Below is a rough transcript of Rania Khalek’s recent interview with Karim Makdisi, both based in Beirut, Lebanon. The transcript is machine-generated, with some light editing.
Rania Khalek
Hello everyone. I’m Rania Khalek and this is Dispatches. While much of the world’s focus has been on the US-Israeli war against Iran, there’s another front that’s receiving far less attention: Lebanon. Israel is once again escalating its war here, threatening to carry out the Gaza model, destroying civilian infrastructure, causing mass displacement, and signaling territorial ambitions that mean land theft, ethnic cleansing, and occupation. So, what is Israel trying to achieve in Lebanon? How is Hezbollah responding? And what does this front mean for the wider regional war, especially as Iran remains at the center of it? Joining me to discuss this and more is Karim Makdisi, co-host of the Makdisi Street podcast and associate professor of international politics at the American University of Beirut. Karim, welcome to Dispatches on Breakthrough News. It’s a pleasure to have you on.
Karim Makdisi
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Rania Khalek
Well, we’ve got some not so pleasant things to talk about, but you are the person to talk to them about. Both of us are speaking from Beirut where we’re now week four into this Israeli escalation. I mean this is going to come out a couple days after we’ve recorded, but as of now, just to throw out some numbers, there’s been 1,079 deaths in Lebanon killed by the Israelis, at least 118 children. There’s an invasion, an attempted invasion taking place in the south. They’re attacking civilian infrastructure, including bridges, and medical facilities. 128 of them have been attacked. At least 40 medical personnel, though I’m sure that number is a little bit higher now, have been killed by the Israelis. Many of them in double tap strikes.
I could go on and on about the horrific destruction they’re meting out against this country right now. But I think a good place to start would be maybe the basics for our audience. As you know, Hezbollah sort of entered this broader regional war with Iran after months of Israeli attacks and ceasefire violations, over 15,000 of them. So I’m curious, Karim, from your perspective, what explain your perspective of why Hezbollah entered, why now? How much of it is tied to the broader war with Iran? How much of it is tied to sort of the domestic problems in Lebanon?
Karim Makdisi
I think you laid this out very well in terms of introducing how things are in Lebanon. I think basically this discussion about why started or I wouldn’t say started the war, I would say escalated because there was a war and I think the proper term is more that they escalated when they did and there’s a couple of big reasons.
I think the proximate cause and just in their own words even was yes it was after Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran. But really also in terms of militarily and tactically they wanted to take the initiative because it was fairly clear that the Israeli government had taken a decision to themselves launch what they call a preemptive attack on Lebanon, on Hezbollah basically. So they decided for military and tactical reasons to initiate this before the Israelis were fully prepared to do so. And that’s the proximate cause as to why they entered when they did.
But there’s a much deeper issue here which is that in the end the way I see it is that you have a resistance project and you have sort of an Israeli Zionist project, expansionist settler colony that’s there, and these two projects simply can’t coexist in the long term. They are at least as they have been for these past decades mutually exclusive projects. So this business of there being this much larger war that we’re seeing today is something which I think a lot of people were thinking would happen and maybe thought had happened last year in 2024 and had finished, and clearly it hadn’t. They had been preparing themselves for this war and perhaps this is the so-called final war.
Rania Khalek
I mean it would seem like an existential war for many actors including Iran and we can get to that in a bit. But I think also it’s interesting to see all these sort of think tankers and analysts chime in especially from DC. I think there was a perception after 2024 that Hezbollah had been severely degraded. You look at what happened — the Israelis killed the entire senior leadership, and the organization came out of that 2024 war seemingly defeated. It was a loss in many ways.
All that said, I think watching now what’s taking place, we’re seeing Hezbollah behave and respond to the Israelis in a way that definitely challenges that perception of them as having basically been defeated. From your perspective, do you look at what’s happening and do you see Hezbollah having been rebuilt and how do you think their capacity now as we’re watching this war play out compares to what we saw in 2024?
Karim Makdisi
I think it’s absolutely fair to say that most people in Lebanon and it seems in Israel as well assumed that Hezbollah had been defeated in the big sense of being able to pose any kind of threat to the Israelis themselves as opposed to an internal force where still they had influence within the country itself but not as an external threat to the Israelis and certainly not in any kind of deterrence vis-a-vis any kind of Israeli attacks. I think it’s fair to say that most of us assumed that.
It’s clear that what happened since that November 2024 not even a ceasefire, session of hostilities agreement that took place, we saw that on the Israeli side there were 15,000 recorded violations by the UN and by the Lebanese government. It’s clear that on our side or Lebanon side, there were literally zero violations across the border from Hezbollah or the Lebanese side towards the Israeli side. There were zero violations as opposed to over 15,000 violations.
