So, What Does Israel Want from Lebanon?
You’re looking at a war map of southern Lebanon.
Nothing in the current Israeli war on Lebanon, nothing in the devastation it has wrought, the lives it has taken, the bodies it has mangled, the mourning it has unleashed, the bitterness it has engendered, is unfamiliar to us Lebanese. They occupy the better part of the archive that chronicles the conflict between the two countries.
All well and good for Israel, of course. Such are the levies it exacts from those who dare defy it –– even if by sheer stubbornness of presence alone. But the high tensions the war has triggered between different Lebanese factions carry within them an altogether more alluring promise for the Jewish state –– that of confessional mayhem.
For all of the furious history that has whiplashed the country since its inception in 1920 as Grand Liban, the problems that vexed us then, still do so to this very day: the systemic weakness of the state, the purposeful meekness of the army, the tenacious sectarianism of our politics, the faintness of a genuinely nationalist sentiment, the myriad corruptions of our ruling elite, the parasitic character of our economy, our addiction to foreign sugar daddies, the precariousness of our borders, and the contested menace of Israel.
Ever since the British and French 100 years ago sent the Fertile Crescent into a century of neurotic unsettlement through misbegotten imperial innovations, we Lebanese have been but one gauge of the ruinous aftereffects. Needless to say, Israel-Palestine is the thorniest brier in this barbed crown.
Now that we are at war again, the big question is raging anew: What does Israel want from Lebanon? Are its intentions purely defensive, in search of secure borders and a safe north, or does it want a piece of us? More precisely: does it want a piece of us in search of that “security belt,” or in pursuit of the south’s water bounty, or because of biblical ardor?
Or is it all three, since, for Israel, they dovetail so nicely?
The question has to be asked so, because for national Zionism in Palestine, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon it has been so. Its claims, before after every victory and conquest, have always been by turns or all at once security based, resource driven, and biblically inspired. And on the rare occasion when it retreated (South Lebanon in 2000, Gaza in 2005) or compromised (returning the Sinai to Egypt under the 1979 Camp David Peace Agreement), it did so either because the costs of conquests became unsustainable, or because it wanted to consolidate its wins elsewhere.
As for the 1993 Oslo Accords, the increase of settlers from an estimated 250,000 at the time of signature to 720,000 in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is its own best argument about the constancy of national Zionism’s ambition and the adaptability of its strategies. The Accords and the Palestinian Authority they brought birth to turned out to be the perfect enablers of Israel’s zealous expansionism.
Today, there is much chatter about various Jerusalem Post articles and clips by Israeli settler groups asserting their God given right to south Lebanon. But such biblical fervor was not the rationale of Chaim Weizmann, leader of the World Zionist Organization, to the British and French as they went about demarcating their spheres of influence between 1916 and 1923. Nor was it part of the movement’s appeal to the Supreme Council at the International Peace Conference in 1919. In both cases, Zionist advocacy focused on the essentiality of security and the Litani River to the prospects of the envisioned state of Israel.
The Zionists failed in their push for the extreme reaches of upper Galilee, but their endeavors to establish a foothold in it never ceased. And it is in one such interaction, in 1923, between Weizmann and Maxime Weygand, the French High Commissioner in Lebanon, that the timeless Zionist method is revealed.
Weizmann had written to request French approval for the establishment of settlements in the south. The High Commissioner’s reply shows how well he understood Zionism’s schemes: “Of course… I would not want you to work in southern Syria, because immediately after you’d come to Tyre and Saida you would want the frontier rectified.” Weygand was speaking from experience. The eastern border of the French zone had already been begrudgingly adjusted inward in 1918 to accommodate Britain’s need to include in theirs Safad’s Jewish settlements.
I am not sure if Weizmann would look upon Doron Nir Zvi, the Israeli lawyer at the forefront of the settler drive in the West Bank and southern Lebanon, as a political heir. But their orientation, across the decades, certainly coheres. In explaining how settlers might today take hold of the Lebanese south, Nir Zvi stated to Jewish Currents, “settlements can change borders.” Put differently, where the army conquers, the settlers move, and where they move, the army stays, and where it stays, the borders stretch.
So to those Lebanese, among them self-proclaimed presidential candidates, who insist that Israel has no designs on southern Lebanon, one would hope that their supposed interest in protecting the territorial integrity of the country is informed by the extent to which such territorial integrity has remained negotiable for Israel. Or perhaps, like their forefathers, they could care less if the south is lost to our Israeli neighbor. Funnily enough, it is precisely this indifference that helped render the south so utterly vulnerable to the region’s geopolitics and gave rise to Hezbollah. But of course the irony would escape them.
Lebanon’s strength lies in its weakness. You hear it often these days from quite a few among our ruling elites and their mouthpieces. When this external war ends and the internal feuding gains pace, it would behoove them to take note of history’s lessons and drop once and for all this idiotic notion.
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On Another Note
Kamel Daoud wins France’s very prestigious Goncourt Prize. Kamel Daoud is sued in Algeria. The first is, of course, all accolades and applause. The second, which targets Daoud’s psychiatrist wife as well, is the worst accusation to lodge against an author and a therapist: defamation and betrayal of confidentiality.
To the complainants, the crime is a ‘’’violation of medical confidentiality … as well as the defamation of victims of terrorism and the violation of the law on national reconciliation,’ which bans publications regarding the period of the civil war. The law drastically restricts what can be said about the conflict and states that anyone using the ‘wounds of the national tragedy’ to weaken the Algerian state can be punished by prison or a fine.”
Daoud offers this on the silence imposed about the 1990s Algerian civil war, which took the life of 200,000 Algerians: “During the war of independence, violence was noble, we were defending ourselves…In 1992, we were killing among ourselves.” But mum is the word.