The War in Lebanon

You're listening to the LRB podcast and I'm your host, Adam Schatz. The subject of this week's episode is Israel's war against Lebanon, which began in early March and which has led to the deaths of 2,000 Lebanese, many of them civilians, and driven a million people, a fifth of the country's population, from their homes, particularly Shia. In the south, the largest air strikes of the war were carried out hours after a ceasefire had been reached between the United States and Iran. On a single day, Israel killed more than 350 people on what is now known as Black Wednesday. Earlier this month, Eyal Zamir, Israel's military chief of staff, declared that Israel would remain in southern Lebanon up to the Litany river and turn this area into a sterile security buffer zone and a Hezbollah kill zone where no Lebanese would be allowed to return. Lebanese and Israeli delegations met in Washington this week for their first direct talks in 33 years. Trump has just said that there will be further talks and there are reports that a ceasefire may be imminent. But Israel is continuing its assaults in Lebanon, particularly in the south, where Hezbollah remains strong. My guests on this week's episode are two seasoned writers on Lebanese politics and history. Joel ABHI Rashad, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, is a historian of colonial medicine whose essays on Lebanon often appear in the Boston Review. Mohammed Bazi, the director of the Kevorkian center at New York University, is a journalist who publishes frequently in the Guardian. Joelle and Mohamed, thanks for joining me.

0:00

Thank you.

1:45

Thank you.

1:45

In early March in the Boston Review, Joelle, you wrote in Beirut, we start our days with the latest litany of places and people hit overnight, a deluge of stories and images. Buildings targeted, cars struck on highways, families wiped out. Here, violence is not a singular event, but something in the air. One inhales. Gradually learning to domesticate and contain Lebanon is once again being drawn into a familiar cycle. Abandonment, impunity and the normalization of violence as the language of international law and human rights is hollowed out in real time. Has anything changed? Yes, and yet not much. Joel, you're joining us from Paris, but you have been in Beirut for most of the war. Can you tell us how the Lebanese have experienced this latest war, which, it should be noted, isn't a new war so much as a continuation of a war that began just after October 7, 2023, and which has arguably been going on since 1978, when Israel launched its first full scale invasion of the country.

1:46

So the view from Beirut is above all, I would Say, the view from a city where war has become at once or feels at once intimate, you know, psychological and technological. Now, I left the country in 2006 during another round of war between Israel and Hezbollah. And at the time, war was devastating. It was terrifyingly physical and visible. Roads were destroyed. I could see it going from Beirut to Damascus and then leaving the country in catastrophe. Bridges collapsed, ambulances hid, and so on. Villages emptied out, and so on. What struck me when I returned in 2024 to work at the American University of Beirut, so almost two decades later, was, was that war had changed. The nature of war had changed dramatically. It had acquired another dimension. It colonizes our landscape, our daily lives, the air we breathe. I mean, everything. It was no longer what fell from the sky. It was also the drones overhead, day and night. We've become experts, by the way, in detecting the sounds of drones and identifying what is flying over the capital. Sonic booms are designed to terrorize. Evacuation orders are dropped and broadcasted on X and with the spokesperson of the IDF or on WhatsApp. You have leaflets that are dropped on the civilian population. It feels like the First World War or the Second World War, when the allied forces would drop leaflets on the civilians in occupied territories. As a tool of both, I would say warning, but also propaganda and so on. And you have a sense that ordinary objects could become lethal, like in the case of the pagers attack. So this time it feels, I would say, surreal and unnerving. There is this kind of, what we might call, for lack of a better way of calling it, a routinization of our brutalization. It is unrelenting. So we go about our daily lives while the catastrophe is unfolding, while the country is being invaded for the seventh time. And the Lebanese have, like, mixed feelings of anger and pain and outrage, the feeling of abandonment, revolt. I have a deep sense of betrayal, exhaustion as well. This is a country that is exhausted by repeated crises and collapses and so on. And I feel terribly sad for my own students who are, you know, young. They're 18, 19, and already are going through their second war in less than three years. And for, you know, my colleagues and some of my colleagues at least, and other students who have lost family members, who have lost their houses in the south, they have lost their, you know, their homes, their livelihoods, their memories. It's a mixed feeling of all of this. What feels different, I would say, this time is that the very existence of the country is at stake, so there is an existential threat. At the same time, we're Witnessing the rise and fall of empires, history in the making. We're witnessing the reshuffling of geopolitical interests in the region. There is a fear, a widespread fear of the resurgence of civil strife and civil war. And there is a broader disappointment with the way in which the world is going. So Beirut, in a way, is a

2:54

city almost a microcosm of the world's convulsions right now. Exactly.

