These are the only two options given to Lebanon by an international community which was much more creative in finding solutions for other small countries (East Timor, Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo....) caught in the claws of powerful savage neighbors.
The two scenarios below are essentially the same ultimatum given to the Lebanese many times before in the course of the past six decades: Submit to either one of your tormentors, Israel or Syria/Iran, or else. In both cases, you would be exchanging your freedom for a half-ass, no peace-no war, temporary respite.
With Israel, your submission would be through a devastating war, not unlike that in Gaza, with its destruction, killings, assassinations, etc. With Syria/Iran your submission would be through a deal that keeps you under the boots of Hezbollah with on-off episodes of war, assassinations, bombings, and a decaying state....
The core problem is the existence of Hezbollah. It poses a threat to Israel (from the standpoint of the Americans) and it poses a threat to Lebanon (from the standpoint of Lebanese patriots).
SCENARIO 1: NO WAR, BUT PRICE IS PERMANENT INSTABILITY AND CONTINUED DECAY OF LEBANON
The Biden administration manages to secure a deal in which (most of?) UNSC 1701 is implemented, which means that Hezbollah withdraws to some distance away from the Israeli border, allowing the Lebanese army and the United Nations Force (UNIFIL) more control over the border area. This has been the thrust of the endless shuttling of US (Hochstein), French (LeDrian) and EU envoys between Tel Aviv, Beirut, Egypt, Riyadh and Doha.
Supposedly, the tensions will ease up, displaced Lebanese villagers from the south can return to their ancient homes and displaced Israeli settlers (notice how foreign Israelis are "settlers" while indigenous Lebanese and Palestinians are "villagers") can also return to their brand new settlements in the north of Israel. In this scenario, war is avoided but peace does not return to this tormented country. In other words, the US and its European poodles do NOT want a permanent solution to the 60-year old Lebanese problem. If they did, they have a number of ways to force a permanent solution.
In this scenario, the country returns to the status quo that has prevailed since the late 1960s: a bumpy no-peace, no-war situation, on and off wars, bombings, assassinations, a rogue terrorist militia like Hezbollah (and its multiple Jihadi and Palestinian allies) controls the country, a continued Syrian regime interference (via 2.5 million illegal Syrians living on Lebanese soil on top of a 4 million native population), which weakens the Lebanese government and slowly dismantles the institutions and the proper governance of the country, continued corruption running amok, a decaying economy that is modulated by the Syrian illegals' rampant crime and their drain on the infrastructure, and a frozen judiciary that cannot adjudicate the simplest of conflicts, let alone enforce the laws against corruption and crime.
The unfortunate thing is that the West (US and European and Arab allies) have tried this approach many times in the past, and it has failed every time. In the early 1980s, following the 1982 Israeli invasion, there was an opportunity to bring an end to the chaos created by Syria, Saudi Arabia, Libya and other Arab "sisters" of Lebanon that were supporting Yasser Arafat's PLO takeover of the country. A new president (Bashir Gemayel) free from any foreign ties had been elected by a unanimous parliament with the backing of western forces on the ground (the Multi-National Force -MNF- of American, British, Italian and French troops), but he was assassinated, presumably by the only loser of that phase of the war, the Syrian regime. The PLO had evacuated Beirut and the Lebanese army was ready to assume control of the entire territory, including the southern border with Israel and the eastern and northern border with Syria, with the backing of the MNF. Everyone participated in negotiations leading to a peace treaty between Lebanon and Israel (the May 1983 accord): the Lebanese parliament had ratified it, the US had mediated it, the Israelis and Lebanese had agreed to it, the Arabs had reluctantly agreed (for reasons clarified further below) and a majority of local militias on both sides had signed on to it.
The only recalcitrant party was the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah tandem. Syria had been involved neck-deep in the fighting on Lebanese soil alongside the PLO and its allied leftwing militias. The renewed hope for a Lebanon divorced from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was felt as a failure by the Syrian regime because it had been using Lebanon as the only Arab war front against Israel, thus saving itself from Israeli retaliations. Syria (and its Arab backers like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya and others) was the biggest loser in the war at this particular junction in the history of the war in Lebanon. The PLO had served as the militia for the Arab League, and all Arab countries supplied the PLO with money and weapons in its war against the Lebanese state. The Arabs, being Sunni Muslims, wanted primarily to promote the Lebanese Sunni community, rather than lift Lebanon out of its Arab- and Israeli-inflicted miseries. Their fight was less about defending Palestine and pacifying Lebanon, and more about transferring the executive power from the Maronite Christian President to the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister. The Maronite Christians had heretofore maintained control over top state institutions (presidency, central bank, army chief, etc.) based on a 1943 agreement with the Muslims. With the PLO gone, the Arabs no longer had a militia to fight with and were pressured (with promises of later benefits) to accept the pacification of Lebanon. Egypt was playing the most hypocritical role: It wanted Lebanon to remain the only Arab front against Israel while it itself had exchanged embassies with the Zionist state and Sadat had visited Jerusalem. But another player was beginning to shuffle the cards for the Sunni Arabs, Iran.
