Confronting America
A ceasefire in Lebanon continues with Israeli strikes continuing unabated. Israel's ongoing invasion of Syria may hold the key to what it and America wants in Lebanon.
This is the text of a lecture delivered to faculty at The Center for American Studies and Research at the American University of Beirut on December 11, 2024. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length, and the full lecture can be listened to at the top of the page.
Good morning to everyone who is listening from the United States, and I should say good evening to all of those joining from Beirut and elsewhere in the hemisphere. I just want to first thank the Center for American Studies and Research here at the American University of Beirut for inviting me to speak about this subject, and for allowing me to return, at least by way of the information super-highway, to the university that I attended briefly in 2020 and made me fall in love with the city of Beirut in all its wonders and frustrations. I hope you have all kept safe through these difficult circumstances, and I hope that the reprieve in Dahieh and in Beirut will remain for some time yet.
When I was first asked to do this talk, the invasion of Lebanon by Israel was in full-swing. Villages in the south were being detonated and destroyed. Hezbollah was making the IDF’s advances costly, holding them at places like Khiam with great intensity, but that advance was by no means halted completely. The objectives of the war continued to grow and a ceasefire seemed to be more and more out of reach, and we were arguably approaching a horizon in which south Lebanon was to become another Gaza, insofar as it was a conflict that could not be brought to an end because what the other side was demanding could never be agreed to, something that what would amount to a full surrender.
But now, all of a sudden, there is a ceasefire. This has been achieved through the Lebanese government itself, with Hezbollah accepting its terms, achieving some level of respite from the horrors that have been wrought on this country for the next 60 or so days, or as the US envoy Amos Hochstein publicly hopes, permanently. But already that ceasefire has frayed, and there are deep fissures that have burrowed their way into its foundation.
The IDF is trying to unilaterally create a buffer zone for which refugees cannot return to, blocking out towns that it did not even occupy when the ceasefire was declared. Airstrikes are still occurring, IDF troops shoot at returnees, and it is difficult to escape the feeling that this is ceasefire is a one-sided affair, one that will not be long for this world. Across the border, the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad has quickly fallen, and Israel has invaded its territory as well, crawling up the border with Lebanon, outside the Golan Heights, in ways that many more people should be concerned by than they are now.
Much focus has been placed, at least here in the West, on Hezbollah’s goals throughout this war, the failure to maintain the unity of the fronts in regard to Gaza, how they have now much to rebuild inside Lebanon, and how their military structure has been weakened by waves of assassinations. But much less focus has been placed on Israel’s ambitions and how those also failed to a certain degree. Initially the goal, at least the one they expressed in public, was a wave of localized raids and the creation of some sort of “small” buffer zone, but under the new defense minister Israel Katz, it became about the complete destruction of Hezbollah itself and an outright refusal to entertain a ceasefire in Lebanon, something that was absolutely not accomplished during the course of this war. Discussed even less here in the West, and most importantly to this discussion in particular, are what America’s ambitions were and largely I think still are.
In reading the text of the ceasefire agreement, it doesn’t seem too different from the documents that came about after the war in 2006. The Lebanese Army redeploys en masse to southern Lebanon, Hezbollah pulls back weapons from the border, the ostensibly proper balance of power in a sovereign state like the Lebanese Republic is reestablished, and some degree of peace can reign between Israel and Lebanon even if there is no peace treaty, let alone some Abraham Accords-style diplomatic breakthrough. But the reality of what America wanted when the invasion started was arguably the exact opposite of this intention, the want to somehow increase the legitimacy of Lebanese state institutions and to increase Lebanese sovereignty.
The real goal of America in this war has been the overthrow of the Lebanese government and the destruction of its sovereignty, quite frankly. I know that seems like a very severe thing to accuse the American government of, especially when it has not launched an explicit regime change war here like it may have done in Iraq or in Afghanistan, and it certainly does not have the relationship, or lack thereof, that exists with the Islamic Republic of Iran today. But everything that has been communicated by the State Department since the invasion began, and what has been communicated by Israel, indicates a desire to rip out the current versions of these institutions that exist in Lebanon today and install something that removes even the shreds of sovereignty that still remained in this country.
