Translated from GegenStandpunkt 2-2026

Secondary front:
Lebanon

As of May, what’s happened in relation to Lebanon in terms of diplomacy and its political subsumption by the parties involved is roughly the following:

In the American capital, ceasefire diplomacy is underway, accompanied by the prospect of broader cooperation and a peace agreement between the Israeli government and the Lebanese government. This has the official premise – which seems strange for this type of diplomacy – that both sides insist that, for all intents and purposes, they are not actually at war with one another, even though they intend to officially end the war through negotiations. At the same time, the negotiating parties and mediators emphasize that the side that Israel is actually at war with – Iran’s ally, Hezbollah – and would actually be the only qualified counter-party for peace talks, has been and will continue to be deliberately excluded from the process.

In the Lebanese capital, the war that Hezbollah is waging against Israel is defined – officially, politically, legally and to some extent even practically – as an act of violence against the Lebanese state, which may in turn be surprising at first glance, given that the Lebanese state and its armed forces haven’t had a presence for quite a while in the area where – or from where – Hezbollah is essentially waging this war – Southern Lebanon – precisely because of this situation. This is accompanied by another oddity: Government officials are voicing fears that, in a worst-case scenario, even northern Lebanon – including the state structures that are still more or less functioning there – could soon fall victim to Israel’s campaign of destruction, even though, as we recall, Lebanon is not at war with Israel; that is, in the event that Hezbollah persists in the south with its activities – which the Lebanese state has practically and avowedly nothing to do with. And all the Lebanese factions and forces are warning one another that if things continue this way, “the country” could “slide” into civil war, something none of them want, but in which the only possible participants would be themselves – though by now this doesn’t strike anyone as odd anymore.

In the Israeli capital, government officials are declaring that, in case of doubt, it doesn’t matter what assurances are made in Beirut or negotiated in Washington, as long as Israel detects any sign of the defiant existence of Hezbollah, it is necessary to hold all of Lebanon accountable.

At the second American capital, Mar-a-Lago, in light of all this, spirits are high: Trump is looking forward to a three-way summit with his friend Netanyahu and that Lebanese guy, whose name an advisor will jot down on a piece of paper for him well in time.

The four parties to the war in Lebanon

Israel

The most important belligerent party in the country is Israel. The war it began against Iran in late February with its American ally launched a new round of violence in its northern neighbor as well, after Hezbollah – as announced, as everyone knew, and as Israel had anticipated – began shelling Israel from southern Lebanon after the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei. The official mission for the IDF, with its air force and ground troops, is now to make Hezbollah incapable of firing rockets and drones at Israel once and for all – that is, to finally establish “peace and security for northern Israel” and thus to eliminate Israel’s Lebanon problem.

The problem itself and Israel’s handling of it have a long history. In the past, the Israel-Lebanon problem was mainly comprised of the Palestinians. Through its expulsions of the Palestinians, particularly in 1948 and 1967, Israel bestowed on Lebanon a considerable number of refugees, the vast majority of whom live in their own camps inside the country, are still denied citizenship to this day, and – in their generally bleak existence, looked after by the UN and others – are treated as citizens of a not yet existing state whose prospects of ever being established have been eliminated by Israel. Beginning in 1970, the Palestinians’ military and political resistance against this situation, led by the PLO, also shifted from Jordan to Lebanon: During “Black September” of that year, the Jordanian king decided to get out of the fix between Palestinian resistance and the Israeli threat of war by ordering his troops to carry out a massacre of a few thousand Palestinians and expelling the militant organizations from the country. During the Lebanese Civil War, Israel initially welded together a proxy army out of right-wing militias which were allowed to use force against the Palestinians in southern Lebanon, then known as “Fatah Land” due to the strong presence of Fatah, the largest PLO sub-organization. In 1978, Israel then invaded southern Lebanon itself, and in 1982 marched all the way to Beirut, driving out the PLO once again after a campaign of massive destruction. This Lebanon problem was thus, in principle, solved. Around this time, a new Lebanon problem emerged for Israel in the form of Hezbollah: Israel continues to fight this avowed enemy – an ally of Iran and all the other remaining opponents of Israel in the region – to this day; but by now with a broader objective and a more radical standpoint.