6:31

It's a mirror. It's a mirror, yeah.

6:36

You know, we were texting on the morning of April 8, and you mentioned in your text that there was a moment when within 10 minutes, there were a hundred Israeli strikes on Lebanon. And some of those strikes, you noted, were in places where they hadn't occurred before, very close to you in Hamra and West Beirut on the Corniche and so forth. And so I'm wondering, in that sense, was it very different from the fall of 2024, was it very different from that period?

6:38

Well, it's the same kind of new war, right, where we are chosen as a target by an algorithm. That's the new kind of war that was inaugurated in 2024, an AI driven kind of war. What felt different this time, with the strikes on Wednesday, it was terrifyingly close. I mean, as I was texting you, I was just realizing that two of the seven strikes were in our neighborhood, in our direct neighborhood. I was going to the hospital and then the fighter jets came over the city and it was deafening and at the same time terrifying. Everybody was in panic and we heard the strikes, but we couldn't understand what was happening. So the scale is very much different this time. And this feeling of being. Of being a collateral damage quote, unquote, although I hate that word because it's a euphemism for a new kind of war that disregards civilian life and the value of a human life. But you live amongst moving targets. This is how it feels. Although on that Wednesday of April 8, most of those who lost their lives that day were civilians again. So. So one of the buildings that was targeted in Aynam Raisi is a building that has been there for three decades. Maybe it has been there for. Since the 1970s. It was probably there during the invasion of Beirut in 1982, and most of the inhabitants of that building were civilians. So, yeah. So this is the new feeling of. When I say surreal, you move among moving targets and you don't know who are these moving targets. It's a perverted way of controlling a population.

7:09

One of the buildings targeted, I believe was a building where Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet, lived in 1982 during that invasion. You mentioned these feelings of betrayal, accusation, disappointment. Where are these feelings being directed? I imagine they're being directed towards a number of targets. But can you give me a sense of that?

8:49

Yeah, I mean, I would speak for myself and when it comes to me, you know, I was deeply shaped by my Western education and by Western values and ironically enough, by the moral and historical legacy of the Shoah. That's because, you know, education, this is how education is in Lebanon. Right. And I went to a private, private school before I, you know, I went on to study in the UK and then in the US and so on. But we were taught a history of the world that was deeply tilted towards Europe's history and towards Europe's overwhelming guilt vis a vis the Holocaust. So my own education, I was shaped and raised in part on the memory of the European catastrophe, on the lessons of fascism. And these lessons were for me growing up there under the Pax Syriana, were fundamental to resist the occupying army, the Syrian army of Assad BER and then his son. And I was raised on moral force of the phrase never again and on this deep faith in progressive values. And so, like many around the world, you know, I, I naively believed that never again meant, you know, never again for everyone, for anyone. Right. I naively believed in this universal moral promise. And so there is this sense of betrayal, you know, and Gaza was, I think, the, the starkest example of this hypocrisy of the international order, the hypocrisy of the human rights discourse, the language of double standard, the language of dehumanization

9:11

and the instrumentalization of Holocaust memory to justify what happened to Gaza.

10:47

Absolutely, absolutely.

10:52

You know, in 2000, when Israel withdrew from the south after a nearly 20 year guerrilla war led by Hezbollah, the party held onto its arms and continued to involve itself in the Palestinian struggle as a member of Iran's so called axis of resistance. Now the fact that Hezbollah continued to operate as an independent military force, unanswerable to the Lebanese state or army, wasn't popular with all the Lebanese, including some members of its own constituency, the Shia. But Hezbollah's argument has always been, I remember Hassan Nasrallah, the assassinated Secretary General of the party, telling me back in 2004 that Israel by its nature would always remain a threat to Lebanon and that if the Lebanese army was, couldn't defend the country, Hezbollah would have to do that. So I'm wondering, has Israel's war helped to reinforce that argument? Among some people who previously would have been very anti Hezbollah. Mohammed, why don't you come in now? What do you think about that?

