This Rare UN Peacekeeping Success Offers Model for Gaza

The question of how the war in Gaza is conducted and should end is driving a wedge between the US and Israel, and so it should. As Hillary Clinton said last week, any peaceful resolution is going to require new leadership for both Israelis and Palestinians.

Hamas won’t be allowed to continue ruling Gaza, meaning someone else will. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday ruled out the Palestinian Authority, headed for now by the 87-year-old-Mahmoud Abbas, or any international administration. Yet enough Israelis are enraged by Netanyahu’s failure to prevent Hamas’s Oct. 7 killing spree that it could be just a matter of time before he, too, has to step aside. But planning for what follows needs to begin even without his cooperation.

The US is trying to prepare, seeking agreements in principle from Abbas and Israel’s Arab neighbors to a post-war reset that assumes a future Israeli recommitment to the two-state solution. Once that’s in place, it’s also clear that some kind of transitional order will be needed in Gaza, but it’s even harder to imagine how that might work.

Netanyahu has said Israeli troops will remain indefinitely, but a political transition can’t succeed in those circumstances. A force provided by Arab nations would make sense, but why take political responsibility for cleaning up Israel’s mess? Any peacekeepers associated with the US or its allies would become an instant target. And while Hamas might accept military personnel from Turkey or Russia — both of which are anxious to assume bigger roles in the Middle East — Israel may not trust them.

That leaves the United Nations, widely dismissed due to its dismal record in keeping the peace where that doesn’t already exist. The list of horror stories, from Bosnia to Rwanda, is long. Yet there is one success that offers useful lessons to any transition force, or even a model: the 1996-1998 mission known as UNTAES, to a 2,600-square kilometer (1,000-square mile) area of Eastern Croatia.

Some parts of the region’s story are eerily familiar. Vukovar, a town with a mixed prewar population of 44,000, had been Croatia’s Stalingrad — or perhaps soon its Gaza City. After holding out for three months in 1991, it was turned to rubble, strewn with bodies left to rot during the siege. Rebel Serbs ended up in charge, with Croats driven out or killed, for more than four years. But then the balance of forces changed and a transition was needed to restore Croatian control. Passions were still high, unemployment stood at 70% and virtually every household was armed.

After previous UN peacekeeping disasters across Yugoslavia — when lightly armed blue helmets proved inadequate to protect “safe areas” such as Srebrenica, and thousands were massacred — there was a determination to get UNTAES right. The mission was unusual in a number of ways that can be instructive for any potential transition force in Gaza.