Lebanon: Those who resist Israel are now called internal enemies of the state
As with previous rounds of negotiations, the latest US-brokered talks between Lebanon and Israel, held in Washington earlier this month, signalled the laundering of war through diplomacy.
Their function was to normalise Israeli aggression as the background condition of the political process, converting demands for a ceasefire from the prerequisite for negotiations into just one item up for discussion.
The talks are no longer a means to end Israeli aggression. Rather, they have become the operative framework through which that aggression is being administered and legalised.
This is why the Lebanese government is increasingly being labelled not simply as a weak regime under pressure, but as "the occupation authority in Lebanon" - one that has accepted the US-Israeli myth that Israel is not bombing Lebanon, invading its territory, and killing and displacing its people, but merely targeting Hezbollah and its military infrastructure.
The structure of the process itself makes this clear. The State Department announced on 15 May that the "cessation of hostilities" - which supposedly began on 16 April, even as Israel has continued its bombardment of Lebanon - would be extended for 45 days. Immediately following this announcement, Israeli strikes killed at least three dozen people and wounded more than 200 others.
At the same time, Washington separated the process of Israel-Lebanon negotiations into a political track, scheduled to resume on 2 June, and a security track, set to begin at the Pentagon on 29 May with military delegations from both countries.
Media reports suggest that the formula now being advanced subordinates any actual ceasefire to two linked requirements: a gradual Israeli withdrawal, which could take up to two years, and a comprehensive Lebanese-Israeli-American enforcement mechanism to disarm Hezbollah.
It also reportedly provides for the creation of a new Lebanese army brigade funded, equipped and trained by the US, with Washington participating in the selection of its officers and personnel; in other words, an externally vetted coercive force inside the Lebanese state, tasked with implementing the military component of disarmament, with such a mandate presumably also authorising raids on people's homes.
Logic reversed
In this manner, the end of Israeli occupation and aggression becomes the reward for dismantling Hezbollah, rather than the starting point of any diplomatic process.
This reverses the entire logic of the conflict, treating resistance not as the effect of occupation, but as its cause - and effectively relocating the enemy from without to within. Occupation is transformed from aggression into an invited disciplinary presence, preserving Lebanon as a US protectorate organised around a political, economic and security order whose central purpose is the suppression of resistance to its own territorial dismemberment.
In practice, Washington has made peace dependent on a condition it knows cannot be met, given Hezbollah's rejection of disarmament and the Lebanese army command's refusal to be conscripted into a confrontation with the group.
This produces a 'peace process' that indefinitely licenses Israel's continued military aggression. The talks are therefore not simply a means to an end, but an end in themselves
This produces a "peace process" that indefinitely licenses Israel's continued military aggression. The talks are therefore not simply a means to an end, but an end in themselves, keeping Lebanon locked into a normalisation and security track while providing legal-political cover for ongoing Israeli aggression and occupation.
What is emerging is not a peace settlement, but a threat-based alliance between Israel, the US and Lebanese authorities, with Lebanon positioned as the junior co-belligerent in a counter-insurgency mandate against Hezbollah.
An alliance, unlike a settlement, creates continuing obligations among its members against a third party. The emerging framework thus cannot be understood as an attempt to resolve the Lebanon-Israel conflict, but rather as a way of binding Israel, the US and Lebanese authorities into this shared counter-insurgency mandate.
Yechiel Leiter, Israel's ambassador to the US, captured this logic when he spoke of "reaching a peace treaty as if there's no Hezbollah, and fighting Hezbollah as if there's no peace treaty". The proposed framework performs the language of peace and normalisation, while institutionalising a permanent counter-resistance security campaign.
Right-wing isolationism
A government that has entered this security alliance can't be understood through the vocabulary of sovereignty, however insistently and ironically its proponents describe themselves as the "sovereigntist" camp.
It is more accurately seen as the institutional heir of Lebanon's right-wing isolationist tradition, whose "isolationism" was never a refusal of foreign tutelage, but a demand that Lebanon be insulated from Arab and resistance politics while remaining beholden to the West and aligned, whether directly or indirectly, with Israel.
What makes the current moment more dangerous is that this tradition no longer appears in its old sectarian form. It has shed its explicitly Maronite Christian character to become the common political language of a cross-sectarian class, excluding the Shia, and is now united against the Shia resistance community and the political identity it represents.
The same right-wing tradition that once constructed the Palestinian fedayeen as a fifth column inside Lebanon is now being reactivated against Hezbollah and, through it, against the Shia as a political community.
President Joseph Aoun's "war of others on our land" formulation is the secular-institutional version of the old Kataeb discourse of 1975, in which armed resistance to Israel was recharacterised not as a Lebanese question rooted in occupation and dispossession, but as an alien intrusion into the national body.
What has changed is not the underlying logic, but the institutional form it now takes. What was once the militia language of the Christian right has been translated into the language of state sovereignty.
As such, Aoun's statement on 27 April that "treason belongs to those who take Lebanon to war in pursuit of external interests" is not merely a criticism of Hezbollah's strategic decision-making.
Treason is not simply a moral accusation, but the category through which a state determines who belongs to the body politic, and who stands outside it as an internal enemy. To cast resistance as treason is therefore to relocate it from the field of legitimate national disagreement into the field of suspicion, disloyalty and internal threat.
'Other people's wars'
Although Aoun was formally addressing Hezbollah's leadership, the accusation cannot remain contained there. It radiates outwards across the group's social base, known as the "resistance community", which recent polling identifies as a core bloc of roughly 93 percent of the Shia population whose political identity remains inseparable from Hezbollah's ethos.
Insofar as that ethos is socially embedded rather than merely organisational, the Shia are discursively repositioned as the population through which foreign interests entered the state.
Their dead are no longer recognised as Lebanese casualties of Israeli aggression, but as the human cost of "other people's wars". Their displacement is no longer a national wound, but the consequence of a suspect political attachment. And having been constructed as the "supportive environment" of now-criminalised resistance activities, their targeting is legitimised as part of a population-centric counter-insurgency.
What is taking place, then, is not sectarian othering in its ordinary Lebanese sense, but a deeper process of political de-nationalisation, in which an entire community's claim to belong to the nation is made conditional on its willingness to renounce the very resistance through which it has historically defended its land, dignity and security - a legitimate right under international law.
Sami Gemayel, the leader of Kataeb, a foundational party in Lebanon's right-wing isolationist tradition, makes this logic even more explicit when he describes the resistance's doctrine as "brainwashing" and insists that the Lebanese Republic "cannot coexist with such a doctrine".
The problem, in this framing, is no longer a military organisation, but an entire political consciousness; a culture of sacrifice, loyalty and resistance that must be confronted before disarmament can be achieved.
The postwar order being imagined in Washington and Tel Aviv is therefore not simply a Lebanon subordinated to Israel and stripped of Hezbollah's weapons, but a Lebanon in which the Shia community's political representation is domesticated or eliminated as a condition of the security arrangement itself.
In this sense, disarmament is not only a military demand, but a project of political reclassification, whereby the occupation becomes normalised and the resistance becomes treason, while the community that refused to surrender its land to Israel is redefined as the internal enemy of the state.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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