10:54

It's a complicated question and I think there's a number of answers. So part of what happened with this progression of Hezbollah getting to keep its weapons, getting to keep its arms was that actually it started back in 1990 at the end of the Lebanese civil war and the Ta' if agreement, the agreement that ended that war brokered by Saudi Arabia, Syria, but also with U.S. involvement, and that called for all of Lebanon's militias to disarm. But Hezbollah got an exception. And Hezbollah's exception was that it was the national resistance to Israeli occupation in the south, which was ongoing. It had started in 1978, expanded in 1982 after the larger scale Israeli invasion of 1982, and setting in motion this series of events that led to the creation of Hezbollah after 1982. And so when we got to the end of the civil war in which Hezbollah, like all of the other armed factions, was a central participant, Hezbollah, at different points during the civil war fought several of the other militias. They fought with Palestinian factions, very famously besieging some Palestinian refugee camps at certain points. They also, you know, certainly fought with the right wing Christian militias and others. So we got to the end of the civil war and this carve out was created for Hezbollah so that it could keep its weapons. And the initial rationale, and I think at that point, the that rationale was understood by many Lebanese because Israel had a large scale occupation of the south of southern Lebanon, and Hezbollah by that point had become the primary force fighting against the Israeli occupation. Then In May of 2000, Israel withdrew under Andrehud Barak, who had been recently elected prime minister, who made that promise that he was going to end Israel's entanglement in Lebanon. And at that point, Hezbollah achieved something that really no Arab military force had been able to do in all of the wars with Israel, which was to force Israel to relinquish land, Arab land, without a peace agreement. And so that began to create the myth of Hezbollah, to reinforce it in the Arab world, to reinforce it in the larger Muslim world. And that was the point where many Lebanese began to turn and to ask, well, okay, now the occupation has ended. Why is Hezbollah keeping its weapons?

11:54

And that's when Hezbollah began its campaign around the Sheba Farms. Right, the Sheba Farms, which hadn't really been talked about much before.

14:30

Exactly. And that's where one of Hezbollah's arguments was that Sheba Farms was still occupied territory. That it needed to keep its weapons to liberate that last piece of Lebanese territory. By most accounts, SH was actually Syrian territory that needed to be negotiated between Israel and Syria in future negotiations for the Golan Heights. But that was a pretext. Hezbollah kept its weapons because they were the means to becoming the dominant political force, the dominant military force in Lebanon, and especially in conjunction with the growing power of the Syrian occupation at that point, Syria had had a military presence in Leb a long time, but after 2000, when it became then the largest outside power, that kept the military force. So Hezbollah was able to keep that going at this point, partly because it was allowed. At that point, no one could disarm Hezbollah. And one other factor that plays a large part in all of this and that we don't hear often about in, in the US in the west, which is that the Lebanese army has been kept weak and ineffective in many ways on purpose, and that's part of the Israeli US strategy. You hear a lot of talk at think tanks, at convenings in Washington about what the Lebanese army should do, how it can deploy, how it can supplant Hezbollah. But no one gets at the core of question, which is that the Lebanese army depends on the west and largely the US for its weapons. And the US Successive US administrations we're talking about, Democrats and Republicans, have refused to equip the Lebanese army properly enough so that it could defend Lebanon against Israel. And one of the most interesting, I think, quotes or admissions we've seen by US Official recently was Tom Barack in this interview about a year ago, admitting almost offhandedly, I mean, he, he basically scoffed at a question and said, the US Is never arming the Lebanese army to confront Israel. We would be arming the Lebanese army to confront Hezbollah. That's the purpose. And that got tremendous traction. And I think Joel probably has very on the ground sense of how that played out. Those comments played out for quite a few months in Lebanon about U.S. intentions. And it happened under the quote, happened under the Trump administration. But this isn't just restricted to the Trump administration. We've had decades of US Policy built around the idea that the Lebanese army will never be built up in a way to actually confront Israel, or for

14:37

that matter, to defend the country from Israel, which ends up strengthening the Hezbollah argument that without Hezbollah, Lebanon would never be able to defend itself, particularly if Israel has expansionist designs on the south.

