How Lebanon's leaders are enabling Israel's war on their own country

This delegitimisation is not confined to the head of state. It also extends to the executive authority now shared by Aoun and the government headed by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, which, in trying to conflate itself with the full authority of the Lebanese state, has launched an unprecedented campaign not merely to ban armed resistance, but to portray it as alien to Lebanese social and political life. In so doing, it has effectively disinherited the legacy of resistance and liberation struggle, disowning an inextricable part of Lebanon's mosaic political identity. What the past month has confirmed is the full entrenchment of a political project whose direction had been clear since August 2025, when the cabinet ordered the army to disarm Hezbollah and destroy its seized weapons - its ultimate objective being to demilitarise Lebanon itself in order to appease Israel. That objective was given more explicit coercive form on 2 March, when, just hours after Israel responded to Hezbollah's resumption of resistance activity following 15 months of restraint in the face of continued Israeli aggression, the government criminalised its military and security operations. By 8 April, the same appeasement project had acquired its clearest institutional expression when Salam insisted on severing the country from Iran, which had been prioritising Lebanon's inclusion in the ceasefire as one of its non-negotiable red lines in its talks with Washington. Having stripped Lebanon of that protective diplomatic cover, Lebanese officials rushed headlong into unshielded and profoundly asymmetrical negotiations with Israel, and did so in the immediate aftermath of Israel's mass slaughter of civilians across the country. Salam went further still in a cabinet session the following day, reportedly rationalising Israel's massacres as targeted strikes on Hezbollah fighters and weapons depots rather than civilians and humanitarian aid, while requesting that weapons in Beirut be restricted to the legitimate forces alone. In one fell swoop, the Lebanese government managed to convert Israel's justification for the atrocities into a security directive of its own. No illusions On 14 April, the Lebanese government met with the Israeli ambassador in Washington - and again on 23 April - even as Israel announced its intent to establish a security zone in the form of a Gaza-style Yellow Line in south Lebanon, barring return to 55 villages and towns and transforming roughly six percent of Lebanese territory into a depopulated military zone. In Gaza, as in Lebanon, the Yellow Line was first presented as a temporary withdrawal boundary under the US-led ceasefire arrangement but has since been expanded by Israeli forces into a permanent occupation encompassing more than half of Gaza's territory. Now extended further to an orange line placing nearly two-thirds of Gaza under Israeli control, its Lebanese iteration was similarly designed to convert a supposedly provisional security line into a de facto demarcation of permanent occupation. This conversion was to be produced through demolition, displacement and the systematic destruction of the frontline villages in its path. The April 2026 memo imposes nothing on Israel whatsoever: no withdrawal obligation, no accountability for its continuing occupation and daily violations The perversity of the arrangement lay in a government that had made the cessation of hostilities its condition for negotiations, only to sit across from an interlocutor using the negotiating period itself to complete the ethnic cleansing and territorial remaking required for its security framework. By attending these lopsided talks without bargaining chips to offer, or genuine conditions to impose, and after decoupling Lebanon from Iran's vastly stronger bargaining position, the Aoun-Salam government made clear that it was not negotiating over the south so much as placing it on the table. It treated the nation's capital of anti-colonial resistance as a burden to be amputated from Lebanon and its people as an expendable community that Israel could kill and ethnically cleanse at will. Given the nature of the supposed enemy it was negotiating with, the government was under no illusions. It was fully aware that Israel has no withdrawal or compromise horizon, only a post-2023 logic of obliterative force displayed across Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. It is a doctrine that corresponds to what anti-imperialist political economist Bikrum Gill calls an unfolding dialectic in which the colonial equation seeks to constantly renew itself by imposing an even greater force with the aim of achieving a permanent repression of the anti-colonial negation. Follow Middle East Eye's live coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza That same colonial doctrine is what the US State Department's 16 April memo, officially adopted by the Lebanese government as its own position, proceeded to formalise and legitimise, granting Israel the freedom to continue its campaign of killing and ethnic cleansing in south Lebanon. The memo achieves this through a structure of radical asymmetry, preserving Israel's inherent right of self-defence and operationalising it through language that authorises strikes at any time against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks. Given Israel's well-documented record of war crimes and genocide, such a formulation effectively authorises the targeting of civilians, villages, infrastructure, and any form of social life it chooses to construe as a threat. A licence to kill Netanyahu's assertion on 26 April that Israel's freedom of action to strike Lebanon forms part of its agreement with the Lebanese state confirms that the memo was received in Tel Aviv exactly as it was written - as a licence to kill. In contrast, Lebanon enjoys no reciprocal right to self-defence whatsoever. The memo even concedes that the two countries are not at war - despite Israeli attacks having killed over 2,500 people, wounded more than 8,000 and displaced over 1.2 million, destroying or heavily damaging more than 50,000 housing units between 2 March and 22 April alone, all in flagrant disregard of Israel's ongoing invasion and occupation of south Lebanon. This already renders the document more humiliating than the infamous 17 May 1983 agreement - since rescinded - which, for all its capitulatory and treasonous character, at least paid nominal tribute to the idea of Lebanese security as a formally reciprocal right and paid lip service to the principle of an Israeli withdrawal. Why Israel cannot defeat Hezbollah Read More » But the April 2026 memo imposes nothing on Israel whatsoever: no withdrawal obligation, no accountability for its continuing occupation and daily violations, even after the ceasefire it had signed, and no reckoning with the destruction already inflicted. At the same time, it entirely conditions Lebanon's path towards an end to the violence on the disarmament and dismantlement of the resistance. Hezbollah and other so-called rogue armed groups are therefore not treated as one issue among others, but as the governing purpose of the entire arrangement. In reality, what is being pursued is not peace, or even a ceasefire in any conventional sense, but a counter-resistance security framework through which the Lebanese state lends its sovereignty to the continuation of Israel's colonial war on Lebanese territory. The clearest demonstration of this is Secretary of State Marco Rubio's recent statement that the US is working to establish a system where vetted units within the Lebanese Armed Forces have the training, the equipment, and the capability to go after elements of Hezbollah and dismantle them so Israel doesn't have to do it. In other words, the subcontracting of Israel's counter-resistance project to the Lebanese state is the only deliverable this government has to offer - civil strife engineered to accomplish through internal Lebanese violence what Israeli bombardment could not achieve from without. Army commander Rodolphe Haykal's refusal to be conscripted into this role, and the widely expected imposition of his replacement on the government, speaks to both the limits of what the Lebanese state can actually deliver and the extent to which even its residual internal sovereignty - the much-vaunted monopoly on force it has been ardently pursuing - is being stage-managed from Washington. The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye. Israel's war on Lebanon Opinion Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:29 Update Date Override 0