Secondly, since October 2023, Israel has been applying to Hezbollah also the principle that it will no longer tolerate even the mere existence of its enemies and is going to destroy them – partly simultaneously, partly one after another – in its regional multi-front war. The violence that Israel has been deploying against Hezbollah for quite some time is not intended to bring about a capitulation that would give any form of recognized existence to Hezbollah, and that’s exactly what it looks like: South Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern districts of Beirut are being declared terrorist infrastructure that must be destroyed as such. Israel, according to its radicalized standpoint, will not repeat the mistake of the past and allow Hezbollah to keep rearming itself in interwar periods, as Israel has inexcusably permitted: “We will not allow Hezbollah to recover.” This means that the widespread destruction of towns in the south is intended to prevent Hezbollah and its fighters from re-establishing or expanding their presence there. By driving the population out of the south – now amounting to about one-fifth of Lebanon’s total population – the battlefield has been cleared of the unwelcome masses who the terrorists inevitably lurk among. And to ensure that these masses stay away in the long term, the most humanitarian army in the world deems it appropriate to destroy any agrarian means of existence – fields, olive groves, livestock – and to destroy the transportation infrastructure; paramedics have no right to be spared if they are too close to detected or suspected Hezbollah fighters, nor do civilians; Shiite charitable organization agencies are branches of terrorist financing. In short, it’s the “Gaza model”...

As in the Gaza War, the scope of the war here is also determined by the circumstance that Israel defines this front as a secondary theater in its primary struggle against Iran. In Lebanon, too, Israel, by combating Hezbollah, an ally of Iran, is trying to eliminate the last major, truly autonomously acting enemy state power in the region, and thereby to create the “New Middle East” that Netanyahu has been constantly invoking since the beginning of the war in 2023, which has since been retroactively renamed a “War of Redemption”: in essence, a region under the total domination of Israel, which has the permanent right to freely decide when any kind of consolidated power outside its borders seems like the beginning of the next Holocaust, which it must prevent by promptly and thoroughly attacking it.

USA

For the USA, which is not itself acting as a direct war party here, its partner’s war is perfectly acceptable. First, the US classifies Hezbollah as its enemy, independently sharing the view that it is an anti-Western terrorist group that must be combatted at all costs. For the USA, that’s part of making Lebanon useful as an object of its proprietary claim to the entire region.[1] That, in turn, is part of the Lebanese state’s imperative mission to produce a pro-American monopoly on the use of force within the country – something that cooperative forces within the political and military establishment have consistently failed to accomplish. For the US, this is an even more compelling reason to stipulate to whatever state authority exists in the country – through measured financial support and calculated military aid – that it has the primary task of imposing order on the Shiite militia.[2] In addition, it is fighting Hezbollah in its capacity as the organizer of its own polity within Lebanon with its exclusively civilian means of extortion: It imposed financial sanctions on any banks, insurance companies, other financial institutions, welfare organizations, etc., that are or could in any way be connected to Hezbollah – something that contributed not insignificantly to the 2019 financial crisis, the consequences of which the Lebanese are still grappling with today. On the other hand, it is using the power of its dollar to impose conditions on the Lebanese state – insofar as it is represented by the government – in exchange for aid, either directly from the US or through the IMF and the World Bank, to help it cope with its ongoing financial crisis. These conditions are aimed, with ever-greater intransigence, at compelling the state to take the initiative in attacking Hezbollah, even in its civilian political, economic, and social positions of power.

For the USA, the fact that no tangible success has been achieved is one perspective from which it fully supports Israel in its actions against Hezbollah, which shows no consideration whatsoever for the Lebanese state. The decision to invade the Islamic Republic and put an end to its anti-Americanism adds a second, very current reason: the surrender of the Iranian enemy necessarily and self-evidently, includes the elimination of Iran’s influence, especially all its positions of power in the region. Here Hezbollah is the most important enemy force that must be eliminated. The fact that Israel has taken on Lebanon as a secondary front and is by proxy stalling the common big enemy with a new escalation of violence against the common small enemy is very welcome to the MAGA administration, which wants to see success from its partners.

Iran

Iran contests the USA’s strategic claim to the region. It is standing up to the Israeli-American program of destroying the Shiite party as a military power factor, weakening it in every other respect, and thereby purging it from Lebanon as an independent force. It has been the Party of God’s primary supporter since its founding; with its assistance, the Shiite Republic of God maintains a presence in Lebanon. This is part of its reason of state: to rescue Shiite Muslims from Western or pro-Western oppression and to mobilize them across the region into a movement that transcends its borders and is backed by its state capabilities.