17:35

Exactly. And that's what we've seen recycling of that argument in 2024. We've seen a recycling of that argument since March 2, which is the latest chapter of expansion of this war. And we've seen Hezbollah say, well, the Lebanese army was deployed in the south and then the government made a decision, you know, against the advice of the army commander, actually, to withdraw the Lebanese army from the south as Israel intensified its attack in early March in the context of the Iran US war.

17:50

Has there ever been talk in this whole history of the Lebanese army absorbing Hezbollah into its ranks? Because presumably if it did so, the Lebanese army would have much more know how and much more skill. Has there ever been talk about that?

18:27

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about that over the years on and off. And there are certainly models and other places, other post conflict societies. But the third rail on that is again, Israel, that Israel is resistant to that. The US in turn tends to be resistant to that model. The model is often disarming and demobilizing Hezbollah. There's been this vague notion of the Lebanese military increasing its capabilities, but again, without the kind of training, without the kind of weaponry that's actually necessary. And the discussions in the west, where a lot of these discussions happen, will center on, okay, here's the latest batch of personnel, vehicles or other things we can send to the Lebanese military. Since the economic crash in 2019, there's been a lot of discussion in the west about just sending salaries to the, to the Lebanese military because most of its members don't have enough money to survive. So we're even, you know, talking about a military that's certainly part of Lebanese society and that's lived through all of these crises that Joel mentioned.

18:42

Muhammad, before this war began, the Lebanese government had actually been placing increasing pressure on Hezbollah to disarm. It had also been calling for direct talks with Israel, and Israel was quite dismissive of these overtures. And then Hezbollah fires rockets in response to the assassination of Iran's supreme leader Khamenei, much as it did in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza. And then Israel began to launch devastating assaults on Lebanon, assaults which it had obviously been preparing for some time. Then Lebanon's President Joseph Aoun offers direct negotiations with Israel, first in decades, in exchange for a cessation of hostilities. Neither Israel nor the US respond now. Emmanuel Macron backed Daoun, but even then the calls fell on deaf ears. So what do you think Israel's objective is here? Is it simply the destruction of Hezbollah? Is it the further weakening of Lebanon? Is it expansion to the lit? What's your sense of Israel's strategy here?

20:02

I think Israel's strategy is a combination of all of those goals, we've heard a number of Israeli government officials, ministers, say that they intend to depopulate the border villages, the border towns of southern Lebanon, to create this buffer zone, which is one of the Israeli militaries and the Israeli government's favorite words, buffer zones in Gaza, buffer zones in the west bank, buffer zones in southern Lebanon. Yes. And the buffer zone in Gaza, of course, is 53% of the landmass of Gaza. Joel made this excellent point about this is the world, this is the post Gaza genocide world that we're living in, where the entire international order has been upended partly for the sake of Israel to be able to carry out the level of death and destruction it was able to carry out in Gaza. And Israeli leaders, Netanyahu certainly, but others in his government realized that there's nothing stopping them. And so in the past, the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon took the form of trying to keep a local population under control, which is very difficult, and also helped breed the long term Hezbollah fight guerrilla war against that Israeli occupation. And so now Israel seems to be shifting to a different tactic, similar to what it's been able to do in Gaza, of trying to depopulate these areas entirely, or if that doesn't work, trying to work with towns that are majority Christian or majority Jews, and trying to pressure, we've seen these reports of very open ethnic cleansing campaign, of trying to pressure Christians and Druze in some of these towns not to take in their Shia neighbors. And so we're seeing Israel try a different tactic. It also has a far superior technological and AI advantage at this point, as opposed to the occupation in the 1980s and 1990s. And so one of the things about the Hezbollah narrative, and we're seeing it unfold today, is to a great extent is that Hezbollah and its supporters keep saying that they're waiting for these Israeli troops to come into Lebanon, Lebanese territory and then they will inflict heavy damage and heavy casualties on, on the Israeli military. The problem though is that this isn't the 80s and 90s even this isn't 2006. Israel has a far more superior terrorist technological advantage here where they have a lot of control over the ground, partly because of their drones and their capability to monitor everything in ways that wasn't possible during the occupation and that wasn't possible even in 2006. And so this is Hezbollah's bind at this point where entire villages in the south are getting destroyed.