In the meantime, the main responsibility of the Lebanese government was to say, “Okay, we’re going to disarm and remove at least the heavy weapons and most of the weapons south of the Litani River and at least move it to the north, and then north of the Litani River there would be a second phase where that would be negotiated and there’d be some kind of discussion.” The reality is that for the most part, the Lebanese army, which did deploy to the border areas and to most of South Lebanon and did take control over a lot of the key points that Hezbollah had their bases on, there was disarming. In other words, the vast majority of Hezbollah’s weapons were removed from South Lebanon. That seems to be clear. The army had certified that the vast bulk of them had been removed except in areas that Israelis retained control because remember Israel was supposed to have withdrawn as part of this agreement. They were supposed to have withdrawn from all of the occupied lands and they didn’t. They retained several points that they said they were going to keep, obviously strategic locations. They did not allow, I think there’s around 60,000 civilians from returning to their villages which is what they were supposed to have done according to this agreement.
So they were clearing out, they were not going to allow in this 2, 3, 4 kilometer zone along the border. The Israelis were not allowing people back. They were not withdrawing their forces from the key points that they had taken. So what Hezbollah was doing in this period which was around 15 months or so was on the one hand according to what they own say, they were giving the Lebanese government a chance to negotiate the withdrawal of the Israelis and a kind of more permanent agreement. On the other hand in reality they understood that would not happen. So they were preparing themselves for this war that has now come and it’s very clear that they have prepared in a way that has taken everybody by surprise.
The level of professionalism, the level of weapons that they have, the way in which they prepared tactically and militarily, they’re doing a job which I don’t think anybody would have expected, and this is what we’re seeing today. And I think the Israeli response, which is what they always do, is just to say, “Okay, we take something and since we can’t really understand what’s going on immediately, we’re just going to destroy everything in our zone. We’re going to threaten by saying we’re going to put 450,000 soldiers and reservists at the border and we’re going to invade Lebanon up to the Litani River, if not even north of that, and we’re going to destroy everybody and we’re going to depopulate the entire country and basically literally say that they’re going to create sort of Gaza type conditions in chunks of South Lebanon.” But in reality, that’s not going to stop Hezbollah now. And this is connected to the larger regional war that Iran has, right?
Rania Khalek
I mean that was a really good distillation of all of Hezbollah now. And I think we can’t talk about that without maybe going a little bit into the fact that this is happening in a very divided country, right? Lebanon is so polarized. I think maybe it always has been but very much so now, especially in wartime. We have this government here that’s talking about negotiating with the Israelis without any preconditions while they’re under fire, right? Not even demanding Israel at least hold their fire first. Talking about, we’re willing to recognize Israel. We’re willing to maybe normalize relations. It’s almost embarrassing to watch, while also saying the state has a monopoly on arms, which makes sense in a normal situation, but there’s a lot of reasons why that doesn’t make sense right now here. Talking about the need to disarm Hezbollah in the middle of a war while the country is under attack. How do you make sense of this internal dynamic contradiction, especially with like, I mean just yesterday, it’s so insane. I was looking at the Lebanese foreign minister, who I think might be Lebanese Forces, but I’m not sure. You can correct me if I’m wrong.
Karim Makdisi
He is.
Rania Khalek
Okay. I was looking at his Twitter feed. I’ve been watching it, waiting for him to say something about the fact that Israel is attacking the country. He hasn’t said anything about Israel. He even condemned the killing of that priest in the south by the Israelis without even mentioning that Israel did it. And then every other tweet is about Iran condemning Iran, and not explicitly but almost condemning Hezbollah, talking about the need for a state monopoly. I mean, how do you explain this contradiction? It’s happening in the same country. On one side, this fierce resistance force fighting to the death to protect their homes and land against an invasion. And on the other hand, these people in suits begging Israel to be their friend.
Karim Makdisi
That’s a great question. I hope we have about 6 hours to go through this. It’s Lebanon especially in this kind of contemporary period of the past at least 20 years if not more. It’s a kind of schizophrenic country. There are at least two different projects and I think there’s three.
In essence, you have one group which now is represented especially by the prime minister and his cabinet in which they basically say that Lebanon can only be secure and eventually work towards a certain form of sovereignty such as it is if they do not enter any war vis-a-vis the Israelis. So if you provoke the Israelis, if you attack the Israelis, if you’re in any way anything but entirely neutral in their sense of neutral, then the Israelis are going to come in, you’re going to give them an excuse, you’re going to give them a legitimate excuse. The foreign minister that you mentioned actually earlier had said the Israelis actually had a right to attack in Lebanon, which was really quite something.
So if you give them this excuse, they will come in, they will destroy Lebanon, they will destroy the infrastructure. And this is in service not of a Lebanese interest or a Lebanese project but of an Iranian project. So in other words, Lebanon will sacrifice itself again in this logic for an Iranian project as a kind of forward base for Iran in order to be like a negotiating card for Iran down the line. That’s how one project sees it. And within that project I would say you can split it into two.
