Lebanon's Government Declares War on Its Own People

This agreement cements the Israeli occupation, which can only be undone through civil war in coordination with the U.S. and Israel. It also threatens to torpedo the U.S.-Iran deal.

The Lebanese government has joined Israel and the U.S. in declaring war on a massive segment of its own population.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s ambassador to the U.S. signed a framework agreement with Israel during a fifth round of negotiations hosted by Washington. The agreement is treacherous, shocking, and shameful. It cements Israel’s occupation of Lebanese territory in the south, which can only be undone through a Lebanese Army-led civil war coordinated with the U.S. and Israel.

The Lebanese elites who promote this submission to empire love to invoke sovereignty. They talk about Hezbollah as if it’s an alien force implanted by Iran, rather than an organic, indigenous and popular military formation born out of resistance to Israeli occupation in the 1980s. For these elites, any resistance to Israel is a violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty, while taking orders from Washington and Tel Aviv against Lebanon’s own interests is considered normal, independent, even virtuous. Up is down, right is left.

The Lebanese government refused to use the leverage Iran’s insistence on a ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal had given them. Instead they collaborated with the Americans and Israelis on Israel’s terms, handing Marco Rubio a tool to undermine the U.S.-Iran agreement in the process.

Netanyahu is bragging that this is a “major achievement because it allows Israel’s occupation to continue. The Lebanese presidency is celebrating it as a sovereignty win that will liberate Lebanese land, but has offered no details as to how, and the agreement itself shows no such thing. Hezbollah rejected it, obviously, because it is total capitulation to Israeli land theft.

The Surrender Agreement

The full text of the framework is available here. Nicolas Sawaya has a great breakdown of all 14 points. I’ll highlight the most damning.

First: this agreement is mediated and overseen by the U.S., which is NOT a neutral party. The U.S. underwrites Israel’s entire military: funding, weapons, Iron Dome, intelligence, diplomatic cover. It is an active participant in the crimes being committed against the Lebanese. The past has demonstrated it cannot be trusted to fairly mediate anything involving Israel. Let’s remember those 15,000 Israeli ceasefire violations between November 2024 and March 2026 that went totally unchecked by the U.S.-run mechanism.

Point 2 stipulates that Israeli withdrawal is contingent on the Lebanese Army first disarming Hezbollah, meaning civil war. This flips international law on its head. Israel’s occupation is illegal whether Hezbollah exists or not. The agreement states: “the LAF will restore effective sovereign authority over all Lebanese territory, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and dismantlement of associated infrastructure, enabling the IDF to progressively redeploy out of Lebanese territory.” By agreeing to disarm Hezbollah first, with the markers for “verified disarmament” yet to be determined by the U.S., the Lebanese government has cemented the occupation of the south.

Point 3 conditions international reconstruction aid, and the return of hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese civilians, on the Lebanese Army disarming Hezbollah in phased “pilot zones,” also to be determined by the U.S. The framework states that reconstruction will begin and civilians will be allowed to return only “upon the confirmation of successful disarmament.” This sells out the people of the south entirely and hands Washington a blackmail lever over the entire process.

Point 4 states the government will “rebuild the State’s monopoly on the use of force, achieve the complete and verified disarmament of all non-state armed groups, and ensure that such groups will have no military or security role and no armed capabilities anywhere in Lebanon.” This means disarming Hezbollah north of the Litani as well. It also calls on “international and particularly Arab partners, under the leadership of the United States,” to support this outcome. A U.S.-led, Arab-supported civil war, in other words.

Point 5 states that “the Government of Israel declares that it has no territorial ambitions in Lebanon.” Israeli ministers say the opposite on a regular basis.

Point 9 establishes U.S.-run performance reviews of how effectively the Lebanese state is prosecuting a civil war against Hezbollah. International support for Lebanon will be conditioned on American satisfaction with the results. The humiliation is structural, I’m actually embarrassed for these sell-outs.

Point 11 commits the Lebanese government to helping suffocate Hezbollah financially through sanctions.

Point 13 demonstrates shocking incompetence as it gives up Lebanon’s right to “hostile or adverse actions in international political or legal fora.” That means the Lebanese government agreed to forfeit using the law against Israel for the endless list of war crimes they’ve committed against Lebanon. It’s wild that this is coming from a government whose Prime Minister was a judge on the International Court of Justice and presided over South Africa’s case on the genocide in Gaza.