In a way that is typically reserved for the USA, Iran helps determine Lebanon’s domestic affairs: Through its financial support for Hezbollah, it perpetuates the group’s threefold existence as a militia, as a political party within the Lebanese state, and as a welfare state for the needy adjacent to the Lebanese government, which doesn’t look after them by itself. From Iran’s perspective, none of this is viewed as interference in Lebanon’s affairs or undermines its sovereignty; rather, it is seen as acts of solidarity in support of Lebanon’s very ability to fight for its sovereignty when it is constantly being undermined and eroded by other external powers, particularly the US and Israel. In this respect, Iran views Lebanon as a whole as part of the “Axis of Resistance.”

Both the Shiite community, which exists in Lebanon as a Party of God and is organized and protected by Iran, and the use of all of Lebanon for anti-Western resistance, are at stake due to Israel’s war and the accompanying US sanctions and other coercive policies. Iran is confronted with the reality that Hezbollah was already militarily weakened during the first rounds of Israel’s wars in 2023 and 2024, and that Israel is making it clear through the nature of its military campaign that this time it will not settle for interim solutions as the outcome of the ongoing war. Not least because of this, anti-Iran sentiment is growing among those segments of the political spectrum that see their salvation, and that of Lebanon, in aligning with the US and its state allies in the region; and this has practical consequences: Iran’s transportation links are being disrupted, and shortly after the war began in the spring, diplomatic relations with Tehran are being called into question – a political test of strength that Iran must face to rescue its anti-imperialist reason at this outpost.

Hezbollah

For Hezbollah, Israel’s actual war enemy, absolutely everything is at stake. For one thing, it concerns its very existence as a small protective power for Lebanon’s Shiites, backed by the great protective power of Shiites in the region. Its base consists of this ethnic group – the largest demographic in Lebanon – the vast majority of whom are poor and among the poorest, and who only managed to overcome their political marginalization through their successful participation in the civil war. This marginalization was driven primarily by the Maronite Christians, whose leaders view themselves as the elite and their followers as the true core of the Lebanese nation; to this day, they can only reluctantly accept having to share political power and the associated access to sources of wealth with the Shiite rabble and its representatives. Hezbollah emerged during the civil war of the 1980s from a split within the Shiite Amal movement – which continues to exist as a political party – and is an integral part of Lebanon’s “political landscape,” which has been in a suspended state of civil war for over 30 years. Within this framework, Hezbollah both competes and cooperates with other parties, which in turn represent ethno-religiously defined groups into which the entire country’s population is divided. Living partly in their own ethnic enclaves and partly in mixed communities, these groups form the basis for a power struggle that has only been formally resolved through the state’s elaborate system of proportional representation based on religious affiliation. The shifting dynamics of this struggle determines which representatives – whether Shiite, Sunni, Maronite, Greek Orthodox, or otherwise – gain control over the state’s power and financial resources – which exist in the form of a central government with territorial subdivisions, an almost respectable budget, a security apparatus, and so on – and channel portions of these assets to their respective constituencies in various forms to maintain their support – ranging from construction contracts and paid public offices to charitable services.

By continuing to exist as a militia, Hezbollah – and this is the second aspect of its reason for existing – upholds the doctrine established at its founding: that the struggle of the local Shiites for a dignified political and material existence in Lebanon is in no way separable from the militant struggle against Israel, whose Christian allies – vested with all the elements of Christian-Jewish-Western chauvinism – deny them that very existence. As the only civil war faction possessing a military presence, Hezbollah – acting with a great deal of self-confidence and with its achievements being honored by half the Lebanese population, well beyond the Shiite community – advocates the view that not only the future of the Shiites, but Lebanese sovereignty itself can be preserved – and thus endure – only through resistance against Israel. Because the official Lebanese central government and its military forces are neither capable nor willing to undertake this task, Hezbollah’s arsenal serves as a substitute on behalf of the nation – one that must under no circumstances be relinquished.

