"The Framework Agreement".. No One Learns from History!

"They speak of peace so prepare for war," is an old saying but it's frequently true throughout the ages. When "peace" was established between Egypt and Israel, it formed an entry point to the war on Lebanon in 1982, and when "Ibrahim's peace" was concluded, the conditions for genocide and war on Iran were set.

 

Thus, we can see the "framework agreement" between Israel and the Lebanese government as an entry point to bloodshed, if only in the sense that it indicates a continuation of the war on Iran and Hezbollah by other means.

As long as we're on the Lebanese issue, it’s important to mention two similar matters regarding the aforementioned framework agreement. The first is the agreement that was concluded between the Kataeb Party, led by Bashir Gemayel, and Israel just before and after the invasion of Lebanon, and the second is the May 17, 1983 agreement between war-torn Lebanon and the Israeli occupying forces. These two "matters" can be used to derive what the new framework agreement means for Lebanon; it comes as an Israeli-American imposition, not as a sovereign Lebanese choice. If past experiences of this kind aimed to neutralize the Palestine Liberation Organization, undermine the Palestinian cause at its core, or besiege the Lebanese national forces in their environment, this agreement also aims to besiege Hezbollah in its own country by setting it against other forces that are partners in the homeland. The pressure on the temporary Syrian president to enter the war against Hezbollah could lead to a situation similar to Syria's entry into Lebanon in 1976 under a regional agreement. An "Arab deterrent force" couldn’t have entered without a series of massacres, starting in the Tal al-Za'atar camp (where about 3,000 Palestinians lost their lives), and a series of assassinations of national movement leaders, the first of whom was the teacher Kamal Jumblatt in 1977. We can say that agreements of this "model" have usually brought violence to Lebanon through the method of letting Arabs kill each other, and here come the Lebanese!

The Israeli ambassador in Washington rushed to comment on the signing of the agreement, saying that the most important thing about it is to remove Iran and Hezbollah from the equation. This statement represents Israel's goals for this agreement, primarily an attempt to deal with Lebanon outside the American-Iranian understandings, which, according to the Iranian interpretation, leave Israel with no room for maneuver in Lebanon, as the Iranians have linked the ceasefire on their front with its cessation on all fronts, starting with Lebanon. Rather than relying on this text and this paper, the Lebanese government entered negotiations exposed and bare of everything, with nothing in their hands but the American promise against Israeli deception based on the occupation of Lebanese land and the destruction of its infrastructure.

Politics, according to its basic principles, means not repeating what failed in the not-so-distant past, since the civil war in the mid-1970s, including reliance on "Syria," and this time a Syria that is under the control of the American godfather. It means that a government weaker than a spider's web, which lives off Israeli media platforms and American hands, should not risk signing an agreement that it cannot adhere to, against a party that is currently stronger than the state, and in front of a Lebanese environment that knows history. Most importantly, the Lebanese government that signed the agreement continues to read the region as it did when it took power, and it should have taken the results of the recent war into consideration and read its implications with a Lebanese eye rather than through American-Israeli glasses.

From my analytical position regarding what has happened and is happening in Lebanon and in wars, including the recent one, I suggest that Hezbollah is now more flexible in reaching a formula for coexistence with the Lebanese state and its partners than ever before, contrary to what is believed; because it has managed to regain what it lost in the past year. But what can be done as long as the Lebanese government has bet on Israel to rid it of Hezbollah, and as long as the Israeli government bets on the Nohad Salam government to rid it of Hezbollah?! Both bets seem losing to me, and the biggest loser in this is Lebanon, its people, and the region.