The advent of the Islamic theobarbarity in Iran in 1979 gradually shifted Syria's reliance on the Arabs to Iran. The Iranian regime's alliance with the Assad regime will slowly degrade those optimal chances in 1983 for Lebanon to salvage itself. Indeed, Khomeini's revolution in Tehran in 1979, his seizure of American hostages, and his dispatch of Islamic Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon in 1981 where they created Hezbollah, scuttled every chance of the May 1983 accord and the pacification of Lebanon to take root. Hezbollah bombed the US and French Marines headquarters in Beirut, and began a campaign (backed by Syrian troops and intelligence on the ground) of dislodging the West entirely from Lebanon. Airplanes were hijacked to Beirut Airport, Western hostages were kidnapped and held for ransom, to which Ronald Reagan and George HW Bush responded by selling weapons to Iran via Israel in exchange for a hostage release.
A coward Lebanese President, Amin Gemayel (who had been elected following his brother's assassination in September 1982) feared for his life and refused to sign the May 1983 Accord that nearly every actor (except Syria) had backed. Had Gemayel signed, Lebanon would have been put on a path to normalization and pacification. Egypt had already extricated itself from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict four years earlier by signing the Camp David accords in 1979, so Lebanon would not have been the first Arab country to normalize with Israel. Yet Gemayel feared for his life and argued (according to reliable witnesses) that he "did not want to close 20 (i.e. Arab) doors to open only 1 (Israeli) door". In retrospect, in 2024 with virtually all the Arab countries having normalized, or are on their way to normalize, with Israel, Gemayel would have been considered today a visionary. But Amin Gemayel is no visionary, he's an idiotic feudal Mafia boss typical of all Lebanese feudal tribal leadership, Christian and Muslim alike.
Blame can also be placed on the Western powers who, instead of staying put to defend Lebanon and its government and army, decided to flee before the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah campaign of terror. Ronald Reagan withdrew his Marines (minus the 241 killed in the Beirut bombing), followed by the British, Italians and French (minus their 58 paratroopers killed by a twin bombing by Hezbollah), and the Syrian army entered Beirut and replaced the PLO with Hezbollah, and allowed the latter to gain in strength and power. Had the western powers stayed and fought the Damascus butcher's occupation of Lebanon, that too could have enabled peace for Lebanon. Hezbollah was a mere 3 year-old militia with very limited capabilities. But for some reason, the West decided to abandon Lebanon to the Axis of Evil. George HW Bush would continue the same US policy of appeasement and submission to Iranian blackmail: Concession after concession was made to the Iranians every time the Iranian proxy Hezbollah released a western hostage held in Beirut. To add insult to injury, whenever a US or westsern hostage would be released from the Hezbollah-held southern suburb of Beirut (5 miles away from Beirut airport), he would be driven 2.5 hours all the way east to Damascus just so he can be paraded to the Western press under giant portraits of Khomeini and Hafez Assad. HW Bush and his Secretary of State James Baker the Turd would express their gratitude to the hostage takers. Syria at the time was the inaugural member of the US State Dept list of State-Sponsors of Terrorism.
And when the time came for a presidential election in Lebanon in 1988, HW Bush and Baker the Turd rewarded Syria by demanding that the Lebanese parliament vote for a Syrian puppet - Mikhail Daher - and the US envoy, Richard Murphy, threatened Lebanon with chaos if parliament did not comply. The parliament did not comply, demanding instead free and fair elections. With US endorsement, the Syrians unleashed their barbarity on Lebanon, shelling residenatil areas for months on end just like Israel is doing in Gaza nowadays. The Syrians even obtained a free pass from friendly Israelis for the Syrian airforce to bomb the Lebanese Prime Minister's headquarters in Baabda who then fled for exile. By that time in 1990, Lebanon was 90% controlled by Syria and 10% by Israel in the south.
