“Lebanon Debate”
Israel is moving its battle in southern Lebanon from the field to the negotiating table, in an attempt to obtain what it was unable to extract by force, using the continuation of the aggression and the threat of its expansion as a means to impose new conditions on the Lebanese state.
Data circulating in diplomatic communications indicate that Tel Aviv has placed the strategic “Ali al-Taher” heights, east of Nabatieh, at the heart of its conditions for moving to a new phase of calm, demanding Hezbollah’s withdrawal from it and handing it over to the Lebanese army.
Israel wants to make the evacuation of the area, with the military installations underneath it, a gateway to completing the implementation of the “Framework Agreement,” expanding the experimental areas, and approving the mechanism charged with verifying the deployment of the Lebanese army there.
It is expected that the “Ali Al-Taher” file will be strongly present in the third round of negotiations expected in Rome early next September.
But what Israel is proposing is not an actual path towards a ceasefire. Tel Aviv did not stop its military operations, nor did it abandon its policy of demolition and sabotage. Rather, it is trying to transform stopping the aggression from an obligation imposed on it into a reward conditional on providing additional Lebanese concessions.
In clearer terms: Israel wants negotiations to give it what the war did not give it.
The statements of Israeli Defense Minister Yisrael Katz reveal the truth of this trend. He boasted of the destruction caused by the Israeli army in the southern towns, saying that “dozens of Lebanese border villages have become ruins,” before adding: “Here we build, and there is ruin,” in a comparison between settlement in the West Bank and destruction inside Lebanon.
Katz also claimed that the Israeli army currently controls about 700 square kilometers of Lebanese territory.
Is a government that displays the devastation of villages talking about a real ceasefire? Can its promises of calm be taken seriously, while it uses bombing, demolition, and occupation as negotiating cards?
The Israeli equation is clear: continued military pressure until political concessions are extracted. Whenever Tel Aviv obtains a condition, it moves to another condition, which keeps Lebanon under constant threat and gives it an excuse to continue its attacks.
Therefore, it does not seem that Israel wants an actual ceasefire, but rather seeks to manage the aggression according to its interests: destroying the south, imposing the facts by force, and then negotiating to stabilize them politically.
If “Ali Al-Taher” becomes the price required to stop the aggression, what guarantees that another region and a new condition will not appear tomorrow? Here lies the danger: Israel is not negotiating to end the war, but rather to take in the negotiations what it was unable to take in the negotiations.