Not everybody that believes that or has that inclination is necessarily for example like the Lebanese Forces or some of these other more right-wing or neocon forces that genuinely would be happy to create conditions of turmoil and instability in Lebanon in order to rid itself of internal enemies, but you have those that are tired that simply want this thing to end and taken the discourse of defeat to its end and say listen, we don’t have a choice. The resistance even if we supported it, even if in principle it was okay, was defeated last year. Hassan was assassinated, the pager attacks, the level of destruction that the Israelis did in Lebanon with full American support is something that we simply cannot deal with, so we simply have to enter negotiations and come up with a deal. Look what’s happened in Syria. The Syrians are doing this. Why should we be any different than Syria? Why should it be different than Egypt? Why should be different than all of these countries? We are the last country that will be signing a deal. And here we are.
So some of it is insidious, some of it is just like we have no choice. We are defeated and we have to act basically like a defeated country in order to save what’s left of our state and what’s left of our sovereignty. In order to rebuild and reconstruct, you need to have some kind of deal and some kind of terms with the Israelis. And when they say the Israelis, they mean Americans because for them you’re dealing with Israelis insofar as you’re dealing with the Americans. And the Americans tell you you have to do a deal with the Israelis. But really the guarantees that these guys look for are always America. It’s not really the Israelis. They look for guarantees from America. So that’s sort of one project.
The other one is this resistance project which of course is led by on the ground militarily and politically but also has other smaller groups and certainly leftists and anti-colonials, anti-imperial types who would subscribe to this as well. For them, they see the Israelis as an existential threat. It’s not simply a question of, alright, the times have changed, we have to do a deal at some point sooner or later, let’s just get as good a deal as we can and try to preserve Lebanon’s territory, its territorial integrity, its sovereignty, and get as good a deal as possible. Basically that won’t work because no matter what you negotiate with Israelis, they will take more. They will hold, they’ll take, and then they’ll push more. We see this in Palestine. We saw this in the Oslo Accords in Palestine. We’ve seen it in the Gaza negotiations. We’ve seen it now with the Iranians when the Israelis and Americans say they’re negotiating and then they kill the negotiating team. We’ve seen this over and over.
And there’s no reason to assume that any deal that we come up with here as happened in 2024 in the November 2024 deal which was concluded with American guarantees, in the end America allowed these 15,000 violations even though there’s a mechanism that’s supposed to monitor this that’s US-led, they basically did nothing to censor or say anything or even condemn all these violations that happened. They really did nothing. So what is the point of having another agreement with an expansionist Israel where they’re openly declaring that they want to turn South Lebanon into a kind of Gaza type situation or even settle it or occupy it and poses this larger existential threat that if you do not create some form of deterrence at the least, then negotiating with them is simply giving up all Lebanese sovereignty and a chunk of Lebanese territory. These are just very different.
I’ll stop here but I think it’s important to get into the discussion which is to say when you take this split which has been around at least since the 2006 war and the leadup to the 2006 war, then we’re talking within Lebanon a fundamental mismatch that has very real impact which is to say the very notion of what is a state, what is sovereignty, what is resistance, and what is the function of a Lebanese army among other things. What does security mean? What are the basics of security? What are the functions of a state? This is not just a kind of, there’s a deep and utter conflict as to the very meaning. That’s before you get to policies and plans and strategies. There is a deep complete and utter mismatch in terms of expectations and conceptual understandings, let alone the practice of it.
Rania Khalek
Just hearing you say all that, I’m just thinking to myself, the people who are of the segment who are like we’re done with resistance, it doesn’t work, not that they ever really supported it, we just want to make a deal so we can be a normal country and move on.
They’re always talking about sovereignty and how we don’t want external influence in Lebanon. But meanwhile, these people are actually quite influenced by the Americans and the Gulf monarchies and they act like they’re not. The same people who are like, “Yeah, let’s kick out the Iranians, it’s Iran meddling in Lebanon,” but you all are totally dependent on foreign actors as well. And I think that’s one of the biggest problems with Lebanon is it is a playground for so many different countries. And so all these people who talk about sovereignty and the national bloc and all these things, it’s like again why is it okay that you’re trying to attach yourself to the Americans or the Saudis?
But I want to ask you about the Lebanese army before we move on because the Lebanese army remains largely on the sidelines of this war. And I think a lot of people are watching from abroad and thinking why is it that this army doesn’t fight Israel, right? Israel’s even killed several army soldiers. I think the number might be around five at this point in this war alone. So I’m wondering if you can explain why is it that the national army of Lebanon is not confronting Israel directly? What are the constraints there whether they’re internal or external in shaping that?