All of this is now at stake for them, and Hezbollah is engaged in the latest round of hostilities correspondingly: It rightly takes the great war waged by Israel and the USA against Iran as a war against itself, and the assassination of the revolutionary leader Ali Khamenei – who is regarded as the supreme authority – as a signal to wage the war that Israel deserves from the north. The fact that Israel can never ultimately win this war, even in the long term – Hezbollah’s leadership and militant rank and file are certain of this, as is always the case when activists deeply convinced of their sovereign right to a truly just rule and a rule truly their own are supported by an already existing mass base. They accept the casualties Israel inflicts – and not just their own; they inflict as many casualties and as much material damage on the Israelis as possible, which is relatively low in comparison, but certainly enough to drive up the cost for Israel, prevent the lasting pacification of northern Israel for the time being, and repeatedly embroil Israel – whose security fanaticism is thereby challenged – in skirmishes on the ground in southern Lebanon. Since they have made decisive progress in recent years along with their Iranian military allies – particularly in the field of specific drone technologies – they are pushing Israel’s territorial and battlefield air defense capabilities to their limits in some areas.

At the same time, Hezbollah is struggling with the fact that the president and his supporting factions in Lebanon are denying the national character of the “resistance” and even criminalizing it – under the emphatic slogan of “sovereignty” and, recently, in a new, escalating way. For this president is very persistently seeking a path forward for his reign in relation to the four-way war in and around the country he wants to govern.

The fifth party: The Aoun government in Beirut

… a US product

Using its long established levers of influence over Lebanon, the USA hoisted the president into office[3] at the end of 2024 – that is, under Biden – so that he would finally carry out a mission the US has long wanted to see completed: He should effectively crush Hezbollah as a pro-Iranian power factor in the country, thereby neutralizing it as an anti-American and anti-Israeli disruptive force, while establishing himself as the decisive power factor and making the pro-Americanism he champions into the country’s dominant political guiding principle. The crucial sub-task within the framework of this overall mission assigned by America, its actual main concern, is to strip Hezbollah of the means by which it asserts its unique status in Lebanon and turns the country into part of the militant axis of Iranian resistance: its vast arsenal of weapons. This mandate is non-negotiable for America and its negotiators, a point they repeatedly drive home to the new president – whom they view as theirs – on their frequent trips to Beirut.

At most, they are willing to negotiate certain conditions he presents to them in order to be able to meet their requirements at all. These conditions mainly revolve around the fact that the thing will take time, which, according to Aoun’s urgent advice to them, he should then be granted; that he will then need the suitable and ample means of enforcement, which can not only be promised to him as a reward after fulfilling the mission; and that, in the interests of fulfilling the mission, accompanying compromises with Hezbollah can’t be avoided, so America must please not use this against him as evidence of him holding back. And he feels confident and apparently feels it is his duty to emphasize to his American partners that he comes to this alignment of interests against Hezbollah and Iran from the standpoint of Lebanese sovereignty; and this includes his long term aim to put an end to Israel’s challenges to that sovereignty – which also could only be in America’s interest as well... On many issues, he also secures a number of concessions from US negotiators – though never very far-reaching ones, and always accompanied by increasingly impatient pressure for tangible progress in dismantling Hezbollah’s military and other bases of power.

… a zero in Israel’s calculations, and even worse

In dealing with Beirut, Israel follows both publicly and for diplomatic purposes a double line so contradictory it could hardly be misunderstood. This consists of, at times, touting its own violence against Hezbollah as acts of assistance to the Aoun government and to all well-meaning Lebanese, who are themselves, after all, also merely victims of a criminal Iran which has hijacked the country with its fanatical proxy troops and plunged its people into disaster. And at other times, Israel presents that same violence as punishment of the Aoun government and all ill-intentioned Lebanese, who are ultimately nothing more than Hezbollah’s puppets or its pathetic yet fanatical supporters.

In any case, coercing others to do one’s dirty work – as practiced by the USA – is not the order of the day here. Rather, Israel sees no prospect of the Lebanese government taking action to eliminate Hezbollah – a point that the government in Jerusalem has made explicit:

“We expect the Lebanese government ... to disarm Hezbollah. But it’s clear that we’ll exercise our right to self-defense... We won’t let Lebanon become a renewed front against us, and we’ll do what’s necessary.”

