Israelis and Lebanese are increasingly concerned that Hezbollah, the Shiite terrorist organization, is not being tackled in accordance with U.N. Security Council resolutions. While public pressure increases for Syria to leave Lebanon, the way Hezbollah is dealt with, if at all, is through backdoor deals.

Resolution 1559, enacted by the Security Council in the wake of the February 14 assassination of a former prime minister of Lebanon, Rafik Hariri, requires all foreign troops – read Syrians – to leave Lebanon, and all armed militias – Hezbollah is the only one now – to lay down their weapons.

The U.N.’s special envoy, Terje Roed-Larsen, speaks publicly of agreements he had made with President Assad and takes him to task over the implementation of them. Yet, any pressure on Hezbollah is being applied privately.

Mr. Roed-Larsen is not a free agent. Hezbollah receives preferential treatment because both American freedom hawks and European realists hope now to turn it into a benign political party. Europe refuses to define Hezbollah as a terrorist group, while America hints it might remove the group from its terrorist list after it is disarmed.

Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the shrewd Hezbollah leader, once again indicated over the weekend that he is attuned to the West, saying for the first time, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, that the subject of laying down arms “could be discussed” nationally, “but not in the media,” he said.

Shhhhh. Council diplomats maintain that pressure is being exerted on Hezbollah, although they concede that, at least until after the May election, when the group expects victory, any push would be done away from the cameras. Such pressure is applied, they say, through Iran, for example, which is the organization’s main source of funding.

Last week, after visiting France’s President Chirac, President Khatami of Iran said Hezbollah, the “real power in Lebanon,” is independent and “not influenced by anybody and not by Iran.” But Paris hopes deals can be made, perhaps by promising a relaxation of pressure on the nuclear front, which is Tehran’s main concern.

All of this is a huge headache for the Israelis, who are mostly concerned about the Lebanese-based organization’s activities in the West Bank and Gaza. “Iran’s objectives are strategic,” a Jerusalem official dealing with proliferation and counterterrorism told me recently. The mullahs “see themselves as a regional power, and they seek to influence every sphere in the region.” Hezbollah is their tool in Israel.

As always, the problem is not Israel’s alone. The Jewish state has served as a playground for terrorists and as a lab for vanguard tactics, which later are used more widely and on a larger scale elsewhere.

Using e-mail and smuggled CD-Roms, as well as some agents on the ground, Hezbollah teaches Palestinian Arab terrorists how to improve their Qassam rockets, which are getting less crude by the day. The hope is to get Qassams, and perhaps shoulder-fired missiles as well, into the West Bank, where they could be used to attack air traffic at the nearby Ben-Gurion airport.

The specter of missile-attacks against airport traffic should be at the top of the agenda for any Western agency fighting terrorism, the Israeli expert said. But when Israelis tell counterparts in Europe and America of such concerns, they increasingly receive the cold shoulder. “The West’s resolve in the war on terror seems weakened,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, Damascus gets credit for evacuating the Beau Rivage Hotel in Beirut, which was used for more than a decade by Syria as its intelligence headquarters, spreading fear throughout the country. Rather than returning home, the Beau Rivage men have retreated to South Beirut, which is controlled by armed Hezbollah forces.

“Once, terrorist organizations needed state sponsors to survive,” the Israeli official observed. “Now terror-sponsoring states need these proxies more than the proxies need them.”

It is doubtful the Lebanese opposition will see their country as empty of Syrian troops as long as Hezbollah is not disarmed. Another group of foreign troops – Iranian Revolutionary Guards stationed in the Bekaa Valley and South Lebanon to supervise Hezbollah – is not even being mentioned when diplomats talk about implementing resolution 1559.

That resolution, the fruit of rare post-Iraq cooperation between Washington and Paris, could potentially become a great tool for change in the region. If its provisions are finessed through too many compromises, however, it risks turning what was once a war against terror into a diplomatic process, Turtle Bay’s favorite phrase. Sheik Nasrallah, for one, can’t wait.