Karim Makdisi
Again, it’s a kind of complex question because talking about the army is literally talking about this dispute in terms of what is the state. The army representing the state, the idea of what is the army supposed to do. The easy answer in a sense is to say the Lebanese army like any army in the world should be defending its borders from outside attacks as a primary obvious thing. For others, clearly that’s not its main idea. The main mandate for the army from the other side is to say no, the Lebanese army’s main role is to disarm all non-state militias, meaning in this case for the most part, some Palestinian factions, but really at its core, that’s the main function that it needs to be doing in terms of security. In other words, your sovereignty, Lebanese sovereignty and security will be only established when the Lebanese army deploys across the country and disarms any non-official non-army force operating on the ground. So there’s a completely separate understanding of what the main role of the army should be in Lebanon.
Now in practical terms, there’s two very important points to say here. One is that I think it’s fair to say that politically speaking, symbolically speaking, in terms of legitimacy, I think the army probably is and it’s often said, it’s a bit of a cliche, but I think it’s true that the Lebanese army is pretty much the only public institution in which the vast majority of Lebanese agree and have favorable opinions towards. You look at the army and you say okay these are an army that is there to protect the country and it’s not there to create problems or to create conditions of conflict or war. There’s kind of positive feelings towards the army not everywhere but sort of on the whole. So that’s on the one hand.
On the other hand, the reason that there is a kind of consensus about this feeling about the army is precisely because they’ve not put themselves over the past couple of decades in a position where they’ve had to oppose one group over the other. But this is important. So what the Lebanese government has now been asking of the Lebanese army and this is why there’s a lot of pressure today is that the Lebanese government took a decision a couple weeks ago or so as soon as it escalated in the south, the Lebanese government took a decision to first declare the military and security wings as illegal basically and at the same time basically demanded that the army go in and disarm Hezbollah now in the middle of this war and arrest anybody illegally carrying weapons. And they’ve arrested I think 20 or 30 or 40 people that they’ve arrested and they’re currently on trial or being investigated so this is going on.
But what the army has done and the general of the army has come and said is that we are not in a position and it is not our job in this case to go in at this moment and forcibly put ourselves in a position where we are disarming and going after people by force in the middle of this war. That’s not what the army function is because they understand very well that if the army were to do that then the army would very likely split up and an army that splits up will create really bad internal conditions. So this is the kind of thing.
Bear in mind that the army has no real weapons. The army is largely funded by the United States. It’s run with the British as well. There are other forces that basically help to run the Lebanese army, provide it with even its uniforms, its guns. The fact that it doesn’t have serious weapons to defend itself, even at a very basic symbolic level, it has nothing. And that’s through decisions that the United States and its allies basically do not let the army do so because the army is meant to be an internal force to disarm so-called militias as opposed to an army that’s there to defend the country from external threats. So the army doesn’t even have these weapons to do anything.
So what the army has done now is it had to redeploy from the positions it took over the past year and a half along the border and in the south and they’ve removed themselves and put themselves in their major barracks in Tyre, in Sidon, places in the bigger areas, and removed themselves from where the main battles are taking place now between the Israelis along the border zone. So it’s a really interesting question because what happens to the army is of fundamental importance not just now militarily (they don’t have very much they can contribute) but in terms of what might happen post-war if there is a post-war. What happens to the army in that case will largely determine whether or not we’re going to end up in a kind of civil war type situation after this war ends and that’s extremely dangerous.
Rania Khalek
Well, okay. So I want to shift gears a moment and talk a bit about Israel’s objectives. Israeli officials are openly talking about pushing their border, whatever their border is, to the Litani River and creating a so-called buffer zone. You have Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister. I’m sure you saw he explicitly said that we should annex the south of Lebanon up to the Litani and make it Israel.
You have the Israeli defense minister, I think he’s the highest level official now to say something like this, Israel Katz, explicitly saying yesterday, the day after or the day before we recorded this, that the Litani River should be Israel’s new border. We should occupy southern Lebanon. This is also happening in tandem with this massive forced displacement. The numbers are something like over a million, 25% of Lebanon’s population has been subjected to forced displacement. And of course these are almost entirely Lebanese Shia from either the south or from the southern suburbs of Beirut.
But all that’s to say, Israel Katz is also saying those people, he specifically named, by the way, the Shia. He was very sectarian about it. He didn’t say Lebanese. He said the Shia who have been displaced from the south cannot return until I say so, until Israelis feel safe. And we know that means never. When it comes to the Israelis, when they kick Arabs out of their land, they mean never can they return. All that’s to say, how seriously should we take this? There are people who are like, “No, this is just a fringe element inside Israel.” But the defense minister and the finance minister aren’t so fringe.
Karim Makdisi
I think that’s fair. I think there’s two main points that I would say here. The first is that aside from the basic objective of “we want to destroy, eliminate them,” the other part which they’ve always tried to do is to create sectarian tension and potentially divisions within Lebanon. Sectarian identity-wise they want to create problems in Lebanon so that no matter what happens on the ground militarily they can create conditions in which Lebanon itself is split, it’s divided, and there’s a lot of sectarian tension. Their main goal in this case is to create sectarian tension and agitation against the Shia.
