that a “international stabilisation force” or “buffer zone” in southern Lebanon will produce any lasting solution.

Peacekeepers have never fared well or been effective, as the current conflict shows. A UN force has for years been present in southern Lebanon — yet proved powerless to stop Hezbollah attacking Israel last month.

Among those who know the cost that Hezbollah has exacted on outside forces is Ariel Sharon, the former prime minister, now in a coma in Jerusalem. Sharon had already entered politics as a retired infantry general when the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) first invaded Lebanon in 1978, after Palestinian militants killed 37 Israeli civilians. The IDF aimed to push Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) away from the Israeli border.

After the Israelis had driven north to the Litani river, the UN Security Council called on Israel to withdraw and established the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (Unifil). Yet four years later the PLO was once again launching artillery attacks on Israel.

Much worse was to come after Israeli forces again invaded Lebanon in 1982, following the attempted assassination by Palestinians of the Israeli ambassador to the UK. During the war Israeli forces pushed into Beirut and then stood aside as their allies in the Lebanese Falange militias slaughtered up to 3,500 Palestinian civilians in refugee camps. Western peacekeepers were unable to prevent the massacres.

Shi’ite militants then struck back with their own bloodbath. In November 1982 a 17-year-old Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim detonated a suicide bomb at the Israeli military headquarters in Tyre, killing 141 people.

In October 1983 two more suicide bombers struck — this time at the peacekeepers. One killed 241 American servicemen — mainly marines — and another killed 58 French paratroopers in attacks on barracks in Beirut. Militant Shi’ite groups claimed responsibility. Four months later all US forces were withdrawn from Beirut.

By 1985 Israel had withdrawn most of the 76,000 troops it used to invade Lebanon — and once again hopes rested on creating a buffer strip between the two countries. About 1,000 soldiers remained in a self-declared “security zone” protecting the Israeli border.

For several years there was an uneasy standoff as Hezbollah became increasingly entrenched in southern Lebanon and Israel mounted occasional raids aimed at killing the group’s leaders. Sheikh Abd al-Karim Ubayd, the Hezbollah leader in Jibshit, was abducted by Israeli commandos in 1989; three years later Sheikh Abbas al-Musawi, the group’s secretary-general, was killed.

Again the peacekeeping was ineffective. In 1993 the Israeli army returned to Lebanon, this time to root out Hezbollah after a rocket attack on an Israeli village. A week-long assault displaced 300,000 Lebanese civilians before the United States negotiated a ceasefire.

Israel remained in control of southern Lebanon but it was forced to return in strength yet again in 1996, in Operation Grapes of Wrath.

Israel launched 1,100 air raids, fired more than 25,000 artillery shells and conducted a 16-day military blitz that killed about 160 Lebanese civilians, 118 of whom were sheltering at a UN base in Qana.

Another truce took effect and an international monitoring group was set up. But it was already clear to Ehud Barak, then Israeli prime minister, that an Israeli presence in southern Lebanon was in the long run unsustainable and that to remain would invite a perpetual war.

By July 2000 Israel had completed its withdrawal from Lebanon. Once again the international force charged with enforcing the peace proved ineffective. Hezbollah began to entrench itself and its weapons again in the south.

The lesson that Sharon drew from this history was that neither his army nor peacekeepers could solve the underlying problem. It needed a political solution.

“Ariel Sharon would not have waged the current war,” said Haim Malka, a fellow at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Sharon believed a guerrilla war against Hezbollah was unwinnable, and he accepted that the organisation was a fact of the Lebanese landscape.”

But in the face of Hezbollah’s attacks, Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, opted for military might. Now diplomats once again pin their hopes on a peaeckeeping force.

But there is little in the history of the past 30 years to suggest that a “stabilisation force” or a “buffer zone” alone will produce any lasting peace.

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