21:05

So they're operating on the basis of an older playbook. They are expecting this kind of ground invasion. But Israel has actually found means to surveil control, dominate, and inflict violence on areas from the air without having to send in troops.

24:12

Essentially, they found the means to do that. They are doing that, but they're also sending in troops. But they're sending in troops in a different way, where those troops are backed up by that air invasion. In the past couple of days, I've been glued to WhatsApp, chat groups, to Facebook and other places, getting reports about what's going on in my hometown. I'm from a town in southern Lebanon called Bintish Bail, which has become the center of battles over the past week. It has a long history. I think, Adam and Joel, you're familiar with this history going back to the occupation and going back to 2000. It was the first place after the Israeli withdrawal. It was the first place Hassan Nasrallah rushed to give this, what became a very famous speech in Bintish Bayl, comparing Israel to a spider's web. And that really became a thorn in the side of many Israeli military planners and politicians for decades. Israel tried to recapture the town in 2006. They failed. There was a huge Hezbollah resistance in 2006. But Israel seems to be making more inroads in 2026. They've caused a far more massive level of destruction. From what we're seeing based on satellite videos, there's not a lot of on the ground images and videos coming out from Tishbel, but entire towns, entire decades and centuries of history are being destroyed by Israel.

24:26

And they're also targeting, I think, hospitals and bridges. I mean, destroying a lot of infrastructure in the south.

25:58

Yes, it's the classic. It's the Gaza playbook. And Hezbollah's response has been consistent and similar to the response over the years. But I don't think that response works anymore, because the response is, oh, we'll rebuild once this is all over. What's most important is that we keep the land free. The problem is not having the resources to rebuild. And also, it's easy in some ways to tell people who've lost their homes, lost their entire lives that you're going to rebuild at some point in the future, but you no longer have the financial support that would be necessary from Iran, from Gulf countries, from others. And so you've put the Shia community of Lebanon into this impossible position.

26:04

Right. And their futures have been stolen from them, essentially. And Hezbollah is not really in a position to rebuild. And these people are not really in a position even to return to their villages, particularly if they become part of this so called buffer zone. Have your relatives all been forced to leave Bin Chabel or are some of them still there?

26:48

All of my relatives have left. And Bintish Bail is as a ghost town. It's basically Israeli military and Hezbollah fighters now facing off in, you know, street to street combat, but also with. With a lot of drones and a lot of airstrikes and heavy artillery. And so my relatives have left there, they've been dispersed. They're in Beirut, they're in mountains, they're in different parts of Lebanon. They're part of the 1.2 million people who've been displaced as a result of this war.

27:07

One fifth of the population. And one sense is that in many cases they're not particularly welcome, partly for quote, unquote sectarian reasons, but also because people are afraid that if they house and provide shelter for Shia as a result of AI, they might also become targets. Is that not true?

27:37

Oh, for sure, that was the fear in 2024. Unlike 2006, when many Lebanese opened their homes to displaced people from southern Lebanon, from the Beqaa, from The dahi, in 2024 through November, that phase of the war, there was more sectarian tension and there was the fear that Israel would target buildings and apartments and places where displaced people were living. And now we've seen that on an even more extraordinary level. We saw Israel do that on April 8, on Black Wednesday, with those hundred strikes within 10 minutes that caused immense destruction. But that also were intended to sow fear, anxiety, panic in the society, and were intended. And it solidified the sense that if you are Christian or Sunni or Druze or another confession, you should fear your Shia neighbors. And that's the beginning. That's Israel helping plant the seeds of a renewed civil conflict, of potentially a new civil war.

27:54

I want to get to that in a moment, but before I do, Muhammad, I wanted to ask you if you might tell us about what happened between Israel and Hezbollah after the ceasefire was put in in November 2024. My sense is that there have been far more violations of the ceasefire by the Israelis than by Hezbollah during that period.