Because of what the Israelis have been doing especially over this last period, there’s over a million displaced officially, but probably even more, across especially in the south but the suburbs of Beirut, etc. These are going into areas. Whenever they create these, they send these little tweets where they send the zones that are going to be attacked at any given moment and then they put directions where people are supposed to go. The directions that they send to the so-called safe zones where they’re supposed to go is often done on purpose to go through Christian or other areas in order to increase that sectarian tension. That’s at least what they try to increase. This has been a goal that they’ve tried forever and it’s never really worked.
Yes, there are incidents here and there where there is tension going on and even yesterday we saw there was a fight going on in Jounieh. But the issue is that in general, if you imagine that 25% of the population or so with the war and with the sectarian connotations that go with it goes into most of Lebanon, you would imagine there should be a lot more fighting, a lot more tension. There should be fights every day. Can you imagine if 25% of the population, especially certain kinds of American population (if 60, 70, 80 million people were to pick up and go somewhere especially certain classes and different demographics) or Europe or any of these places? The vast majority of people that have gone to these different areas have been treated with respect. They’re terrible conditions. It’s humiliating. It’s terrible. There’s no stability. There’s uncertainty. That’s 100% true.
But in terms of the conditions that the Israelis are trying to create, they’ve so far failed at that. And that’s where you get some forces. I think these right-wing forces that we’re talking about, their role internally is to try to push harder this Israeli objective, which is to create more and more sectarian tension. Because as they understand that Hezbollah militarily is not as destroyed as they thought it was or as weak as they thought it was, then they have to work on the sectarian agitation part in order to undermine Hezbollah during the war and after the war depending on what kind of deal happens. So I think this is an important point for the audiences to bear in mind.
Rania Khalek
I guess with the territorial expansion aspect of it, and you’ve already alluded to this, this has always been a long-standing ambition of Israel whether they could actually carry it out.
Karim Makdisi
That’s the point. I think what people should remember is the Israelis don’t have declared borders. The Israelis don’t have a constitution. They have a series of basic laws that kind of enshrine apartheid inside Palestine, but they don’t have declared borders. So this business of when we talk about expansion and the greater Israel project, you’re talking about a country that does not have declared borders.
With that in mind, we can go back even to 1919 or over 100 years ago when the Zionist delegation after World War I, when the Middle East was being repartitioned following European deceptions and their promises to the Arabs and they started to divide up Palestine and Lebanon and these different countries, the Zionist delegation had gone to the British and told the British, “Please, when you’re negotiating Palestine and Lebanon borders with the French, please put the border to the Litani River because we know eventually we’re going to need South Lebanon for the water resources. There’s a lot of water resources for economic reasons. It’s a very fertile land and we’re going to need this for our future state.”
Now, they didn’t do it because the French wanted to protect the Maronites and so they kept the border where it is today because they basically wanted the area to protect the Maronites and the Christians within Lebanon itself. But over the decades and over the years, the Israelis time and time again under Labor Party and Likud Party have said we want South Lebanon. Ben-Gurion made it clear in the ’50s and in the ’60s and in the ’70s with the Israeli invasion of 1982 it was clear that they were going to keep it.
So it transforms from “we need it for agricultural economic water reasons” to “we need it for security zone” to “we need it for greater Israel for ideological reasons for settlement.” For 100 years it’s been consistent that they view South Lebanon as part of their project whether it’s actual total occupation and obliteration of everybody in it or control in terms of total demilitarization where they effectively control what happens south of the Litani. With a country that does not declare its borders, we need to take that seriously. It’s not like a country that’s just talking. It’s a country that has invaded Lebanon multiple times. It’s a country that has threatened Lebanon multiple times. It’s a country that is literally, as you mentioned, saying that they want to turn south Lebanon into Rafah and into various parts of Gaza. We should take that seriously. This is not a joke. With regard to territorial integrity, it should be fundamental to all sides in this.
Rania Khalek
With regard to you mentioned Ben-Gurion and the French getting in the way. The earliest iteration of the idea of the Litani being their natural border was Ben-Gurion saying it in 1919. The ultimate irony there is that the French wanting to create a Maronite state and screw the British is what made that not possible at least for that time.
Karim Makdisi
Absolutely.
Rania Khalek
All that’s to say, we’re also looking right now at this really widespread destruction. You mentioned the idea of wanting to create little Gazas across southern Lebanon and we’re seeing this widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, all this displacement. I actually think one way to look at this would be to call it a kind of Nakba. This to me looks like ethnic cleansing. It’s depopulating people from the south.
