PERHAPS it’s not surprising that amid the latest eruption of conflict in West Asia, Israel’s aggression against Lebanon tends to be viewed as a sideshow. After all, whereas the abortive US-Israeli effort to effect regime change in Tehran, mainly via bombardment, was something of a novelty, Israel has routinely intervened in or invaded Lebanon over the past 50 years.
The hostile urge goes back further. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, informed his military commanders in May 1948: “Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Muslim regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai.”
Six years later, Ben-Gurion and Israel Defence Forces (IDF) chief Moshe Dayan worked out a plan to persuade a Lebanese army officer to declare himself a saviour of Maronite Christians, whereupon Israel would invade, establish a friendly Christian regime, and annex the territory south of the Litani river. Though not yet accomplished, at least a part of that mission is still on the Zionist agenda.
Beirut’s Dahiyeh suburb has suffered Israeli-afflicted depredations before, not least in 2006, when the scale of devastation offered a template for Gaza’s fate, and again in 2024. After Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to pound it yet again — as compensation for IDF’s failure to prevent Hezbollah’s sporadic attacks on northern Israel — Donald Trump told the Israeli PM to curb his enthusiasm. His reportedly expletive-ridden talk with Netanyahu sounds different from the “very good call” Trump claims to have had with Hezbollah. Both chats followed Iran’s declaration that it would suspend negotiations unless Israel halted its ceasefire violations in Lebanon and Gaza.
The first step would be to settle the Palestinian question.
The apparent upshot is that Israel has agreed not to attack Beirut, while Hezbollah will stop targeting northern Israel. But will southern Lebanon remain a free-fire zone for the IDF in its anti-Shia ethnic cleansing campaign? After all, the area south of the Litani has borne the brunt of the ground invasion in a war that has already claimed over 3,000 lives. As in Iran, most of the victims are civilians. Christian and Sunni villages might be spared Israeli evacuation orders, but that doesn’t mean they are safe from IDF-inflicted humiliations. Israeli soldiers themselves have described the orgy of looting that has accompanied the invasion.
Despite a Western-friendly government in Beirut, chances of peacefully disarming Hezbollah have significantly diminished as a result of the latest invasion. Should Israel wish to solidify its incursion into a long-term occupation with the aim of eventual annexation, it may be able to get away with it for a while. There will be whimpers, but no deterrent action, from the West or Israel’s Arab neighbours.
Lebanon’s fate as a conflicted entity was ordained by the lines in the sand drawn by Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, representing Britain and France, in 1915, apportioning the Levant and much of the rest of the Middle East according to colonial whims. The Balfour Declaration two years later added a twist, enabling the project to erase Palestine. Inflicting a European-led settler-colonial power on West Asia where other nations were stumbling into independence had an unsettling effect.
The first step in any remedy would be to settle the Palestinian question. That prospect seems more remote today than it did in 1948, with the wholesale occupation of Gaza and annexation of the West Bank proceeding apace. Perhaps expecting anything different was folly.
During the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Trump’s equally pro-Israeli predecessor Ronald Reagan berated PM Menachem Begin for the IDF’s determination to wreak a ‘holocaust’ in Beirut. Begin bristled at the use of the term, and shortly afterwards the IDF orchestrated the Sabra and Chatila massacre. On the eve of a visit to the US by the same Begin in 1948, a group of Jewish intellectuals — including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and Sidney Hook — publicly decried the former Irgun terrorist’s new Freedom Party as “closely akin in its organisation, methods and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties”. The fate of Deir Yassin, they noted, “exemplifies the character and actions” of the party, which bears “the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Arabs, Jews and British alike), and misrepresentation are the means, and a ‘Leader State’ is the goal”.
Their December 1948 letter to The New York Times has lately been doing the rounds on social media under the headline ‘Why Didn’t They Listen?’ To which one might add: They’re not listening still. Perhaps they never will.
Published in Dawn, June 3rd, 2026