Had a rocket launched from Gaza landed a half-mile from the factory that it struck on Tuesday, November 21, Yaakov Yaakobov might yet be alive and Louise Arbour?s family in Canada would be mourning her death today.



As United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Arbour came that close to losing all her rights, human and otherwise, when she visited the Israeli border town of Sderot. It was Yaakobov, 43, who died from his injuries after he was critically wounded by the explosion. A 57-year-old woman who emigrated from Russia in 2003 was killed in a rocket attack just days earlier. Did it make a dent in Arbour?s sensibilities?



Here?s what she allowed after her near-death experience: ?Israel has a responsibility to defend its citizens, but has to do so only by legal means. It has to do so in line with international law.?



Arbour is either a malicious hypocrite or a naive marionette for the international community. More importantly, it is long past due for Israel to revisit its so-called peace deal with the UN and Lebanon.



Arbour ignores the negligence of her employer for failing to prevent last summer?s war between Israel and Hizbullah. The UN had peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, where the Hizbullah built up their missile supply right under their peacekeeping noses. It was the UN?s job to contain all aggressive forces.



Israel has been criticized, correctly, for focusing on an air offensive that killed hundreds of civilians. Israelis themselves were enraged, partly because a ground war would have produced far more progress had it been initiated from the start.



But it was Hizbullah that started that senseless war and the UN should have prevented the war in the first place. For this reason alone, Israel should have never agreed to the vaguely-worded pact to end the war. Israeli leaders should have known that they could not rely on the international community.



Since the war ended, both the UN forces and the Lebanese military have refused any attempt to disarm the Hizbullah. Nor is it clear what they are doing to keep Iran- and Syrian-supplied arms out of Lebanon. As of November 19, the New York Daily News reported that Hizbullah could be smuggling large missiles from Syria; the Daily News was quoting United States intelligence sources and Lebanese groups.



A key passage from the Daily News story reads, ?A source with the Lebanese group the World Council for the Cedar Revolution said that its operatives in recent weeks have tracked nighttime convoys traveling south on the coastal road from the Syrian border through Tripoli in Lebanon. ?The lengths of the trucks, 20 to 25 feet, could mean they?re carrying missiles,? the Lebanese source said. The convoys typically include two or three long trucks hauling trailers accompanied by a dozen jeeps with smoked glass, the source said.?



There is nothing definitive here, but the description of these activities conforms to Hizbullah?s modus operandi.



Meanwhile, the agreement did not free Israeli reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, whose capture set off the war with Hizbullah.



It was Arbour who warned last summer that both Israel and Hizbullah could be charged with war crimes if they did not take steps to prevent civilian casualties. Arbour neglected to identify other partners in crime. One of them was the UN, which might as well have launched the rockets themselves, because they did not do their job. No doubt that Arbour expected us to take her seriously then. It was nice of her to drive the half-mile to the area where Yaakov Yaakobov was fatally wounded, but was she surprised when Israeli workers jeered and even tossed stones at her and her convoy?



There is a term in child abuse investigations known as ?perp-by-omission.? It often refers to a parent who leaves his or her children in a perilous situation; e.g., leaving them alone in a car or having them watched by his or her violence-prone paramour.



The UN became a perp-by-omission on July 12 and it appears that the UN will become a perp-by-omission again. Until people like Arbour recognize this, they share the UN?s guilt.