The reason for this is, however, only one part of Israel’s mistrust as to whether Aoun could be a useful tool – a point on which even the US, for all its conditional support for the man, has its doubts. Israel’s relationship with the power holders in Beirut is, in a much stricter sense, purely negative: If Israel – as it has been doing for some time now, not just since the attack on Iran – were to unleash a new war against Hezbollah, the aim will not be merely another round of the recurring need to fight it, but its total annihilation. And implicit in this is that Israel today has moved beyond the standpoint that it needs a self-interested ally in Lebanon for this purpose – a central power that shares a common interest of its own accord. Israel simply has no use for such Lebanese self-interest; on the contrary: reckoning with it at all would, from the anti-Hezbollah standpoint of the Israeli warlords, already be a concession – taking it into account would amount to a relativizing consideration of foreign calculations, to a project that, despite all the efforts at alignment, is still distinct from their unshakable purpose of putting an end to it once and for all. For this reason and in this sense, the Lebanese state plays no role whatsoever for Israel – not as an enemy and certainly not as a friend. At best, it is a nuisance that must be reminded of its absolute powerlessness through pronouncements such as the threat to blow up ten houses in Beirut for every Hezbollah drone that attacks Israel in the course of this war.

… a power without a monopoly

Lebanon’s leader is doing everything he can to make the best of his situation: to extract the maximum possible amount of sovereignty from a position of dependence and powerlessness. Aoun presents himself to his people as a sovereignist; and he is pursuing a dual strategy to assert himself as the country’s ruler, positioning himself between the ruthlessly attacking, overwhelmingly superior force of Israel and the Shiite militia fighting to the bitter end. On the one hand, he makes the USA’s anti-terrorism mandate – and certainly not Israel’s will to annihilate, but its political explanatory notes – into his own cause, as best he can. He criminalizes Hezbollah by law and repeatedly takes forcible action against it – albeit with the consistent result that Hezbollah counters such moves or causes them to fizzle out with the help of its allies within Lebanon: The President simply lacks the power to enforce a sovereign monopoly on power; yet this does not deter him from pursuing this goal and taking corresponding actions, often under American command. On the other hand, he is willing to make offers to the Shiite party or to reach compromises with it – which testifies to his statesmanlike, patriotic determination to establish himself and his government as the authority over the entire Lebanese people in a country with respected external borders and no internal civil war fronts. Yet this proves impossible to realize, either against the Shiite party and militia or against his own followers and supporters, not to mention the mandate of imperialist oversight. With his very personal will to power, Aoun provides the perfect character mask for the dual contradiction that characterizes Lebanon’s state and domestic governance.

The first contradiction is that his “sovereignist” determination to strip Hezbollah of its power as a militia actually requires precisely what he lacks: As president, Aoun simply does not have the means to bring Hezbollah under control by force, because – and this is, after all, Aoun’s woebegone starting point – Hezbollah is an entity that commands its own, autonomously armed base, which in many respects is stronger than the official army or the other security and police forces. The existence of the Hezbollah militia, with its active supporters and its substantial weapons arsenal, effectively prevents Aoun from exercising the authority he claims over the entire country. And in this way, Hezbollah embodies and perpetuates a political division within the country that extends even into the security forces, over which Aoun, as president, holds supreme command: Even there, supporters of the line advocated by Hezbollah – that Lebanese sovereignty must be asserted first and foremost against Israel – can be found in virtually every rank, making it impossible to take action against Hezbollah of the sort demanded by Israel and the US. Thus, it is generally questionable as to what extent – and how little – Aoun can rely on the unwavering loyalty of the LAF, the Sûreté Générale, the intelligence services, etc.

The second contradiction concerns Aoun’s determination to seize the power that Hezbollah withholds from him. On the one hand, he is certainly very honest about this, because from the standpoint of Lebanese state sovereignty, which he embodies in its highest office, it is and remains unacceptable that this sovereignty should be permanently undermined from within; by an organization that, by virtue of its status as the dominant party within Lebanon, insists on bypassing – or rather, acting against – the Lebanese state represented by Aoun in deciding what the state stands for and against, and with whom it engages in what kind of foreign relations; and especially when it comes to war and peace. But from this very standpoint – which Hezbollah, in its existence as a militia, constantly disputes and challenges – Aoun also has reasons to engage with it in ways other than simply fighting it at all costs. For one thing, both share the view that Lebanon’s sovereignty is challenged primarily from outside: by Israel – not only through its current military operations, but also through its ongoing occupation of parts of Lebanese territory and the unrestrained liberties it takes in allowing its army to operate at will on or over Lebanese territory. In this respect, it is not a desire for militant hostility toward Israel that divides Aoun and Hezbollah; rather, it is the militant stance of self-determination with which the militia engages in armed resistance. And in this regard, too, Aoun – at least until recently – could find common ground with Hezbollah on one issue – even more so than with some of the more inflammatory right-wing Christian parties: Since Hezbollah views its hostility to Israel as the flip side of the need to create a sovereign and nationally united Lebanon as a whole, neither side is interested in completely shattering Lebanon in the course of their conflict; since both, albeit in quite opposite ways, are concerned with its rebirth as a nation that is free from external interference and defined by the equal coexistence of its constituent communities.[4]

