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3. Lebanon and Gaza: The Unresolved Dilemmas

The observation of political realities in both Lebanon and Gaza sends us back to the same impasses that have prevailed over the last two years despite the mutating strategic landscape. Iran is trying ex post facto to stall the political dynamics and revert to a previous stage whereby it restores its control over political life and dictates its rhythms. Summarily, it tries to reclaim the status quo ante and to cancel out the strategic shifts that succeeded the unraveling of the “integrated strategic platforms” set by Qassem Suleimani. 

International mediations led by the United States are still controversial and challenged by the Iranian regime and its proxies in both Lebanon and Gaza. This state of intentional sabotaging cannot endure lest it compromise the future of the projected diplomacy toward negotiated peace and regional stabilization. The state of political instability and open-ended conflicts brings back the stalemated political horizon and its dead ends. The renewed dilemmas of war and peace are back at the forefront.

The recent political evolutions in Lebanon have been engineered by forceful US diplomacy. The mitigated responses of the Lebanese executive are still under scrutiny and await the closing of the gaps between the principled pronouncements and the practical achievements. The broad lines of the military plan submitted by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) reflect the state of political ambiguity conveyed by the well-entrenched political and legal extraterritorial practices and regional power politics.

The state’s sovereignty is still challenged and subject to the discretion of the contending political factions. The disarmament plan is marred by uncertainties related to the overt political obstructionism of the Shia opposition, the clashing operational priorities, the implementation calendar, and the overriding political and strategic objectives attached to it. 

The whole political process doesn’t seem to be geared toward political normalization and the end of war. It’s a scenario of reported wars and frozen conflicts open to various instrumentalizations by the shifting actors of a mutating strategic landscape. The Shia opposition is in tactical abeyance, and the Lebanese executive is hobbled by its inner contradictions and the pervasive fractiousness of the Lebanese political scene. 

The scenarios of deconfliction – be it in the South, the Beqaa and the various strategic nodes woven by Hezbollah throughout the years, or the Palestinian camps – are moot, and the LAF will likely encounter the same obstacles of the immediate and recent past. The decommissioning is unlikely to be achieved unless the whole political narrative changes. The tactical moves can be deceitful and go awry if they are not aligned with a genuine and purposeful peace plan with Israel that puts an end to the endemic instability and its destructive fallout. 

The reluctance of the Lebanese government to engage the state of Israel directly is highly detrimental to the military plan and brings the country back to the historical dilemmas of curtailed sovereignty, imperial inroads, protracted conflicts and domination politics operating on the interfaces. Short of a binding peace narrative, Lebanon is likely to linger in a context of open-ended conflicts and long-haul disintegration; the option of reported conflicts has proven destructive throughout the last six decades.

The situation in Gaza is quite similar to Lebanon’s. Both have been instrumentalized by Iranian power politics. The extension of conflicts in Gaza is deliberately sought by Hamas, which uses the Israeli hostages and Palestinian civilians to promote its political agenda and serve the sabotaging politics of the Iranian power broker. The dire humanitarian and ecological costs of a total war were intentionally dismissed because the politics of victimization were the ordering variables around which the whole operational scheme revolved. 

The French-led proposal about Palestinian statehood is misplaced, ill-advised and counterproductive at this stage. This policy tends to overlook the urgency of ending the war in Gaza on the basis of the unconditional liberation of the Israeli hostages, the withdrawal of Hamas from the political and military scenes, and the formation of a consensual transitional government to oversee the deconfliction, deal with the disastrous humanitarian consequences and manage the post-war reconstruction.

 Hamas’s truce proposals are premised on the perpetuation of conflicts and ideological blinders that prevent it from reckoning with the new geostrategic facts that followed the unraveling of the Iranian “integrated strategic platforms.” Tackling the grand peace scheme is unlikely unless the temporary truce issues are decoupled from the overarching political narrative. 

The cases of Lebanon and Gaza are quite illustrative of the overlapping and clashing dynamics. The unraveling of the Iranian power projections and its aftermath put the region at the crossroads between two choices: the completion of wars through the ultimate defeat of Iran and its proxies or the reengagement of diplomacy to finalize peace agreements between Israel and its nemeses. There is no longer any place for half-baked solutions, latent conflicts and deferred wars. Short of a clear and holistic approach, the region is likely to become the ultimate hostage of warmongering. Military and security issues are primarily political issues and need to be addressed as such.