You actually have settler groups starting back in 2024, Israeli Jewish settler groups who are renaming villages in South Lebanon in preparation for eventually settling it and are actually amongst each other purchasing and selling land in Lebanon. I think we should take that very seriously. They want to do what they’ve done in the West Bank to South Lebanon, to parts of Syria. You had Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, tell Tucker Carlson, “Israel should be able to have the whole Middle East.” We should take that very, very seriously.
Israel’s also though, and you and I have experienced this because we’re in Beirut striking. Tom Barak, the American envoy here, is also talking about the Sykes-Picot deal that created all these different countries. Maybe the Israelis and others don’t believe that there should be this case anymore. Maybe there should be a greater Syria again, expanding parts of Syria into Lebanon, north of Lebanon. Maybe the Israelis can rethink what borders are after all. These are artificial. So what does Tom Barak, the American envoy, represent? I don’t know. But the reality is in the discourse they’re preparing for a kind of changing of the borders and as you’re saying we need to take that seriously**.**
I want to ask you because this has been such an ongoing ambition of the Israelis and on top of that this is not the first time they’ve done these kinds of things in Lebanon, right? This is the seventh invasion of Lebanon since 1978. So zooming out a little bit, I want to ask you, how do you think this moment, this 2026 invasion by the Israelis, attempted territorial expansion, compares to past attempts? How would you compare it, for example, to the invasion of 1978, 1982, 2006? How is it similar and how is it fundamentally different? I think those things matter to understand what’s at stake today.
Karim Makdisi
That’s a great question and again there’s a lot of nuance and complexity that goes into that. The one thing I think that ties all of this together is as I was just saying there is a desire for the Israelis to take South Lebanon in one form or the other. In order to take South Lebanon in whatever form, they also need to have a pliant Lebanese government that basically legitimizes giving them the South Lebanon.
In terms of all these different incursions and invasions into Lebanon, they come in different sizes and shapes. For example, in 1982 when the Israelis invaded Lebanon, at the time you had the Palestinian resistance, you had the PLO with other Lebanese factions and resistances operating there, but this was pre-Hezbollah. They invaded South Lebanon, they basically rolled over South Lebanon very quickly and ended up in the siege of Beirut during the summer of 1982 which ended in a sense with American mediation and with the PLO having to leave Lebanon and they ended up in Tunis at the time. The infamous Sabra and Shatila massacres of the Palestinian refugee camps happened after the PLO fighters left.
Again, how can you trust Israelis in any kind of deal? They never comply with any deal whether it’s to their advantage or not. They always end up interpreting the deals as they want and doing as they wish.
1982 is interesting because after 1982 they tried to impose an agreement, the infamous treaty of May 1983 in which the Lebanese parliament ratified an agreement that basically in a sense handed South Lebanon not de jure but de facto to the Israelis. The idea again was to create a Lebanese government that was going to be pliant to Israel and to Israeli wishes. Remember this is happening at a time when the Israelis were still occupying Lebanon. This agreement ends up being dropped because the civil war continues. The parliament officially abrogates the deal and then the resistance really starts to push the Israelis out of large parts of Lebanon and pushes them back into South Lebanon where the Israelis remain in occupation south of the Litani from 1985 until the year 2000 when they for the most part withdraw and the UN certifies that they withdraw.
I think what the Israelis are threatening to do now is to do this. They’re saying we’re going to go into South Lebanon. We’re going to go all the way to the Litani River. We’re going to force the Lebanese government into a certain kind of agreement and treaty and we’re going to spend our time there basically destroying Hezbollah in a way that we destroyed the Palestinian fighters and the PLO as they claim it.
Of course the context is completely different, right? The PLO could pick up and go to Tunis or somewhere else but Hezbollah are Lebanese. So you start to hear this thing and some of the local people here will agree with them. They’ll say, “Actually Hezbollah is Iranian. If Hezbollah is Iranian, then why don’t you pick up these people, especially those in certain leadership positions, and send them to Iraq, send them to Iran, send them to Shia areas because in the end they’re not really Lebanese. And as for the rest, okay, we can see what happens and how to resettle them and what kind of buffer zone we can put and what kind of demilitarized zone we put, etc.” So I see 1982 as an interesting thing that we need to keep in mind, ’82 and ’83 really.
Then you have the war in 2006 where Hezbollah is able, where Israelis come in again with the stated declaration that they want to destroy Hezbollah. Hezbollah grows in stature during that 33-day war until that war ends with UN Security Council resolution 1701. Effectively, Hezbollah kind of established a deterrence with the Israelis that lasted more or less until October 2023 when this new phase begins.
There are similarities but one last similarity which is interesting is the April 1996 agreement. In effect during the 1990s, and this is part of the lesson that Hezbollah learned from last year until now in the way in which they’re fighting.