In any case, neither side wants another civil war. But what does that really mean in a proxy war between imperialist and anti-imperialist forces that is destroying the country and terrorizing its inhabitants?

The wonderful ceasefire –
a blank check for the destruction of Hezbollah

In the heat of the American-Israeli war against Iran, both Israel and Hezbollah are escalating their long-standing existential struggle against one another: Israel is waging its security totalitarianism as a war against a quasi-state terrorist group with which even the possibility of a compromise is completely unthinkable and effectively ruled out by the nature of the warfare. Hezbollah is fighting for its existence as a serious belligerent through rocket attacks and resistance against advancing Israeli occupation forces. As a result, Israel is turning southern Lebanon – the heartland of the Shiite community – into its “buffer zone” by driving out the population and destroying their living conditions. Furthermore, it is turning Lebanon as a whole into its combat zone at its own discretion – and without encountering any resistance outside the areas controlled by Hezbollah – partly and officially in pursuit of the war aim of specifically eliminating Hezbollah fighters; and, in addition – and in general – in a manner that not only demonstrates the complete powerlessness of any entity that could be considered a sovereign Lebanese authority, but also makes this powerlessness a permanent and demonstrative reality.

After six weeks of an intense campaign of annihilation against the Islamic Republic’s means of power – and successes which, in the warlord Trump’s judgment, should suffice for the time being – Trump transforms it into a ceasefire with a surrender ultimatum. This has consequences for the theater of war in Lebanon, which Israel manages solely according to its own needs. Iran’s commanders make their willingness to respond to the American demand for submission through negotiations contingent on a ceasefire in Lebanon as well. Trump, for his part, responds to this in keeping with his mission to end war through the sovereign and ruthless deployment of his military might: He brokers the diplomatic agreement – mentioned at the beginning – between Israel and the President of the state of Lebanon. For the latter, this means that, by virtue of an American decree, he finds himself in the position of a party to a ceasefire agreement without ever having been a party to the armed conflict that the treaty effectively brings to a halt. He is given the honor of playing the role, on demand, of counterparty to the Israeli state power, so that by signing the treaty he contributes nothing at all from his side other than his signature as a formal head of state, and certainly not any military force against Israel. Israel, for its part, is formally committed to calling off and, in the long term, ending a war against the Lebanese sovereign – a war that, from its own perspective, it is not actually waging at all: The government in Beirut is, for those in Jerusalem, neither the enemy being fought nor one to be fought in the future, nor a treaty partner of any significant weight. Equally irritating for the Israeli side is the “expectation” that the American peacemaker attaches to this: that Israel should show “restraint” in its devastation of Lebanon; not where Israel’s priority is eliminating Hezbollah and its popular base,[5] but rather where America identifies rights of the Lebanese state itself that are worthy of protection; or, perhaps more precisely, that Israel should show restraint in such a way that, with enough good will, one could speak of respect for Lebanese jurisdiction within its own borders. On the other hand, President Aoun has to pay for his elevation by the US president to the status of an internationally acceptable negotiating partner by giving up everything he himself had previously defined as preconditions for any peace negotiations with Israel: When he took office a year and a half ago, he demanded that Israel must, prior to any even indirect diplomatic efforts, completely withdraw from Lebanese territory, including all buffer zones, forward posts, outposts, and observation posts, release all citizens captured in Lebanon and transferred to Israel back to Lebanon, and guarantee that it would not invade Lebanon again. That is now off the table: His success with this “beautiful peace” lies in the fact that he is allowed to sign it.