The most obvious and clear example of this has been the push to allow Israel to have freedom of operation in southern Lebanon. One of the reasons why I assumed early on that a ceasefire would be much farther off was that the conditions that Israel sought to impose in the talks were just as untenable as they would have been in Gaza. What is a ceasefire if one side does not cease firing, and continues to have the ability to strike inside a sovereign nation? How is that not a continuation of the war? How is that not still a violation of another country’s sovereignty. Israeli officials have plainly said, with no screens, no fog over their word, that Lebanon has no sovereignty.
As long as Hezbollah operates inside Lebanon, it is not considered a sovereign state. As long as the “enemy Shia population” exists at the border, these problems Israel is having will remain, so they have to be expelled. This is another, separate nation that is imposing ethnic quotas and forcible expulsion on another country, yet the nation that is giving it all the arms in the world is insisting that this will in fact be a way of increasing Lebanon’s sovereignty.
The more insidious examples of this have been the changes in rhetoric at the State Department, things that people in Lebanon largely do not see. As soon as the invasion began, talk of a ceasefire largely dropped. They stopped advocating for it. The suggestion of it only crept back in later when Israeli losses began to mount and it became clear this would be no easy adventure, even if massive destruction was being wrought on Lebanon in the interim. With Hamas, of course the State Department wanted its overthrow but it still kept talking about a ceasefire because there were larger considerations that could be pointed to, a two-state solution, a larger Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab peace. Some other distraction that could be tabled. Hamas did not threaten the hegemony of the United States, not on its own. It could not defeat Israel militarily on its own. Hezbollah however could go toe-to-toe with Israel. It could be bloodied, it could be weakened, it could be shocked, but it had the capacity to beat Israel in a war as it had done so before again and again. Israel knew this well, as did the United States. So here was a historic opportunity to dislodge Hezbollah from the political space entirely, to create what was to be known as a post-Hezbollah Lebanon, something that was being considered even as the IDF wasn’t even near Sour, they were still fighting at Ayta ash-Sha’ab, a place you could practically throw stones at Israel from, it was so close to the border.
When the American government talks about Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon, when the American media talks about Hezbollah, the idea that becomes constructed in our minds is one where Hezbollah, this foreign entity, aligned wholly with foreign, Iranian interests, controls everything in the country. Hezbollah obviously, no question, receives massive amounts of arms, funding, and ideological inspiration from Iran, this cannot be denied in any way, shape, or form, nor would Hezbollah even really deny this. Nasrallah put up Khamenei’s portrait for a reason.
But we also know that Hezbollah is something that came out of Lebanon, that came out of the specific political considerations of this country, and that Lebanese people are its primary base of popular support, not Iranians. Yet now the rhetorical constructions from the media and from the government, accusing Hezbollah of taking the country hostage in its politics and in warfare, has become this kind of strange beast, in which a propagandistic talking point has now become an honest belief, where Hezbollah literally controls the political system, literally the entire government, and that there is no democracy in Lebanon period.
Lebanon has massive problems with its democratic system. The issues with representation, the confessional system, the bizarre specifics of just something as simple as where people run and register to vote, the fact that there hasn’t been an elected president for two years now, throughout this entire war even. But fundamentally, at the end of the day, if you are a Lebanese citizen you can vote for a representative and that representative will take his seat in the parliament.
It doesn’t matter if you are Kataeb, SSNP, [Lebanese Communist Party], if you have the votes, they will take their seat. We know that the Lebanese elect their own representatives, even if it is a needlessly complicated process. Yet, when the State Department spokesman Matthew Miller speaks about what kind of system the United States seeks for Lebanon, he says it is one where the people “can choose their own representatives.”
When that maxim of “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East” is repeated and repeated ad infinitum, you lose sight of the actual reality. Lebanon has democracy. Iraq has democracy. Jordan has democracy. If the bar is that a country that denies the right to vote to millions under its control is a democracy, then Iran has much more democracy. This is a flat out counterfactual statement has become gospel within the liberal sphere.
