Don’t Believe the U.S.–Israel Fantasy for Lebanon

A view on Oct. 18, 2024, of destruction in Nabatieh, Lebanon, after Israeli warplanes launched massive air raids destroying a big part of the city’s old market and the municipal buildings. AP Images

For readers of Western media since the start of the invasion of Lebanon, Israeli maneuvers appear to be a blinding success. Israeli military spokesperson Daniel Hagari filmed a press release from occupied southern Lebanon, and Israeli troops gave a tour of a captured neighborhood in Blida to a host of reporters, both international and domestic. A detained Lebanese man, alleged by the Israelis to be a Hezbollah member, told interrogators that his comrades had fled in fear and left him behind, like cowards.

What this PR offensive has obscured is the actual cost of the invasion thus far.

While the Israeli military has continued pushing into Lebanese territory, the actual distance has rarely exceeded towns on the border. Contrary to the claims made under duress by kidnapped Lebanese for the cameras, Hezbollah fighters have not abandoned the border, and skirmishes with Israeli forces remain deadly endeavors, with five Israeli soldiers killed in the fighting last week. Hezbollah has expanded the scope of its operations, with drones striking soldiers deep in Israeli territory, including an attack at a military base near Haifa on October 13 that killed four soldiers and injured at least 58 people. Missiles weighing as much as three tons are being fired at Tel Aviv. While much of Hezbollah’s leadership has been assassinated, rumors of the organization’s demise have, for now, been greatly exaggerated.

Despite the complex reality on the ground, Israeli officials and their American backers are already thinking far into the future. Although the total destruction in Gaza and the killing of Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh have so far failed to dislodge Hamas, Israel and the United States are already speaking about a Lebanon post-Hezbollah.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government have advocated for months — and especially intensely as the invasion continues — for a kind of civilian uprising against Hezbollah. It’s envisioned as an almost cinematic event in which all sects of the Lebanese Republic throw off the organization’s yoke, releasing Lebanon from its alleged bondage. It is a purposefully vague invocation, one that any Hezbollah opponent, Lebanese or not, could map their own desires onto. While Netanyahu and the state remain relatively light on details, other Israeli politicians have been very specific in what they foresee.

Yair Lapid, former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader, has been extremely supportive of the invasion of Lebanon — despite his severe disagreements with the Netanyahu government. In an English-language opinion piece in The Economist, Lapid lays out a plan that sounds indistinguishable from a Netanyahu one. Lapid advocates for the reestablishment of the South Lebanon Army, the Israeli proxy army that existed from the 1980s until 2000. It would consist of Lebanese soldiers bribed to fight with higher salaries, who would be trained not by Israelis but by “French, Emirati, and American military officers.” Most critically, Lapid advocates for dissolving the Lebanese government and placing the entire country of millions under an international mandate, at which point new elections would be held and “a new government can take control” — one almost certainly without Hezbollah anywhere near it.

The absurdity of this proposition, to say nothing of its intrinsic orientalism, should be obvious to anyone familiar with the region. Hezbollah has immense military power — moreso than the Lebanese Army, certainly. But it does not exert this power through might alone. While its allies in the March 8 Alliance do not hold the majority in the Lebanese Parliament, Hezbollah received the most votes of any single party in Lebanon in the last election, and enjoys significant popular support in south Beirut and in much of south Lebanon. While there are many in Lebanon who place themselves in opposition to Hezbollah and its ideology, supporters of the organization see the group as a critical backbone of resistance against Israeli military power, being instrumental in the expulsion of the Israel Defense Forces from the south in 2000 and rebuilding south Beirut after its bombardment during the 2006 war. While the majority of the Lebanese population has not and does not support a war with Israel, Hezbollah is an inseparable and native-born element of Lebanese society.

Even if this might be a clear reality to observers, the United States takes no issue with Israel’s publicly articulated plans. It has stopped advocating for a ceasefire in Lebanon, instead seeing an opportunity for Hezbollah’s power to be diminished and defeated. It has begun maneuvering to push for an election of a new Lebanese president while Hezbollah’s attention is allegedly weakened and turned elsewhere, with U.S. envoy Amos Hochstein slipping up when speaking to the Lebanese TV station LBC, saying: “Until we select — once Lebanon selects a president.” When Lebanon’s parliamentary speaker asked a U.N. coordinator how in this scenario Hezbollah MPs would even be protected, considering Israel has launched assassination strikes against Hezbollah political officials inside Beirut, the coordinator simply replied, “No one can guarantee that this will not happen.”

The United States is spinning up a fantasy vision of Lebanon, at once communicating with the Lebanese prime minister and other officials and engaging in diplomacy with them, while at the same time, the State Department speaks of a future Lebanon where Lebanese people “can choose their own representatives” — mirroring George W. Bush’s language about Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Lebanese people can choose their own representatives, but there’s no evidence the kinds of representatives the majority of Lebanese want are the ones that would meet the approval of Israel and the United States.

While the U.S. concocts this fantasy, the Israeli state and its military are acting in accordance with the understanding that the Lebanese cannot be trusted with democracy, and thus must be expelled from southern Lebanon entirely. When Hagari spoke from south Lebanon, he said that every house in the village he was in was part of Hezbollah’s infrastructure. Video has already emerged of Israeli troops destroying an entire Lebanese village in one swoop with planted explosives. What the U.S. and Israel may soon come to advocate, once the reality can no longer be ignored, is the kind of Lebanese state that former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan once foresaw: one where the south is under Israeli control, and in the seat of power in Beirut, an installed leader who will want nothing more than to give Israel everything it wants.

The post Don’t Believe the U.S.–Israel Fantasy for Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.