ZIONIST EXPANSIONISM IN LEBANON

ZIONIST EXPANSIONISM IN LEBANON

Author : Gilbert Achcar, Professeur émérite, SOAS, Université de Londres

 The  current Zionist government is the most rightwing extremist government in the history of the State of Israel – to pursue long-standing expansion ambitions that lie at the heart of the original Zionist ideology and are fervently upheld by the Israeli far-right, dominant in the present Israeli cabinet. Indeed, the parallel is striking between the way Israel invaded the Gaza Strip, ordering a gradual displacement of its population north to south, and what it is now doing in southern Lebanon.

And as with Gaza, the most extreme members of the Zionist cabinet are revealing the true objective their government is pursuing. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich declared on March 24 that “the Litani River must be our new border” with Lebanon (the river is 15 to 30 km – 9 to 19 miles – north of the present border, delimitating a region that constitutes over 10% of Lebanon’s area). Smotrich advocated Israel’s permanent seizure of this portion of Lebanon just as it occupies a portion of the Gaza Strip, with the intention of perpetuating the occupation and annexing it later. On the same day, minister of war Israel Katz, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, declared that the coveted region constitutes Israel’s “security zone.”

In these wars, the Israeli government is exploiting the presence at the White House of a president who is certainly the most lenient toward Zionist ambitions of all U.S. presidents, a Donald Trump who, during his first term, had already been the first U.S. president to recognize the annexation of East Jerusalem and the Syrian Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. He was also willing to support the annexation of most of the West Bank, had it not been for the Gulf monarchies’ veto, including the “red line” set by the closest of them to Trump, the rulers of the United Arab Emirates. Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet hope that the U.S. president will turn a blind eye to their invasion of Southern Lebanon, if not openly support it. They have retained control of more than half of the Gaza Strip, in the hope that Trump, or the failure of his “peace plan,” would allow them to prolong the occupation with a view to later annexing most of the Strip. They also contemplate annexing most of the West Bank, which is undergoing violent creeping appropriation and population displacement by Jewish settlers with governmental support.

The far-right Zionist government hopes to replicate this situation in southern Lebanon, whose territory it is currently in the process of occupying after emptying it of most of its inhabitants. Just as it uses the continued existence of Hamas and the threat it poses to the State of Israel as a pretext for the perpetuation of its occupation of Gaza, it intends to use the existence of Hezbollah and the threat it represents to its state as a pretext for a long-term occupation of southern Lebanon. From this perspective, Hezbollah’s resistance to occupation, like Hamas’s resistance, is turned into an argument for implementing and perpetuating the occupation.

But a renewed Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon can only bolster the national legitimacy of Hezbollah’s resistance. It confers renewed rightfulness on its fight against the occupation, in the hope that its harassment of the Israeli army could ultimately force its withdrawal, like what the Hezbollah-led resistance of the 1990s achieved in 2000. True, that withdrawal was carried out by a government led by the Zionist Labor Party, and it is unlikely that the current Israeli government would repeat it. But the Israeli government could change hands in the not too-distant future.

Under these circumstances, the best that the Lebanese government can do is to actively lobby the Arab states, particularly those with the greatest influence on the White House, i.e. the Gulf monarchies, to bring them to exert pressure on Trump in order to prevent a prolonged occupation of southern Lebanon. These monarchies surely understand that the Israeli occupation of part of Lebanon in the last two decades of the 20th century led to the rise of Hezbollah and the regional expansion of Iranian influence. They thus have a vested interest in preventing a repeat of this scenario. This is what the Lebanese government should focus its efforts on in the face of Israeli aggression – not on disarming Hezbollah under U.S. pressure, a task that is beyond its capabilities.

Worse still, the Lebanese government has clearly seen that, despite the withdrawal of Hezbollah’s forces from the region south of the Litani River and the deployment of governmental Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) troops there, in accordance with the ceasefire agreement of November 27, 2024, Israel has not stopped its airstrikes and incursions in that region. And yet, the Lebanese government’s reaction to the new Israeli invasion was to withdraw its troops from the south and raise its voice against Hezbollah, declaring its military action illegal at the most inappropriate moment.

The country’s best interests require it to aim at a peaceful agreement to integrate Hezbollah’s armed forces within the LAF – a move that will only become possible when the regional equation undergoes a fundamental shift. Any attempt to disarm Hezbollah by force is but a recipe for a renewal of civil war in a country that has already been devastated by fifteen years of such war, between 1975 and 1990.

THE NEW ISRAELI OCCUPATION OF SOUTH LEBANON 

Author : Ryan Tfaily : journaliste indépendant, diplômé de Sciences Po Paris et de l

The territory below the Litani River has undergone constant spatial and political reconfiguration over the past seven decades, linked to the geopolitical upheavals in the region. Even before the creation of the State of Israel, Zionist leaders, as early as the 1920s, formulated territorial claims that included southern Lebanon, a region rich in agricultural and water resources. However, they encountered the categorical refusal of France, then the mandatory power in Lebanon.

