On Friday, 27 June, in a room at the US State Department, Lebanon’s ambassador to Washington — with zero diplomatic credentials prior to this post — signed her name to a “framework agreement” with Israel. US secretary of state Marco Rubio beamed that it was “the beginning of the beginning.”
As usual, in spite of American imperial pomp the ‘agreement’ is not what it appears, as Al Jazeera reported:
he agreement does not force Israel to withdraw from the large area of southern Lebanon that it continues to occupy, and Israel also appears to be signalling that it will continue its attacks in the country if it deems them necessary.
That same day, back home in Lebanon, an Israeli air raid killed two people in the southern town of Mayfadoun. Israel bombed Nabatieh. Then the Zionists dropped leaflets ordering the people of Al-Mansouri to leave their homes.
Blood in the south. Ink in Washington. All in the same afternoon.
What did Lebanon actually sign?
If you read the full text, you’ll discover that the deal is far thinner than the ceremony made it to be. Israel hands back two token “pilot” zones — apparently Al-Ghandouriye and Zawtar, Israel has tried and failed to occupy both towns and now it’s ‘giving’ them back — while keeping a self-declared “security zone” carved into the south until Hezbollah ‘disarms’.
Good luck with that!
No deadline or timeframe added to this ‘framework’, because why bother? The Lebanese Armed Forces — the same army that America prevents acquiring any real weapons, and that Israel targets and assassinates all the time — is tasked with ensuring the security of the south of Lebanon and establishing a “military coordination group” with their killers. Meanwhile, Israel will only withdraw its occupation of Lebanon after the “successful implementation of this framework.” And this one is definitely up for interpretation.
Clause upon clause
The final clause, number 14, thankfully provided the opportunity for the parties involved to kiss orange ass and thank the master. With all the redundancy of the clauses, we think it’s 14 points so that it doesn’t seem inferior to the Iran-US MOU.
Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t pretend otherwise. He called the deal a “blow to Iran” and said his soldiers would stay “as long as there is a threat.” The butcher of Lebanon and Palestine continued:
Iran is trying to force us into a withdrawal from southern Lebanon by force. In effect, Israel, Lebanon, and the United States are telling them: this is none of your business.
So there goes any fig leaf that the lebanese government thought might conceal its treason. There it is, in Netanyahu’s own words. Lebanon isn’t set to gain anything from this humiliation — it instead handed the occupation a way to stay, and pulled Israel out of the corner Iran had backed it into.
Only days earlier, the US–Iran understanding had required Israel to respect Lebanon’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty.” This ‘framework’ quietly let it off that hook. President Joseph Aoun thanked the Trump administration for being such a good host. But seeing how he himself — and prime minister Nawaf Salam — came to office as a US-backed pick… It’s giving an employee sucking it up to his boss.
Read clause 4, then 6, then 4 again
The most revealing bit in the signed document isn’t about Israel. In clause 4, Lebanon’s government asks for the support of “international and, particularly Arab partners, under the leadership of the United States” to finish disarming Hezbollah. I had to read it twice to make sure I’m not just seeing things. The President and Prime Minister of Lebanon are inviting foreign forces, under American command, to break a Lebanese resistance movement on Lebanese soil.
Lebanese journalist Hasan Illaik — summoned by a state prosecutor in January for the crime of criticising Lebanese president Joseph Aoun — names the partners the clause won’t: the forces of Ahmad Al-Sharaa, the former Al-Qaeda commander once known as Al-Jolani, now Syria’s US-embraced Trump-adored president. Previously, and more than once, Trump had said it himself: let Syria “take care of Hezbollah,” and send Jolani’s men into the south to do what Israel couldn’t.
Now read clause 6, which declares that “any state or non-state actor to use force on its behalf” is illegal. Clause 4 invites exactly that. You would be excused if you find this confusing and contradictory, but the 4th clause effectively invites Al-Jolani and the 6th clause bars Iran and Hezbollah from lending a hand.
So if you’re not the previous head of Al-Qaeda that used to literally chop people’s heads off, we don’t want you!