As we write these lines, Amos Hochstein and Jean-Yves LeDrian are trying to construct a similar deal for the Lebanese. To avoid chaos and war (as threatened by Israel and Syria), the West is asking the Lebanese to comply with a pacification deal that doesn't solve the fundamental problem of the missing Lebanese sovereignty. They tell their Lebanese interlocutors to accept a Syrian puppet for President (Sleiman Frangiyeh), to accept that Hezbollah keep its weapons but withdraw 10 miles north of the Israeli border, and essentially maintain Lebanon hostage in the hands of Iran, in exchange of which Israel will not wage an invasion in the Lebanese south now that its northern border is not immediately under Hezbollah's threat, and Iran will re-join the nuclear negotiations. Everyone gets what they want, except the Lebanese who want Hezbollah to disarm, Syria to take back its 2.5 million illegal migrants, to secure the entire border with only the Lebanese army (north and east with Syria, and south with Israel) backed by UNIFIL, and for the Lebanese state to regain the attributes of a sovereign state. All of this America-style "Lebanon garage sale" deal will, of course, be "funded" by American largesse to buy up more corrupt Lebanese Mafia leaders.
The Lebanese should continue to oppose such a deal because it would mean another two decades of decay and torment. I suggest they reject any more visits by Hochstein and LeDrian to Beirut, and turn them away back to their home countries. Mediators sometimes take too much risk: Remember how Hezbollah took hostage Terry Waite, the Anglican mediator who was seeking a solution to the hostage question in the 1980s? Remember how Mohammed Bin Sultan, the Saudi dictator, kidnapped the Lebanese Prime Minster Saad Hariri and held him hostage in Riyadh?
SCENARIO 2: ISRAELI INVASION-WAR AS AN IMMEDIATE SOLUTION BUT WITH A HEFTY PRICE: IMMENSE GAZA-LIKE DESTRUCTION AND POTENTIAL ANNEXATION BY ISRAEL OF SOUTHERN TERRITORIES.
The second option facing the Lebanese is for Netanyahu to transfer his barbaric right-wing ultra-religious Jewish terrorist policies in Palestine up north to the Israeli-Lebanese border, in the hope of "eliminating" the barbaric right-wing ultra-religious Muslim terrorist group Hezbollah. For some Lebanese, an Israeli war and invasion could, despite their cost, serve as a prelude to a final settlement to the 60-year old problem of Lebanese sovereignty being raped by the Palestinians (1965-1982) then by the Iranian Hezbollah (1982-present). But they can dream.
Israeli leaders have been saying as of late that with their savagery coming to an end in Gaza, they want to shift to their northern border to confront, once and for all, the Hezbollah threat. They want their settlers in the north to be able to retun safely to their settlements, with some urgency because the school year is about to begin. Thus the imperative of eliminating the Hezbollah threat has an express tag and a no-return clause attached ot it.
Which is putting Israel at odds with the Biden administration. The latter wants Hochstein's half-ass "deal" (of Scenario 1 above), while the former wants a full-ass war to dislodge Hezbollah entirely from the south.
Back in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, Hezbollah was still only a militia with no part in the Lebanese state institutions or government. This has changed. Today Hezbollah has MPs, ministers, and essentially holds the entire country hostage to its weapons and war-tested army (in the Syrian civil war) that is stronger than the Lebanese army. Therefore, Israel can claim to have a "legitimate" reason this time to "defend itself" against the Hezbollah threat by waging war against ALL of Lebanon and not just Hezbollah targets. State entities, infrastructure, Lebanese army positions and barracks, ministries...it's all fair game and every thing is a kosher target this time around.
Hence the economic and financial costs of such a war on Lebanon will be immense, not to mention the potential for such an Israeli war to degenerate into an internal domestic civil war not unlike the 1975 war between Palestinians and Lebanese. This time, the 2.5 million illegal Syrian migrants would constitute themselves into a militia armed by Syria and fighting on behalf of the Syrian regime (whose coveting of Lebanese territory is historic), the Palestinian refugee population could again leave its camps to fight elsewhere in the country, the Sunnis, the Druze and the Christians could each constitute their own defense militias, and the Lebanese army might splinter along sectarian lines like it did in 1975.... I believe such a war would be transformative of the Lebanese entity which might disintegrate from the Greater Lebanon monstrosity created in 1920 into smaller homogeneous "cantons" that may be federate or confederate in vague future arrangements.
Assuming it succeeds, an Israeli invasion might defeat Hezbollah and dislodge it to north of the Litani river, thus re-creating a much bigger buffer zone than the one in 1982. Indeed, given the expansionist blindness of the ultra-religious criminals in power in Israel, it might even annex the Lebanese south including for sure the city of Tyre (Litani River boundary) and perhaps even the city of Sidon (Awwali River boundary). The grotesque "Greater Israel" could be in the offing, including southern Lebanon, the Syrian Golan Heights, and the Palestinian Gaza Strip and West Bank.