It eventually creates these insane scenarios where Economist editorial boards are green-lighting coverage of the war in Lebanon and all the wheeling and dealing that is going on inside the government, but also the hosting of opinion pieces by Israeli politicians where they advocate not only overthrowing the current Lebanese government, but placing it under an international stewardship and creating an entirely new proxy army in the south to fight Hezbollah. It creates baffling contradictions where the US is sending top-level envoys to Beirut to talk with officials that it is openly considering circumventing the authority of.
In the early stages of this war, while they weren’t pursuing a ceasefire, the United States was instead considering pushing for an election of a president that they would favor, taking advantage of the fact that Hezbollah’s elected representatives were distracted and couldn’t mount a defense for the wishes of their voters. And even then, did they want to break the impasse to perhaps elect the president wanted by [the Lebanese Forces] and the October 17th Revolution MPs before, Jihad Azour, an IMF economist? No, they wanted Joseph Aoun, the commander-in-chief of the army.
Civilians, technocrats, those were too many barriers to deal with. Instead, they wanted to go right to the source, to install a military leader and cut out any democratic middleman. This is not an accusation that Aoun is some sort of dictator wannabe, rather it is more insidious because the United States was clearly aiming to craft him into one, to make the Lebanese Army into its own tool.
What Israel has been hoping for and is still continuing to push for, if not wholly explicitly, is if it cannot produce a new South Lebanon Army of its own, then it can manufacture a civil war that will give rise to one, or better yet, pit the unified Lebanese Army against Hezbollah and potentially recreate on a much larger scale what happened in 2008.
If you follow any of Israel’s Arabic accounts, especially Avichay Adraee’s, who is the IDF’s official Arabic spokesman, or even if you encountered promoted ads from these accounts as I received when I lived in Lebanon, you will be presented with endless provocations to undertake civilian uprisings against Hezbollah. Some might come from Netanyahu directly, others from edited videos, others from Avichay who is speaking Arabic directly into your ears. In cartoons the Israeli government makes, they make the innocent victims Christians, wearing crosses and with Maronite symbols everywhere, and the ones making their lives infinitely worse are the Shias, Hezbollahis in disguise as refugees. When these messages don’t convince anyone, they strike buildings holding the displaced, hoping to inflame sectarian tensions and make everyone fearful of even touching a Shia person, lest they be targeted from above.
The goal of this ceasefire agreement, I would argue, is to bring about that confrontation finally, between the Lebanese Army and Hezbollah. Hezbollah is already going south and rebuilding its arsenal, and the Lebanese Army is supposed to be in charge of maintaining security and making sure Hezbollah does not deploy south. But there is also an acknowledgment by officials that the Lebanese Army is not ready to deploy into the area to the capacity that America would want. It is already very much there, as evidenced by the killings of these soldiers in Israeli strikes, but it does not maintain total operational control.
It may seek to disrupt Hezbollah’s activities and its offensive capabilities as stipulated in the agreement, but if you decide to enter into open conflict with a party that is represented in your elected government, you are opening up a Pandora’s box, and this is what is hoped for by Israel and what is hoped for by America: to return to a situation where they can mold the Lebanese government to its own will, and impose a system where the wishes of many voters of Lebanon’s single largest party, Shia Lebanese voters primarily, are not represented whatsoever.
Even then, if the Lebanese Army does not end up attacking Hezbollah for Israel and starting another civil war, this is also an acceptable outcome for Israel. It gives them reason to expand its strikes on Lebanon and to target the government directly as co-combatants with Hezbollah. When Hezb responded to the plethora of ceasefire violations in a single instance some days ago, both Defense Minister Katz and Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz both said that Israel should target Lebanese civil institutions should the ceasefire break down and war returns. If there is literally any chance of a state allowing for opposition to Israel’s power, it is to be stamped out militarily, all of the powers of that theoretically opposing state removed permanently.
In Syria right now, we are seeing the expedited and expanded version of what could potentially await Lebanon. Hayat Tahrir ash-Sham, the Islamist group that has now taken the reins of the Syrian state, has never fought Israel. Even as Israel invades sovereign Syrian territory, it has not even acknowledged it directly, let alone condemned it, let alone directed its forces to counter it. But “instability” is the siren call of any Israeli expansionist action, and the idea that there could even be a sliver of a chance that a new Syrian state could one day, far in the future, counter Israel directly, must be stamped out while the moment is ripe and the authorities are distracted with building something new.
