Lebanon is in a deep impasse. It lacks the capacity to drive the Israeli occupation out of the territory it seized in the last two wars, in which it destroyed more than 60 southern Lebanese villages and towns. Nor can it extend the authority of the legitimate state and implement the provisions of the Taif Agreement on confining weapons to the state without a military clash, given the intransigence of Hezbollah, and of Iran behind it, in refusing to hand over those weapons, even though they failed to provide Lebanon with a protective umbrella, and the balance of deterrence spoken of for decades has collapsed under successive Israeli strikes.
On the first front, it has become clear that there was haste in signing the trilateral agreement, or the "framework agreement" as the government preferred to call it, which was never submitted to the cabinet or to parliament for debate. Constitutional formalities and institutional requirements aside, the agreement was not anchored in the 1949 Armistice Agreement between Lebanon and Israel or in UN Security Council Resolution 1701 of 2006, and so it lacks the reference points from which any new agreement with Israel should have proceeded.
It must be said that Lebanon, which managed to secure the armistice agreement, with its recognition, in one form or another, of the border, only a year after the Nakba of 1948, has now fallen back on a current agreement riddled with flaws. The clearest evidence is Israel's failure to comply with even its minimum requirements, and its stalling on implementation on the pretext that disarmament must come first. Hezbollah, for its part, shelters behind this stalling to argue that handing over its weapons is impossible while the occupation continues, even though resistance to occupation is guaranteed by international conventions as a right of peoples and states, and a general principle whose abandonment would amount to accepting the occupation and dealing with it in a spirit of surrender or defeatism.
It has also become clear that the clause in the agreement freezing any legal or judicial action by Lebanon against Israel is no more than throwing dust in the eyes. The official Lebanese justification held that this path remains open to Lebanon whenever it wishes. But Israel's practiced procrastination suggests that it has been closed indefinitely, which is a great moral, legal, and political loss for Lebanon. The commendable work of a Lebanese government committee in documenting violations is nonetheless important, even if that path is not pursued, in exposing Israel's methods of dealing with a state with which it has supposedly signed a ceasefire agreement and with which it is supposedly seeking to end a state of permanent war.
In practice, too, the idea of "pilot areas" has faltered, and the "pilot" has been confined to the town of Zawtar al-Gharbiya alone. The daily shelling of unoccupied areas and the bulldozing of villages in occupied areas, which Israel calls the yellow line zone, are glaring evidence of its unwillingness to end the status quo. They demonstrate, indeed, that Israel prefers that official Lebanon not succeed in collecting Hezbollah's weapons and monopolizing them, since that would deprive it of its pretext for continuing to change the facts on the ground and for keeping Lebanon hostage to it and to its expansionist designs for as long as it can. Israel has always sought to play the game of setting Lebanon's sects against one another and deepening the rifts between them, and it is succeeding, little by little. The voices calling for some Lebanese communities to be relocated to an Arab country are a concrete example.
On the second front, the Lebanese state's inability to impose by force, through its legitimate agencies, its control over all its territory, its monopoly of weapons and of the decision of war and peace, and its role in defending the borders, appears no less complex than the first, even though it concerns domestic parties. The complexity lies specifically in this Lebanese faction's ideological, political, organizational, and financial ties to Tehran, which over more than four decades has invested billions of dollars in it, reportedly some $5 billion.
There is no longer any point in saying that had Iran invested half of that money in developing the people of Jabal Amel and the south, institutionally, medically, educationally, and in human terms, that community's situation would be entirely different from what it is today. It is a community stricken in every sense of the word, and its catastrophe is a catastrophe for Lebanese society as a whole. Had Iran wished to take that course after its 1979 revolution, it would have done so. But these were the components and pillars of its policy of exporting the revolution, and they were clear from the start.
Whatever the case, Iran cannot go on holding Lebanon hostage and pushing it toward the abyss once again.
Hezbollah, after all, made no secret that it ignited the war to avenge the assassination of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; indeed, it boasted of it. Yet it did no such thing when its own secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, a central pillar of the entire "axis," was assassinated. Today Hezbollah cannot avert its gaze from Lebanon's highest national interest, which lies in a strong and capable state, the very thing Israel most rejects and abhors. It is called upon to read the matter from this angle, to save Lebanon and what remains of it.