Point 14 frames this entire framework as the foundation for a future normalization agreement with Israel.

Lebanon’s Anti-Resistance Stooges

This deal is reminiscent of the May 17 Agreement of 1983, when the U.S. brokered a Lebanese surrender deal with Israel containing many of the same stipulations: cementing Israeli occupation and declaring war on resistance to it. That agreement was signed by Israel’s allies in Lebanon and abrogated within a year because it was politically untenable. I’m sure this one will meet the same fate, but at what cost in the meantime?

Hezbollah is not some alien organization. It represents a huge portion of Lebanon’s Shia population. That’s why it’s democratically elected to parliament as part of the largest parliamentary bloc despite a system that structurally devalues the Shia vote through Lebanon’s own version of gerrymandering.

There are people accusing Hezbollah of threatening civil war to prevent this agreement. They have it backwards. Hezbollah is reacting to the very real threat, laid out explicitly in this framework, of a U.S. and Israeli-sponsored civil war against the population it represents, a population that has spent the last three months being displaced and hunted by Israeli bombs with zero protection from the state.

President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam claim to support sovereignty. What they are actually doing is using foreign-backed violence to weaken their domestic political opponents. There is nothing more anti-democratic than that.

Rubio vs. Vance

This makes Lebanon once again the most exposed pressure point in the Iran MOU.

Iran has written a ceasefire into its demands for an end to the war and has called for an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. When Israel bombed Beirut earlier this month, Iran responded by bombing Israel. The first point of the MOU demands an end to the war on Lebanon. Iran is watching to see whether the Americans can actually restrain the Israelis. So far, they have partially succeeded. The violence remains daily but less intense than a month ago.

This is where the Vance-Rubio split becomes crucial to understand. Reuters reported that the two men have been striking different tones. Vance blasted Israeli bombing of civilian infrastructure in Beirut as undermining U.S.-led peace efforts, he traveled to Switzerland for talks with Iranian officials and he’s repeatedly raised the possibility of a cooperative relationship between the U.S. and Iran. Rubio, on the other hand, toured Gulf states defending Israel’s military campaign in Lebanon while reassuring allies that the Iran deal wouldn’t be too generous to the big bad Iranians.

Vance wants to end this war. He is gearing up for the 2028 Republican primary and wants the mantle of the antiwar candidate who stood up to an increasingly despised Israel. Rubio represents the neocon wing that remains unconditionally aligned with Netanyahu. The Lebanon-Israel framework has his fingerprints all over it, engineered to separate Lebanon from Iran and preserve Israel’s ability to continue the war. It reads like an attempt to torpedo the Vance track.

Just after the framework was signed, the U.S. announced it had bombed Iran again, in apparent violation of the MOU, claiming it was in response to Iran firing at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran did not take credit for firing at the ship, but did not deny it either. Iran has since responded to the U.S. by striking Bahrain. The Israelis launched a drone attack on Lebanon the same day. Rubio had spent his Gulf tour promising Arab allies that Iran would never control the Strait or collect tolls on it. Meanwhile the drone over Beirut is buzzing into my ear louder than ever.

The return-to-war rhetoric is escalating and so is the noise.

Can Disarming Hezbollah Work?

No. If the full might of the Israeli military couldn’t disarm Hezbollah, the far weaker Lebanese Army certainly can’t. And if a civil war is actually attempted, the Lebanese Army will split. But what does Israel care? Israel wants endless war and instability, and it has servants in Lebanon willing to perpetuate that policy.

I’m reminded of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth:

“The national bourgeoisie discovers its historical mission as intermediary. Its vocation is not to transform the nation but prosaically serve as a conveyor belt for capitalism, forced to camouflage itself behind the mask of neocolonialism. The national bourgeoisie, with no misgivings and with great pride, revels in the role of agent in its dealings with the Western bourgeoisie.”

The comprador class of Lebanon is the Fanon quote in real time. As I explained earlier this week, they still don’t seem to understand that their American masters lost the war with Iran. This framework agreement is a mandate for civil war dressed up in the language of sovereignty. It will fail. But perhaps the damage it does along the journey to failure is the point.