So Trump has, in any case, once again brought about peace – not to the delight of the two parties he brought together to sign the agreement. But the results are anything but fictional:

America has once again demonstrated to Israel that the superpower ultimately decides on war and peace, military engagements and ceasefires in the Middle East. The fact that there is heated debate in Israel over whether its own government has once again shown itself to be accommodating – even submissive – in its relationship with the US in this matter reveals, at the very least, the political significance of such an American show of power, even toward Israel. Conversely, it has been made clear to the Lebanese government that the US sees it as a fully accountable party to its demand for submission to Trump’s regional peace order and holds it responsible for ensuring usable conditions in the country. Finally and most importantly, the Iranian party to the ceasefire has seen its wish to spare its Lebanese protégé – who is fighting with great sacrifice for the common cause against the Western enemy – fulfilled in a way that goes even beyond a simple rejection: Hezbollah is not even mentioned in the ceasefire; restraint toward it, as actually demanded, has not even been rejected; whatever Israel does against it falls under “no more war” by virtue of American intervention.

And what’s going on there is no small matter. For in practice, Israel is using the imposed treaty situation as a political license to aggressively push through whatever it deems necessary for the far-reaching security of its existence. It all the more ruthlessly makes the Aoun government, which it now supposedly gets along with, responsible for the successful elimination of Hezbollah; not to support Aoun in the spirit of a shared objective, or even merely to use him, but in order to take full control of the fulfillment of this unasked for obligation by appealing to the fiction of such a consensus. This includes – in the interest of ensuring the success of this ceasefire – the constant demonstration of total air superiority over all of Lebanon; for the purpose of exercising complete control, to ensure that there are no enemy activities anywhere that could disrupt the ceasefire; and to eliminate these activities – if they are discovered, as is constantly the case – through precision bombings; mistakes cannot be ruled out. For this, Israel is demanding unrestricted American backing.

Israel is testing just how far this license to extend the authority of its national anti-terrorism campaign now reaches politically, fully in line with its aggressive program of reorganizing the states of the entire region, by informing its major partner – and, incidentally, the rest of the world – that it has increasingly serious plans to annex Lebanese territory as a buffer zone. Because ultimately only Israeli sovereignty can guarantee the peace that Israel needs, that it wants for the entire Middle East, and that it is currently bringing about in its northern neighbor due to recent events. Every Israeli head of government is convinced of this, even if he should one day no longer be named Netanyahu. It is, after all, his job to ensure that the Trump-Abrahamic peace exists only on these terms.

Footnotes

[1] In Beirut, the USA maintains its second-largest foreign embassy, after the one in Iraq.

[2] The Pentagon has plans to tie funding for the LAF to the establishment of a unit directly under US command that would be tasked with hunting down Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. At the end of May, the US announced sanctions against certain high-ranking officers in Aoun’s LAF and the Sûreté Générale, as well as several ministers and members of parliament, all of whom are alleged to have ties to Hezbollah. There is also talk of imposing sanctions on Nabih Berri, the leader of the Shiite Amal Party. Alongside President Aoun (Maronite) and Prime Minister Salam (Sunni), Berri serves as Speaker of Parliament, and as this third president, he embodies – alongside the other two – the fundamental principle of sectarian political coexistence in Lebanon. Subjecting him to such sanctions would amount to an externally imposed termination of this principle, starting from its highest level.

[3] Half of Lebanon’s political establishment is calling this a coup. The issue at stake – once again – was whether the official Lebanese Armed Forces would continue to receive their urgently needed funding from the US. At the time, the US had originally made this funding contingent on Joseph Aoun being elected to the vacant presidency.

[4] With every advance in the Israeli-American campaign against Hezbollah, with every expansion of this campaign into the areas north of the Litani River and into the institutions of the Aoun-led Lebanese government, Hezbollah and Aoun are consequently faced with the reality that they can less and less afford to straddle the line between their conflicting agendas – which neither is willing to give up – and to maintain a coexistence to which they remain committed. The fact that their room to maneuver is shrinking is made clear to them by, among other things, the hardliners in their own ranks who would now rather risk an open intra-Lebanese war – and are inciting one accordingly – than continue to make compromises with people who have always betrayed Lebanon to foreign powers.

[5] The third note from the US regarding the ceasefire that it had Israel and Lebanon sign makes this clear: “The agreement stipulates that Israel retains the right to act in self-defense against imminent or ongoing threats, a provision not hindered by the cessation of hostilities. Concurrently, Israel agrees to cease offensive military operations against targets in Lebanon across land, air, and sea.”