In the Western media, these massive strikes on Syria’s military infrastructure have been called things like strikes on “Assad’s navy”, but these are not the Fedayeen Saddam. This military existed before Bashar, it is the institutions that belong to the state. But now that it knows no one will stop it, Israel has now destroyed 70-80% of Syria’s capabilities within only a couple days.
There is a pervasive myth that if Lebanon has a strong, sovereign military, that Israel would not dare to attack it. In truth, there is no way out of this equation Israel wants to create under the terms that it sets. If Hezbollah continues to regain its strength, it and the country must be bombarded into oblivion because its stated goal is the dismantling of the Israeli occupation. If the Lebanese Army becomes a strong army, independent of Israeli control, properly sovereign in the way that its supporters envision, it may still need to be bombarded because one day it could threaten Israel. The only option, to Israel and the United States, is to either remain weak, or to accept the Western sphere of influence. To be both at the same time is preferable.
So, we’ve talked about what has already proceeded during the Biden administration, these veneers that have been removed, but Biden and the Democrats will not be in office in January. The 60-day ceasefire trial period is set to end several days after his inauguration. Here, there is perhaps qualified hope, and I do mean qualified in that there are bizarre details to it that could only come from a return to a Donald Trump administration, details that likely would not come about in another Republican administration.
Trump’s primary locus of trust is his family, and further outward his in-laws. They are the people who he is most in contact with, who he talks to all the time, who he relies on more than anybody else. Hochstein, to put it bluntly, has been a disaster. He mediated this ceasefire agreement, yes, but his arrival has been the harbinger of numerous deadly strikes in the Beirut area, and he is compromised by his interests, namely that he is an Israeli who has served in the IDF. Contrast that with who is in Trump’s inner circle, that man being Massad Boulos, Tiffany Trump’s father-in-law. This is a nepotism hire, he has no real diplomatic experience, but he is someone who has connections with all different sides of the Lebanese political sphere, including people like Suleiman Frangieh, and he is firmly within the information bubble that Trump has placed around himself, which allows him more access than some others.
Still, that is not an unbridled case for optimism in this regard, I cannot emphasize that enough. Trump is still surrounding himself with even more ironclad supporters of Israel, people like Marco Rubio as Secretary of State. Brian Hook, the most hawkish of the Iran hawks, someone who still denies the CIA overthrow Mossadegh despite the CIA admitting to it.
The thing is with Trump is that he is the most suggestible man on the planet. The last person who spoke to him, he believes almost wholeheartedly. Sometimes he stumbles into a diplomatic breakthrough, such as when Kim Jong-un spoke to him and through that, set up two unprecedented summits between North Korea and the US. Sometimes it results in completely incoherent political statements, such as when Erdogan speaks to him and he started saying the YPG were working with ISIS. If Boulos speaks to him first, he may be more conciliatory, more willing to be hands-off. If anyone else in the State Department, speaks to him first, he will advocate for much harsher measures. It’s a not especially sophisticated game but it is one that is going to have to be played because of who is sitting in the Oval Office.
Trump likes dramatic, maverick measures, no matter what they are. Most of the time they are in the direction the Republicans are facing, sometimes not. What he cares about is what looks best on TV, for his persona. He assassinated Qassem Soleimani, assassinating a military leader in a sovereign state’s army outside of wartime, but he also made the decision to end the cycle of retaliation after the IRGC hit back at an American base in Iraq with ballistic missiles, something that Kamala’s campaign was very critical of and genuinely considered to him to have been too soft on Iran for. Netanyahu considers this ceasefire to be a gift for Trump in some way, a dramatic gesture of ending America’s wars abroad that Trump will appreciate, but if Israel considers restarting this war, as I fear he is, then there is just as much chance that Trump will be gung-ho for it, wanting something bigger, more severe, more TV-ready than Biden would have perhaps enjoyed.
The fine details will be different, certainly, but this genocidal war did not start under Trump, it started under Biden. The arc of this conflict will remain the same, and people need to prepared for the fact that the light at the end of that tunnel has not yet shown itself. To see it, there might still be carving to be done.