29:01

Oh, for sure. I think we saw basically one violation by Hezbollah that was documented. Maybe there were a handful of others. Israel, you know, I've seen different figures, but we've seen UNIFIL, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, and other UN documentation of 10,000 violations. And by some counts, the violations went up to 15,000 violations.

29:22

And what sort of violations are these? These are mostly violations of Lebanese airspace. Can you be a little more specific about what Kinds of violations. These are. That's a lot of violations.

29:48

It's a lot of violations. The vast majority of violations of Lebanese airspace, sometimes leading to attacks from the air, but also sometimes just violations of airspace, as in drones monitoring and consistent flying of drones all over Lebanon. So thousands of aerial violations, but also several thousand land violations near the border. Israel insisted on keeping five bases on Lebanese territory. And so there were violations around that. They insisted on keeping those even after the ceasefire. And there were consistent attacks. Israel was attacking, especially southern Lebanon and the Baqa almost every day. And during that period, November 2024, late November when the ceasefire took effect, and 1 March 2026, the Lebanese Health Ministry reported 397 people, 397 Lebanese killed and hundreds injured during the ceasefire. So it was similar to the Gaza ceasefire. It was Israel interpreting it as the other side stops, firing stops, but Israel can continue the fire and fight as it pleases.

29:57

It's sort of Israel gets to kind of pursue a sort of low grade war, while the other side is supposed to respect the ceasefire entirely. Now, there have been reports that Hezbollah, under the leadership of Naim Qasim, has become more of an Iranian proxy since the fall of 2024, when Hassan Nasrallah was assassinated in an Israeli airstrike. There have also been reports of an estrangement between the party and its base in the southern suburbs, the south and the Bayka. Can you give us a sense of where the party stands today in relation to Iran, in relation to its constituency, and perhaps also in relation to the question of Palestine, particularly the situation in Gaza. Tell us about Hezbollah in the spring

31:12

2026 on all of those fronts.

31:58

Hezbollah.

32:01

Hezbollah is evolving and the picture is evolving in that it's difficult to get an exact sense of where it stands, where Hezbollah stands with its constituency, partly because the war continues and the war has these ebbs and flows and dramatic days like April 8th. But there's little doubt that Hezbollah has lost significant support in this phase and even going back to 2024, you know, for a number of reasons, partly a lot of Lebanese, but also including members of the Shiite community who questioned why Hezbollah got involved after October 2023, why Hezbollah began firing rockets at northern Israel and questioned whether that was an effective strategy at all and whether it was just, in the end, performative.

32:02

And we're also talking Muhammad about a Shia community that had lost thousands of its own people in the war in Syria.

32:48

Yes, exactly. Because of Hezbollah's intervention there in order to prop up the Assad regime. And to support the, the Iran Russia project there to keep Assad in power and also earning the enmity of a lot of Lebanese Sunnis and a lot of Sunnis in the wider Arab and Muslim world because of what Hezbollah did, because of its transgressions in Syria.

32:55

So, you know, in recent weeks, as you were saying just a moment ago, Mohammed, Israel has been telling Christians and Druze in the south you can stay, only the Shia have to leave. And we are seeing nothing less than an ethnic cleansing of southern Lebanon in the name of Israeli security. And as a result of this displacement, villagers have been pouring into other parts of Lebanon, including Beirut. Some are sleeping in their cars. And in an article in the current issue of the lrb, the longtime Beirut correspondent Charles Glass reports, and I'm going to quote him, the risk of another civil war looms large as increasing numbers of young Shia move onto the turf of young Sunnis and anti Muslim Christian fanatics call for attacks on their Shia countrymen. Friends in the northern city of Tripoli, which has a Sunni majority, tell me that the most popular politician there is not Lebanese at all, but the Syrian president, Ahmed Al Shara, champion of Sunni religious fundamentalism. Shias and many Christians fear an invasion of Lebanon by Shara's combatants stationed along the border. Their purported motive would be to take revenge on Hezbollah, which fought against them on behalf of Assad, and persecute all those who do not share their fanatic dogma. So this is a question for both of you. How serious a threat is this? A threat of, of another civil war? What, if any, are the guardrails against it?