Now, I understood what you meant Netanyahu, but next time do employ a bloody copy writer!
The occupation, outsourced — and the Syrian tutelage we thought we thought ended in 2005 is apparently making a comeback sponsored by the very people that catalysed and helped end it.
A ‘peace partner’ that is still massacring the population
Israel, Lebanon’s good-faithed ‘peace partner’, is an occupying army in the middle of a campaign — massacring and ethnic cleansing the very people this Lebanese government claims to represent.
Around a million Lebanese southerners — a fifth of the country — have been driven from their homes. Amnesty’s satellite imagery shows whole border villages levelled. Israeli ministers have vowed that hundreds of thousands of Shia residents “will not return,” and ordered homes flattened on the “Rafah model.”
Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty have called this a “war crime“.
More than 3,700 people have been killed since March. The killing didn’t pause for the ceasefire, and it didn’t pause for the signing. On average, Israel has killed more than one child a day since the April truce.
But for the Lebanese government, that’s not enough to take any meaningful stance. A UN Security Council complaint, statements of condemnation, they have nothing to offer their own people. But for Washington and Israel? Only ass kissing and capitulation.
An ambassador can’t sign away the south of Lebanon
Now regarding the Lebanese law which the government doesn’t seem to be keen on observing.
Lebanon still treats Israel as an enemy state under its penal code and the 1955 Boycott Law. The pro-west mouthpieces in Lebanon say that according to Article 52 of the constitution: the president may negotiate treaties. Good spot Sherlock. But the same constitution forbids ceding any part of Lebanese territory, this can be undone by one body only — parliament. Not a president or a cabinet. And certainly not an ambassador in a foreign capital.
Even the May 17 agreement of 1983 — the US-brokered deal signed under Israeli occupation, remembered ever since as a national surrender — at least went to the chamber for a vote. It’s worth noting that Nawaf Salam, now PM and broker of the current ‘framework deal’ was also a signatory and legal consultant of the May 17 agreement of 1983. What can I say? The man loves to strike the worst deals
The ‘mediator’ is the sponsor who’s also enabling the ethnic cleansing
The US’s role in all of this multilayered — it is not only a signatory on this framework agreement, but also partisan in the war. It obviously arms and funds Israel: HRW has documented US-made weapons used in massacres in Lebanon. It also apparently ‘sweetened the deal’ with $100m to the Lebanese government in some sort of ‘aid’. And a year ago, during the 2024 ceasefire deal on which it was a guarantor, it quietly slipped Israel a secret “side-letter” — which Lebanon knew nothing about — pledging full American backing for Israeli ceasefire violations. Not any guarantor, the BEST guarantor!
This is the same Washington whose preferred man in Beirut, Joseph Aoun, it trained in its counterterrorism programme before he became president — and the same Washington that built a billion-dollar fortress embassy near Beirut, the second largest on earth, in a country slightly smaller than Yorkshire.
So who is really occupying Lebanon?
Nearly nine in ten Lebanese people oppose recognising Israel. Yet the deal was signed over their heads — by an ambassador — for a government that answers to Washington.
Which leaves a question begging an answer. Who is really occupying Lebanon? The easy answer is Israel: its outposts, its drones, its daily massacres, its continuous ethnic cleansing efforts. But the deeper answer sits in that ziggurat of an embassy in Aoukar. Lebanese citizens are being killed with American bombs, dropped from American planes, paid for with American money, by a government obeying every American order — this is what Vichy was to France, what the authority in Ramallah is to Palestine. There is a real and animate US occupation in Lebanon that is in control over the politics, the economy, and the military. All that, coupled with heavy spending on media and psyops.
So the Lebanese government’s actions were never a betrayal of “the resistance.” They were a betrayal of the people of the south. A betrayal of Lebanon. All to the benefit of the United States of America and all its interests.
The US occupation of Lebanon is getting harder and harder to ignore. Maybe, finally, this is the wake-up call we needed to decolonise — not only from Israeli settler-colonialism, but from American domination.
Featured image via the Canary
By Jamal Awar
