Lebanon’s rulers have surrendered the country to Israel - this is no ceasefire
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Amal Saad
on
Tue, 06/02/2026 - 16:06
What is presented as a cessation of hostilities is not the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon, but the removal of Lebanese citizens from their land
US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa and Lebanese Ambassador to the US Nada Hamadeh during a meeting between Israeli and Lebanese delegations in Washington on 3 June, 2026 (AFP)
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The US-brokered trilateral statement, issued by the US State Department on Wednesday following the latest high-level meeting between Lebanese and Israeli representatives, belongs to a category of political submission so extreme that it is difficult to locate a precedent in the history of modern statecraft.
Lebanon, a state under attack, co-signs a document that conditions a ceasefire not on the withdrawal of the occupying power from its territory, but on the withdrawal of its own citizens from their land.
The ceasefire agreement is not made conditional on Israel ending its aggression, withdrawing from occupied Lebanese territory, releasing prisoners, or enabling the return of the displaced, but on Hezbollah ceasing fire and withdrawing from the south.
Israel is not even named in relation to the ceasefire’s obligations.
What is presented as a cessation of hostilities is, therefore, structured not as the withdrawal of Israel from Lebanon, but as the removal of Lebanese citizens from their land.
Nor is this omission accidental. Israeli freedom of action had already been normalised in a previous framework, and since this statement contains no requirement that Israel stop its attacks, that earlier dispensation remains intact.
Instead, the centre of gravity is Hezbollah, which is defined not as a Lebanese resistance force confronting occupation, but as the problem to be dismantled throughout Lebanon.
By placing its signature beneath US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that Hezbollah is "an enemy of Lebanon", the Lebanese government lends state authority to the assertion that both the resistance and the political community it represents are external to the Lebanese nation itself.
An act of de-nationalisation
In light of a recent poll showing that between 92 and 96 percent of Lebanon’s Shia community opposes every element of this agenda, this is not merely a policy dispute but an act of de-nationalisation.
In other words, the Lebanese government is defining the virtual entirety of one of Lebanon’s largest communities as a hostile, non-national force, while claiming it has "no hostile intent" towards Israel and its genocidal attack on Lebanon.
The proposed "pilot zones" deepen this logic by making the authority of the Lebanese state in the south conditional on external certification, positioning the Lebanese Armed Forces not as a sovereign military force, but as an enforcement instrument for Israeli security requirements, and hence a co-belligerent in Israel’s war on Lebanon.
Equally damning is that Lebanon co-signed a condemnation of Iran at the very moment when Tehran had made ceasing Israeli attacks on Lebanon as one of the central conditions of its own negotiations with Washington.
In response to Israel’s continued operations in Lebanon and Gaza, Iran had treated a Lebanese ceasefire as a regional red line. It suspended talks with the US, threatened full closure of the Strait of Hormuz unless those attacks stopped, and warned that any Israeli strike on Beirut would trigger direct retaliation against Israel and risk resuming the war against the US itself.
In effect, the Lebanese government actively disarmed itself of the only counter-leverage available to it, while lending its signature to the very US-Israeli framework designed to isolate that leverage, criminalise the resistance against occupation, and leave Lebanon negotiating alone under Israeli fire.
Aside from the content, the significance of this text lies in the new conditions under which a Lebanese government can speak the language of Israeli security as if it were the language of Lebanese sovereignty, and can present the dismantling of resistance as the restoration of the state.
The question, then, is not just what is being negotiated, but why such a project has become possible now.
The structural answer lies not in any change to the conflict’s colonial dimensions, but rather in a transformation of the imperialist context within which the anti-colonial struggle is fought.
Massive miscalculations
For decades, Lebanon’s fractured sovereignty was produced through competing external interests and/or tutelages, with Syria, Saudi Arabia, France, Iran and the United States each backing different local forces and sustaining contradictions that prevented any single power from achieving full hegemony over Lebanese politics.
This fragmentation gave Hezbollah structural room to operate within the state. It also allowed successive governments to oppose the group politically, and at times contain it institutionally - but not to fully incorporate or eliminate it.
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The current government has resolved that multipolar field into US unipolarity, removing the contradictions that previously made it structurally impossible to fully criminalise the resistance.
In this new configuration, Washington has installed itself as the exclusive mediator of any settlement with Israel - an absurd designation for Israel’s principal sponsor, arms supplier and diplomatic shield, since a role that should - by definition - belong to a neutral third party is now occupied by the very power underwriting the war-making capacity of the main belligerent.
This move was built on a miscalculation. Washington, Tel Aviv and their Lebanese allies read the 2024 losses of Hezbollah and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, alongside the wider pressure on Iran, as a historic opening - the moment when a US led by President Donald Trump, alongside a triumphant Israel, had achieved sufficient regional dominance to establish sole hegemony over Lebanon for the first time.
Normalisation and disarmament appear together in this project because both are instruments for ending the structural conditions that once allowed resistance to survive, with the Lebanese government cast as the domestic administrator of a US/Israeli-designed order.
What the government and its backers are now discovering, however, is that they chose to act at precisely the moment when Hezbollah is reconstituting its strength and Iran is consolidating its position as both the strongest regional power and the principal counter-hegemonic pole against the US-Israeli order.
The Lebanese government’s miscalculation is not just a strategic misreading of the balance of forces. It also reveals the deeper intellectual and political formation that makes such a miscalculation possible in the first place.