33:20

Joelle yeah, that's, that's a tough question because certainly the society is more, the Lebanese society is more polarized. At the same time, the mosques have fallen. For the first time, the base of Hezbollah has seen why Hezbollah. They rekindled the war on March 2 to avenge for the killing of the Ayatollah Khomeini and not for the killing of Nasrallah, for example. So the masks have fallen on so many different fronts at the same time. As Mohammad was saying earlier, you know, there is this intention to at the same time pursue a scorched earth policy in the south while cementing strife and chaos in the remaining parts of the country as a pressure so that the government, even if in its weak form as it is, could do something about the disarmament of Hezbollah, so force that disarmament somehow by the threat of an impending or looming civil strife. At the same time, I think we're not shedding Light also on forms of solidarity. And there have been so many, you know, churches, monasteries, opening their doors to everyone, families. There are many, how shall we put it? Families of different marriages. Right. Families in Lebanon are interconnected across religions. Right. There are also many NGOs that have mobilized. The whole civil society, or what remains of it, because it is an exhausted civil society as well, has mobilized.

34:45

Well, that's encouraging because I think people tend to forget that Lebanon is not just a multi confessional society, it's an interconfessional society with a lot of mixed marriages. And that's encouraging to know that there is this solidarity emerging among Lebanese. Is that your sense too, Muhammad?

36:19

Yes. I think we've seen, as we saw in the first phase of this war In September of 2024, we saw that kind of solidarity. And we saw, for the most part, as Joel pointed out, it was civil society that that took the lead much more so than the Lebanese government in helping the displaced and getting people meals and helping get people places to stay and distributing aid on the most basic level, and you know, there's multiple reasons for that. There are a couple of ministers in the current Lebanese government who are more effective than others, and there are a couple of ministries that have helped and tried to coordinate. But you know, on the whole, the Lebanese state still operates from this point of week, from this point of leaving especially social care, leaving the social care of different populations to the relevant political parties of that sect. And you know, really until, until Lebanon

36:36

gets past that and education too, I think that's not mistaken.

37:35

Education, healthcare. I mean, so pretty much most aspects of life are left to the political party affiliation. And so in many ways, and this goes beyond Hezbol, as a Lebanese, you're often trapped. Even if you have no affinity for your sect's dominant political party, you're often trapped and forced into collaborating with it in some way in order to live your life on a daily basis. But we've seen some cross sectarian solidarity around the war both in 2024 and right now. But I think the tension there is that in many ways civil society is also stretched to its limit. The diaspora Lebanese community is stretched to its limit in many ways as well, having supported the country very intensively since the economic crash in 2019 and then the Beirut port explosion a year later. And so you have a country that in many ways survives economically on remittances from abroad and that also survives on social care and solidarity during moments of crisis provide by civil society groups as opposed to a structured system provided by the government. And here we only need to point to how the displaced in Israel, in northern Israel, are able to survive and function thanks to the, you know, well, functioning socialist government system. Israel, you know, of course, financed by billions of dollars in US aid from the United States. But it functions well, certainly much better than the system in Lebanon, because there

37:40

is a strong state. And again, that seems to be really a fundamental question and an elusive goal for Lebanon that keeps coming up and is probably much more important than the question of Hezbollah and its arms and so on, which is so often the obsession in the West. Now, the Lebanese government has been in talks with Israel and Washington, overseen by the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. This government could hardly be more conciliatory. In fact, fact, it's been so conciliatory that some Lebanese regard it as having capitulated to Western dictates, particularly with respect to Hezbollah. Now, after the talks ended, Israel's ambassador to the us, Yechiel Leiter, described the talks as wonderful and claimed the two sides shared a desire to, quote, unquote, liberate Lebanon from Hezbollah on Iran. The Lebanese diplomats. And this is. This was quite notable. They said nothing. What can Lebanon get out of these talks, particularly given the closeness of Israel's relationship to the US government and to Trump?