Karim Makdisi
Between 2006 when they were able to establish a deterrence up until 2023, Hezbollah grew in terms of its bureaucracy institutionally. It became a regional actor. They intervened in Syria militarily, a very high-profile case. They had a lot of influence in Yemen, a lot of influence in Iraq. Through its leader Hassan Nasrallah, he became a regional player and a regional actor rather than a kind of purely Lebanon-focused actor. That entailed a massive bureaucracy, a lot of growth. It became a quasi-army and that was its downfall eventually when the Israelis were able to infiltrate this massive bureaucracy very deeply and where they were able to hit a lot of the military forces and the command structures in 2023 and 2024.
What I think they’ve done now in the meantime over these 15 months is to say we certainly cannot go back to that model. We have to go on a diet, go back down, go to the base of what we used to be, which was during the 1990s and especially after this 1996 deal, this kind of Grapes of Wrath deal that happens where there’s a ceasefire deal that legitimizes the rules of engagement that is allowed to do vis-a-vis the Israelis, meaning from a defensive resistance kind of rules of engagement that targets Israelis inside Lebanon and it has legitimacy and the law to be able to push any kind of occupation forces out of Lebanon and defend Lebanese territorial integrity.
I think this is where we are now. This is why today Hezbollah basically says, “We’re not here to invade the Israelis. We’re not here to defeat Israel as such. We’re here to ensure that Israel gets out of all Lebanese territory. We will defend all Lebanese villages from an Israeli invasion.”
This is a role that they’re much more suited to and where tactically, militarily, they are much less likely to be infiltrated and much less likely to be defeated because it’s more decentralized. The Lebanese terrain in South Lebanon, the physical terrain suits these kinds of smaller operations. There’s not this need to say, “We’re holding this town.” They’re much more able to say, “We’re going to come out, Israelis come in, and then we do a surprise attack. Then the Israelis withdraw.” So there’s a much more tactical flexibility and decentralization in the way that they’re being able to fight in South Lebanon today, which is more akin to the 1990s and less so as this kind of big regional actor with a kind of big army that was very easy for the Israelis to infiltrate, as we saw through that 2023 and 2024 war.
Rania Khalek
Certainly like returning to a bit of their roots and also lessons learned, right? I think that kind of feeds into what I wanted to ask you next. I think there’s this maybe because of the way that 2024 was a defeat, a defeated battle in many ways, there’s this almost like sense of inevitability about Israel occupying the south, but it’s not actually an easy thing to do. I mean, you mentioned the distinction between the PLO, you can just make them get up and leave, right? But Lebanese on the other hand, these are their villages. They live there. I mean, that’s where Hezbollah comes from is the Lebanese people who live in the south, right? So I guess I just wanted to ask your thoughts on that inevitability because I don’t think it’s inevitable and we talked about how this has been a long-standing ambition of the Israelis, but they’ve actually never been able. They did occupy for 18 years, but it was not an easy occupation and they eventually had to retreat.
Karim Makdisi
Absolutely. I think what gets missed out in this equation as you’re saying is the fact that for all these decades, since 1919, they’ve been trying to get South Lebanon in one form or the other but since 1919 they’ve not been able to do so. So there needs to be this kind of analysis of saying yes resistance to a large degree and it’s not just pre-Hezbollah and it’ll be post-Hezbollah. There will be resistance as long as there’s a foreign power that occupies land there will be people that resist this.
As you’re saying, between 1982 on to the year 2000 there was the Israeli occupation of all of South Lebanon. The resistance that eventually becomes especially in the 1990s, there was a lot of resistance groups but effectively it for the most part ends up being Hezbollah in the 1990s. Remember that in this period of the 1990s Hezbollah was able to grow and learn while the Oslo peace process, while the post-Cold War period was taking place. It was in the post-civil war period in Lebanon. There was reconstruction. And there was a whole different kind of politics taking place where Hezbollah was able to conduct this resistance and learn and grow in South Lebanon without anybody really monitoring them. They were sort of on the side. So they had all those years in order to perfect their ability to attack Israelis until the Israelis were unable anymore, the cost of holding the occupation was simply too high and they ended up withdrawing in the year 2000 under fire.
I want to remind people that this is the first time that the Israelis withdrew from occupied Arab land under fire anywhere in the entire hundred years. It’s never happened before. So I think it’s important to bear this in mind that resistance, however we want to define it, has worked so far.
Now the question that Lebanese will have is to say what is the cost of this resistance? That’s the discussion we’re having today. So is the cost of resistance worth the destruction of the vast majority of Lebanon’s infrastructure? They might start hitting power plants, all this kind of thing. That’s the question that’s being asked today. I understand that as a question. It’s a fair question for people to have: is the cost worth it?
I think that’s also a very geographic question, right? Because part of the country bears the brunt of Israel stealing their land while the other part of the country is like well I just want to go about my daily life without having to deal with this, it’s not my problem. Which is an unfortunate reality of the way that Lebanon is.