That formation is structured by two distinct but related layers of colonial internalisation - ontological and epistemic - each operating at a different depth, and together producing a political class that does not merely accommodate US-Israeli power, but has lost the capacity to think outside it.
The first, ontological colonisation, is the internalisation of imperial power as the permanent horizon of political reality - a defeatism so complete that it no longer registers as defeatism, but as a lucid reading of the world.
The second, epistemic colonisation, is the adoption of the coloniser’s knowledge system, whereby the Lebanese government perceives the conflict through the lens of the US-Israeli order itself: accepting its classifications of sovereignty, resistance, security and peace as if they were homegrown.
This logic operates not by making US-Israeli power appear undefeatable as a fact of reality, but by making the US-Israeli interpretation of the conflict appear legitimate and true.
Invisible horizon
In the defeatist worldview of the Lebanese government, US hegemony functions not as one contingent power arrangement among others, but as the neutral and invisible horizon within which all political calculation must occur.
This is hegemony in the Gramscian sense at its most complete: not power imposing itself by force, but power becoming “common sense” - ceasing to appear as power at all, and presenting itself as the permanent horizon of the possible.
It is, in this sense, a form of meta-political imperialism, operating not only at the level of policy or alignment, but at the prior level, where realism, rationality and possibility are defined.
Those who have internalised this framework do not experience themselves as having surrendered, but as having seen clearly. Resistance thus appears irrational or utopian, because it’s detached from “reality”.
By contrast, the resistance worldview is a different ontology - one that treats imperialism and settler-colonialism as contingent, historically produced, and hence defeatable, rather than as an irreversible reality.
The Lebanese government’s defeatist worldview reveals itself in the language of officials who continue to speak in these terms, where submission is redescribed as realism and negotiations with Israel become the only imaginable exit.
This ontological structure is visible in the State Department statement’s treatment of Israeli occupation.
The absence of any demand for Israeli withdrawal is not merely a diplomatic omission; it reflects the zero-point logic of the US-Israeli order, in which Israeli presence on Lebanese soil is treated as the unmarked default, the background condition of reality that requires no acknowledgement, while Lebanese resistance to that presence appears as the marked disturbance that must be disciplined.
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It is also evident in former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora’s insistence that "we are forced to deal with the Americans", and that Lebanon is now facing a "bitter reality" because refusing it would lead to "something even more bitter".
This is not merely a pragmatic assessment of constraint; it is the verbal condensation of a worldview in which US-Israeli power has already been accepted as the limit of the possible.
President Joseph Aoun translates this same ontology into the colonial language of rationality and irrationality. When he declares that “between suicide and prosperity”, he and his putative people choose prosperity; and that “between misleading slogans that destroy and rational steps that build”, they choose rationality, resistance is no longer treated as a political strategy with which the state disagrees, but as a pathology of reason itself.
Hezbollah’s refusal to surrender is renamed "suicide", its political will redescribed as "instinct", and its sacrifices reduced to meaningless deaths. In this formulation, sovereignty becomes the state’s right to protect the population from its own allegedly irrational desire to resist dispossession.
Logic of surrender
This logic is the afterlife of the old right-wing isolationist maxim that “Lebanon’s strength is in its weakness”. Yet the position that names itself rational is profoundly self-defeating, insisting that Lebanon can negotiate alone, without Iran leveraging its regional power on the Lebanese state’s behalf, despite the overwhelming asymmetry between Lebanon and Israel.
It is hard to rationalise this stance as either realpolitik or raison d’etat, since realpolitik would require maximising leverage rather than surrendering it, while raison d’etat would require subordinating all calculations to the defence of territory, sovereignty and people - not accepting the strategic terms of the state violating them.
What is presented as sovereign reason is therefore closer to “raison de l’autre” - a state thinking and acting through the logic of those violating its sovereignty.
The same logic imagines that surrendering the south will buy safety for the rest of the country, and that Israel will reward weakness with peace. Foreign Minister Youssef Rajji’s promotion of “Little Lebanon” as a formula for securing prosperity and protection for Christians captures this fantasy of insulated privilege.
When it comes to epistemic colonisation - whereby the government no longer merely submits to the US-Israeli order, but begins to think through the categories of the order imposing itself on Lebanon - we witness a tradeoff between two kinds of sovereignty.
The government imagines that it can obtain a Weberian sovereignty, a monopoly on violence inside Lebanon, by surrendering to Israel its Westphalian sovereignty - the right of the state to territorial integrity and freedom from external intervention.
In exchange for disarming Hezbollah and giving the state formal control over weapons, it accepts that Israel may continue to bomb, occupy, dictate security conditions, and decide when Lebanon has complied sufficiently. The state is thus offered an illusory sovereignty over its own population in return for the relinquishment of sovereignty to the enemy.
There is also a value dimension to this political stance. The government’s position assumes that a life organised around accommodation, stability and material prosperity is more fully human than a political life organised around collective liberation, justice, dignity and sacrifice.
As such, it does not merely disagree with Hezbollah’s strategy; it rejects the world of values within which resistance becomes a meaningful political choice. The conflict is therefore not ultimately over weapons, but over the prior question of what sovereignty is for.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
Israel's war on Lebanon
Lebanon’s rulers have surrendered the country to Israel - this is no ceasefire
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