39:22

It's a question that everybody's asking with no clear answer. What troubles me most, though, is how there are, you know, there is a narrative, an emerging narrative, comparing this, what you call capitulation with, you know, with the Vichy analogy, that somehow this will become a government that collaborates with the enemy. And I find this truly misleading. And, you know, this is a government that is weak in part because of the hollowing out of the state, which was possible because of Hezbollah and its allies and other factors over the years. We could say since the civil war, this has been ongoing. So there are reasons why the state is weak today. At the same time, Vichy was not simply a defeated government. Right. It's not a government that capitulated. It collaborated, actively navigating the catastrophe. And it's a regime that organized the collaboration. I don't think we're there, but there is this narrative that is also, I think, terrifying people. What does it mean to be a collaborationist government as well? When, with what implications, at the same time, do we have other choices? What are the choices? It's either diplomacy or a collective suicide. And in fact, Barak had warned the government of the possibility of Lebanon ceasing from existing. It was part of his controversial jokes and other controversial statements. That he put out there when he was the envoy. So it's either existential erasure or diplomacy.

40:21

It's a stark choice.

42:07

Very stark.

42:08

Mohammed, diplomacy or existential erasure? Would you agree?

42:09

Yes, in large part. And I also agree with Joel about the collaborationist narrative. And in many ways, it's being instrumentalized by Hezbollah to undermine this government. And they've done this before with previous governments where they had more influence over previous governments. I think one of the mistakes in the week and a half by the current Lebanese government was in the early days. In the first night of the ceasefire, we heard Pakistan and we heard Iran be insistent that the ceasefire included Lebanon. The words that the Pakistani prime minister used was that the ceasefire applied everywhere, including, and he singled out Lebanon. But within hours, it became clear that Netanyahu and Trump had talked and that Netanyahu had convinced Trump not to apply this to Lebanon.

42:13

And then came Black Wednesday.

43:07

Exactly. And then came Black Wednesday. And then we had the Lebanese government. I think it was bewildering, the Lebanese government insisting, and you can see the basis in international law for this, but the Lebanese government began to insist that only it, as the Lebanese government, had the right to negotiate a ceasefire with Israel. And. And that's all well and good on paper, and it's important to reinforce that sense of national sovereignty, but the core problem is that the Lebanese government has no leverage over Israel or Trump or really anyone else, or Hezbollah for that matter. And whereas Iran had some leverage in those early days, Iran had some leverage to try to use its position and try to use Trump's desire for the photo op of. Of peace talks in Islamabad, to use that to pressure for Lebanon to be included in the ceasefire. Obviously, it's not ideal, but what it helped do, what this insistence did was Netanyahu wanted to separate the Lebanon and Iran tracks very clearly. He was angry about the ceasefire in Iran. He wanted to keep bombing.

43:09

No linkage. No linkage.

44:18

No linkage. And that's been the Israeli policy all along, for decades, but especially since October 2023. And so. So he managed to do that partly with an assist from the Lebanese government

44:19

out of a kind of national pride, which is understandable, but as both of you have been pointing out, Lebanon faces both external and internal forces that would prefer that the state remain weak, whether it's the United States, Israel, Hezbollah. That appears to be the preference. It used to be said that Lebanon's strength was that it was weak, but actually weakness turns out to really be weakness when it comes to questions like this.

44:32

So I have a slightly different view why the Lebanese government wanted to decouple or uncouple the two ceasefires. So the ceasefire in Iran and the ceasefire in Lebanon. And I think, and this is speculative, of course, but I think it's a way to avoid the narrative that emerged after the 2006 war between Hezbollah and. And Israel. It was a narrative that empowered Hezbollah. You know, the Divine victory, as it was called, a kind of narrative, very triumphant, that did empower Hezbollah. Now, it is true that the Lebanese government is weak for historically contingent reasons, but that's the best government we've had for a long. In a long, long, long time. And it is internally divided. And I think the challenge is, is to attempt to reassert sovereignty despite these divisions and under extremely difficult conditions, including an extremely powerful Israel. It's an impossible situation to be in.

45:00

Well, I hope that this wager proves successful and that Lebanon is somehow able to overcome this terrifying predicament. And it has been a great pleasure, in spite of the grim nature of the subject, to talk with you. Joelle and Mohammad, thanks for joining me on the LRB podcast.

46:08

Thank you for having us.

46:25