Rania Khalek
I wanted to ask you about the Syria equation of all this. Just your general thoughts on the fact that we saw last week there was this report that came out about how the Americans were trying to pressure the Syrian government to get involved in Lebanon to basically fight Hezbollah alongside the Israelis. And then the Syrian government basically said no. I can understand their reluctance to do that. But I mean they’ve got a lot of issues in their own country. And also I can imagine the Turks were maybe like, no, absolutely not because they have a bit of a veto when it comes to Syria’s leadership. But just curious your thoughts on that. I know a lot of people in Lebanon are fearful about the potential for a Syrian invasion into the east of the country.
Also just to throw this since we’re on Syria, I do think it’s interesting. You sort of mentioned it earlier, but for those who do think that resistance is futile, it’s an interesting debate to hear out. You look at a country like Syria, which has spent the last year plus since their new government took over trying to basically signal they want normalization with Israel. They’ve never responded to a single act of Israeli military aggression. And they still get bombed. They still are having raids. The Israelis do raids inside Syria and kidnap people sometimes. The Israelis bombed just a couple weeks ago, if not last week. And the Israelis are still trying to basically make their theft of the Golan Heights permanent. But anyways, I threw a bunch of Syria stuff at you, so feel free to take on whatever you’d like there.
Karim Makdisi
There’s a lot there. Maybe a couple of things. The first just in terms of Lebanon, I am very worried to be honest. I’m very worried. There’s conflicting reports about what happened in terms of these rumors of the Syrian president being asked or requested to come into Lebanon. Obviously it hasn’t happened, but I think a lot of people are legitimately worried that it might happen depending on how the war here progresses. It’s intimately connected to the way in which the war progresses.
If the Israelis become, for example, either more desperate and Hezbollah gets defeated in military terms or hit very badly, then the question becomes, well, who’s going to mop up? Because ultimately a lot of the heavy weapons are in those areas in the Beqaa. They’re not in South Lebanon as such, but they’re north of the Litani River and they’re in parts in the Beqaa. The question is who’s going to go in there and help to fight Hezbollah on that front.
The Turks, I think the Turks don’t want this. The Turks are worried. From my reading, Turkey is worried that the Israelis will want to dominate the region. If Lebanon falls and if Syria falls even more so, then it’s right at the front. The Israeli border effectively becomes with Turkey. The Israelis are already talking and their rhetoric is all, okay, after Iran, the next big bad guy is Erdogan and Turkey. I think they take that seriously. And so, if Syria falls even more so in this sense, and if Lebanon falls and Hezbollah in particular falls, then the Turks will have a problem on their hands. I think the Turks have an interest for Hezbollah not to fall. That’s how I see it now.
I think it’s true of many other countries, even those that we might find surprising. I think there’s a lot of countries in the region that don’t necessarily want Hezbollah to fall in the context of this larger Israeli regional domination project because they understand that as long as you have Israeli domination, you’re going to have instability, you’re going to have conflict, you’re going to have war. So I think there are plenty that would want Hezbollah to stay not because they like Hezbollah or anything like that, definitely not, but in this phase to make sure that the Israelis do not win decisively across the region. I think this is important.
Karim Makdisi
Now the other part of what you’re saying, remember the Israelis came through, they did these two kind of curious operations from the east through the Beqaa. They came via Syria. After all, they landed via the Syrian border in Nabatieh. When they came into the Lebanese area of Nabatieh, there were two battles that took place and then the Israelis had to pick up and withdraw. And remember, the Israelis came in with a bunch of people via Syria. There’s no way I cannot imagine that somebody in Syria didn’t know that the Israelis were coming in. They didn’t participate, but they kind of came through Syria to do these operations. At the same time, what was insidious is that the Israelis came in and some of them were wearing Lebanese army fatigues, which is very easy to get because the Americans are the ones who provide Lebanese army fatigues. So it’s easy to get. It’s not a big deal.
This kind of thing coming in, they said they were coming to get the remains of an Israeli pilot that had been around for decades, the remains of his body, but in fact it’s most likely they were coming in to test this border area to see what would happen from the Syrian side, to see what would happen on the Lebanese side, and to try to test Hezbollah’s defenses along those borders. So what happened was you had local villages fighting the Israelis when the Israelis did come and there were some heavy casualties on the Lebanese side and some on the Israeli side until the Israelis withdrew. So I think there are testing of the ground to see what happens if they come in from Syria themselves directly, on the one hand. On the other hand, what if the Syrians are told to enter Lebanon in order to mop up the situation depending on how the war in Lebanon goes.
So the final point I would say here and I think this connects to the much larger question you’ve been asking which is in this kind of regional war everything depends on what happens on the ground. If Hezbollah is crushed you’re going to have a very different kind of setup. If Iran is crushed and regime change happens and Iran gets changed completely you’re going to have a very different setup, you’re going to have Israeli domination across the region. The Gulf has been severely weakened itself and so it will become even more dependent on the Israelis in that sense.
The American configuration, I think America