What are the chances that such an invasion succeeds? For one it will have to be won very very fast because Hezbollah's rockets and missiles will immediately start raining on major Israeli urban centers the moment the first Merkava crosses the Blue Line. It may be that Israel's Netanyahu is willing to sustain significant loss of life and destruction inside Israel but only for a short timeframe. If his invasion drags on like it did in 2006, it will be a defeat for Israel which cannot countenance substantial loss of life. And this still does not invoke an Iranian, Syrian or American interventions. Hezbollah has often threatened the Israeli Galilee bordering Lebanon with an October 7-like land incursion, which may or may not take place.
Alternatively, Israel could opt for a long-term war of attrition without a land invasion. With its supremacy in the air it could unrelentingly bomb targets for as long as needed. A land invasion would otherwwise force it to fight a guerilla war that it has lost twice already (1980s- 2000), then again in 2006.
The Israeli war and invasion options would be extremely dangerous for all involved. For now, the Gaza war continues to siphon resources aways from a major operation in Lebanon, but this is coming to an end and several Israeli brigades have moved to the Lebanese border. Israeli army soldiers have trained in Cyprus in conditions resembling the terrain in Lebanon. Israeli threats against Lebanon are almost daily, and the perception in Lebanon is that the Israeli invasion is imminent. Last night, news resports spoke of Israeli strikes against Hezbollah's rear lines in the Bekaa and the Hermel regions of Lebanon, of border barriers being torn down to facilitate the entry of tanks. It appears that the Israeli threat is materializing gradually, with an emphasis by Israel on weakening Hezbollah's supply lines, leadership (assassinations), striking its ammunition depots, and testing highly sensitive equipment that can detect deep undergroung tunnels (30 meters, or 90 feet, deep) and also that can detect human movement inside these tunnels.
OTHER OPTIONS?
For some reason, help by the international community and the so-called "friends" of Lebanon has always boiled down to forcing the country to choose between those two horrible options.
But there are other scenarios, foremost of which is for the international community to use force to restore sovereignty to Lebanon and separate it from the regional conflicts. This has been done elsewhere when small countries were bullied by barbaric neighbors, in which cases the international community dispatched a fighting force to control the borders and secure the sovereignty of countries like Bosnia (Serbia), Kosovo (Serbia), East Timor (Indonesia), Kuwait (Iraq), and others. Why is this so impossible or difficult in the case of Lebanon? A fully sovereign and independent Lebanon, free of all Syrian and Iranian proxy militias has never posed a threat to either Syria or Israel. Lebanon has been in recent years declaring its will to be recognized by the international community as a legally neutral country. Why is Lebanon always kept as an outlier in the scheme of obtaining protection under international custody?
The Lebanese are a very stubborn people. They have reluctantly and coercively submitted to US-brokered deals in the past that only served the criminal neighbors of the country, Syria or Israel, or Iran and Saudi Arabia. This time, they keep telling Hochstein and LeDrian that they will not fall in the trap one more time. Sixty years is enough. Therefore the Biden-Hochstein deal in Scenario 1 will never be accepted willingly by the vast majority of the Lebanese people. The option of Scenario 2 is a horrible one as well; "We don't want war" the Lebanese keep telling the world. But while Scenario 1 cannot a priori be imposed by force unless it follows a major military and civil upheaval like the one in 1988-1990, Scenario 2 is a priori an Israeli decision and is beyond the control of the Lebanese.
Therefore, it seems that Lebanon will, again, gradually descend into civil unrest between the various Lebanese communities taking up arms, some siding with Hezbollah and some against it, accompanied by an Israeli invasion in the south and a Syrian takeover in the north. Sounds familiar? That is exactly what happened in the 1975-1983 period, with the PLO playing the role of today's Hezbollah. Nothing else has changed. So much for the much-vaunted "successes" of the US- and Arab-sponsored Cairo Accord (1969), the Multi-National Force (1892), the Taef Accord (1989), or the Doha Accord (2008).
But the international community still has the option, which it implemented in many other places around the world in defense of small countries, to claim and impose its custody over Lebanon, and extricate it from the insoluble, untractable, endless conflicts betwen colonial Jewish Israel, and Islamic hegemonic Iran, Satlinist Syria, Wahhabi extremist Saudi Arabia and all the other hypocrites of the Arab-Muslim world who are not too unhappy to see part-Christian Lebanon shoved into the role of the only open war front with Israel.
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