His Plan has Built-in Obsolescence.
US envoy Amos Hochstein, the former Israeli soldier who succeeded in clinching a deal between Israel and Hezbollah over maritime borders only because everyone benefited from the offshore oil and gas platforms, is evidently playing dirty with the Lebanese. He keeps pressuring the Lebanese and threatening them with unleashing an Israeli onslaught that would be worse than the Gaza genocide, but can’t seem to convince the rabid Zionists of implementing UNSCR 1701 by withdrawing from Lebanese territories they still hold in the south.
Unfortunately for the vast majority of the Lebanese, they see both Israel and Hezbollah equally as hyper-militarized terrorist outlaw entities. The Lebanese don’t want to see a victorious Hezbollah any more than they want to see Israel continue its occupation and harassment of the Lebanese population in the south.
Both Israel and Hezbollah have continued to violate UNSCR 1701 since it was voted in 2006. But America is either a weak, or a pernicious hypocritical, bully: It can’t contain its own ally Israel’s belligerence and colonialist DNA, and it doesn’t talk directly with the Iranian masters of Hezbollah. It keeps talking to a pseudo-Lebanese state that has ceased to exist in practice: The Islamist Hezbollah is blocking the election of a president, it runs a resigned caretaker government without any powers, it is dismantling every Lebanese state institution (tourism, education, industry…), and holds Lebanon hostage to a short-term cessation of hostilities in Gaza and to a long-term and very hypothetical destruction of the state of Israel. Like Hamas, Hezbollah’s Iranian-stated objective is to “liberate” Al-Aqsa Mosque, without ever articulating what the Israel-Palestine landscape should look like in a state of peace.
But Amos Hochstein is disingenuously pretending to resolve all these long-standing issues with half-ass solutions that do not address the fundamentals of the problem. He keeps visiting Lebanon, and instead of warning Hezbollah (and Syria and Iran behind it) directly, he warns Hezbollah’s hostages – the Lebanese state and its people – of dire consequences of Israel’s planned invasion of Lebanon and its likely objective of seizing and annexing Lebanese territories south of the Litani river.
Mr. Hochstein: You are negotiating with the terrorist organization Hezbollah indirectly by talking to Hezbollah’s hostages – the Lebanese people and state. No serious agreement can be reached in this upside-down negotiation; Hezbollah can always violate any such agreement and claim deniability by arguing that it was the Lebanese government, not Hezbollah, that agreed to the terms of the agreement. Hezbollah has done it before in 2006: UNSCR 1701 was negotiated between the Lebanese state and Israel, while the belligerents were Hezbollah and Israel. UNSCR has yet, after nearly 20 years, to be implemented.
Imagine if the Americans issue warnings to the Israeli hostages held by Hamas – but not to Hamas directly – of terrible consequences to their lives if the Hamas-Israel war continues. That is exactly what Hochstein is doing: He is warning the Lebanese hostages of Hezbollah of dire consequences if the Hezbollah-Israel war continues in the south. Now the Lebanese people are powerless (unless they start a devastating civil war) and the Lebanese state is equally powerless with a weak army that is more like a glorified police force that has never really fought to protect the country’s borders, abandoned as they have been for the past 55 years to the criminal states of Syria and Israel and all their local proxies.
The US did get involved in Lebanon in 1958 when President Eisenhower dispatched 10,000 US Marines to protect Lebanon against the likes of Hezbollah back then. The US then kept its word and Lebanon survived the Arab Nationalist onslaught of Gamal Abdel-Nasser. But suddenly, around 1974, the US changed course and decided – thanks to the American Zionist war criminal Henry Kissinger – to turn Lebanon into a cesspool of violence where all the region’s problems could be “contained” and where the millions of Palestinian refugees could be settled, thus relieving Israel of the Right of Return. That hasn’t worked well, at least not yet, despite years of warfare between the Lebanese and the Palestinians. But the Americans, the Israelis and the Syrians keep trying: They are now determined to dismantle Lebanon and force it to accept the permanent settlement of 2.5 million Syrian refugees which gives the brutal Syrian regime a break.
With Israel free of the burden of a return of millions of Palestinian refugees, and Syria free of the return of millions of Syrian refugees, Lebanon will cease to exist as we know it. It will turn from a 50-50 Christian-Muslim pseudo-democracy into an Islamic state with a 5% Christian minority (the last free Christian community in the entire region) and in a state of constant warfare between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Thank you, Amos.