The borders of the new Jewish state in Palestine ultimately did not include this territory coveted by the Zionist movement. The Paulet-Newcombe demarcation line, resulting from an agreement between the British and French governments in 1923, served as the armistice line between Lebanon and Israel from 1948 onward. While its influence has varied over time, the idea of ​​absorbing southern Lebanon has never truly disappeared from political and security circles in Israel. It brings together the doctrine of the "buffer zone," favored by Israeli security elites who systematically prioritize the use of force against their neighbors to secure their borders, and the territorial ambition of Greater Israel, the ideological foundation of the Israeli right wing.

The Israeli war against Lebanon aims to impose a new territorial reality and maintain control over a significant portion of Lebanese territory. This reflex involves leaving a physical imprint on a dehumanized territory, stripped of its complexity and its inhabitants, for the sake of pure military projection. Illegal and an infringement on the sovereignty of neighboring countries, the "buffer zone" de facto imposes new borders, while everything is done to make life impossible for the local population. For Israel, the goal is to reshape the landscape to its advantage, preventing any contact between its settlements and those of southern Lebanon bordering the country.

In violation of the agreement, the Israeli army continues to occupy five locations in Lebanese border villages along the Blue Line. These bases house military buildings and vehicles.

They allow Tel Aviv to control all the border villages and, more importantly, give its army the opportunity to conduct incursions and ground raids whenever it sees fit. This situation is reminiscent, albeit to a lesser degree, of the occupation of the West Bank or the Syrian Golan Heights. The scorched-earth policy, in effect for decades in Palestine, is now being applied in the Israeli-Lebanese border strip. The border villages were razed during the war, in a tabula rasa strategy similar to that adopted—albeit on a far greater scale—across the entire Gaza Strip.

However, since the signing of the agreement, the Israeli army has continued demolishing homes to expand the uninhabitable zone through ground incursions.

To prevent the return of the population and render the territory uninhabitable, the Israeli air force does not hesitate to resort to ecocide, dropping high-intensity glyphosate, or targeting, throughout southern Lebanon, resources that could be used for reconstruction.

Unilaterally, Israel is thus managing to impose new borders on the Lebanese by systematically destroying the environment. Moreover, the Israeli army continues its bombings well beyond the border area and even over the Litani River. It destroys civilian homes, particularly in the Nabatiyeh district, causing further population displacement and contributing, there too, to the depopulation of the territory.

Notably, unlike previous occupations, this de facto "buffer zone" does not need to be declared on the Israeli side. It is established solely by force, on the ground, through daily operations that constantly reconfigure the territory.

Unlike the occupation of 1978-2000, the current occupation of southern Lebanon now operates without ground troops: it is imposed from the air. Advanced technology, which remotely controls the spatial and social dynamics of the population, thus prevents Israel from losing soldiers on the battlefield. The drones that constantly fly over southern Lebanon—and, to a lesser extent, the rest of Lebanon—serve two purposes. First, they allow for continued espionage activities and enable Hezbollah personnel, both military and civilian, to conduct strikes with complete freedom of action despite the ceasefire.

Secondly, they function as tools for mass surveillance of the entire southern Lebanese population, even as tools of direct control. Lebanese social media is rife with anecdotes, sometimes accompanied by videos, recounting daily life under the omnipresent surveillance of drones. These drones directly intrude on individuals' private lives, ordering them to stop their vehicles, following them during their daily activities, or even at funerals. This surveillance regime, previously tested in the occupied Palestinian territories, thus exerts constant psychological pressure on the population. It reminds them that they are being spied on and that they are no longer entirely at home in a territory where Israel intends to assert its control. The drone becomes an instrument of demographic engineering, capable of producing invisible borders and imposing uninhabitable zones from the air, without needing to mark them on the ground.

This particular form of control, combining various border and air strategies, ultimately aims to influence the Lebanese political landscape.

Historically, Israeli wars and occupations in Lebanon have always been associated with attempts at political interference.

The imposition of arbitrary borders through the return of the "buffer zone," air control and surveillance, the constant threat of escalation, and political interference to maintain a weak state against a backdrop of military freedom of action: the control model applied by Israel in southern Lebanon is merely one manifestation of Israeli expansionism after October 7, 2023, on a regional scale. We are thus witnessing a homogenization of Israeli expansionism, its modus operandi, and its technologies of repression across all of Israel's borders. A Greater Israel is gradually but surely and permanently taking hold, nibbling away at territories while maintaining a ring of fire around itself, redefining borders, depopulating entire areas and controlling individuals through military power and advanced technologies, with no political horizon other than the normalization of a permanent state of war.