US-backed Lebanese govt enabling Israeli aggression while attacking the resistance

By Denijal Jegić

The ongoing escalation of the Israeli regime’s aggression against Lebanon is unfolding alongside the Lebanese government’s deepening compliance with imperialist designs against the country.

Under the leadership of President Aoun and Prime Minister Salam, the current administration has increasingly positioned the Lebanese state as a tool serving US-Israeli imperial interests.

While the Lebanese authorities have not formally aligned themselves with the apartheid regime, they have, with growing transparency, entrenched the state’s role as an enabler of Israeli colonial expansion.

Through their uncritical alignment with US imperialism, they have effectively surrendered what remains of Lebanon’s already contested sovereignty to Washington and Tel Aviv, while holding accountable the very resistance that confronts Israeli aggression.

Blaming the Lebanese resistance

Hezbollah’s recent retaliation against the Israeli regime, after more than a year of strategic patience, has been met with an intensified anti-resistance campaign by the current Lebanese authorities and US-aligned political and media elites within the country.

Adding to its ongoing aggressions against Lebanon, which have included over 15,000 ceasefire violations since the previous year, the Israeli regime has authorized a larger military assault, framed in Zionist terminology as a “preemptive attack”, against Lebanon, with reportedly thousands of settler-colonial troops stationed at the border.

Hezbollah, which had patiently observed the ceasefire despite near-daily violations by the opposing party, eventually responded after 15 months. The so-called ceasefire had been in place since November 2024, following the regime’s last war on Lebanon, a war that killed and wounded thousands of civilians and displaced nearly a third of the country’s population.

Yet this ceasefire merely marked a new phase in the Israeli occupation, entailing continuous violations of Lebanese sovereignty and international law. During this period, the genocidal regime has martyred hundreds of people in Lebanon, particularly in the South.

Despite this ongoing Israeli terror campaign, the current Lebanese government, which assumed power with US backing in early 2025, has remained a passive bystander, seemingly incapable and unwilling to defend the country or confront Israeli aggression.

When Prime Minister Salam recently visited the South, a citizen confronted him: “If you cannot protect us right now, why are you asking us to give up the weapons of the resistance?”

Salam had no answer. He turned and walked away.

The former International Court of Justice judge has instead chosen to confront the Lebanese resistance, the very force that remains the last obstacle to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon.

Hezbollah has guaranteed Lebanon’s sovereignty throughout the past decades, as the country has been under consistent imperialist attack by the Israeli regime and its Takfiri allies in Syria. The weapons of the resistance have liberated Lebanon many times and have served as a deterrent against the genocidal Israeli regime.

Salam declared his commitment to executing the US agenda to disarm the resistance movement, while Lebanon continues to be under relentless attacks. The illogical narrative that the Israeli regime, which is carrying out a genocide and operates outside of what used to be known as international law, might potentially consider ceasing bombing Lebanon if the resistance were disarmed, became a guideline.

At the same time, no alternative defense strategy - such as a potential collaboration between the army and Hezbollah - was considered. The goal was to remove resistance against the Israeli regime, in line with US-Israeli diktats.

Before the latest Israeli aggression, the US had reportedly pressured Lebanon into canceling the parliamentary elections to guarantee that the current authorities remain in power.

As the Israeli regime unleashed its latest war of aggression against Lebanon, the Lebanese authorities were quick to condemn Hezbollah. Salam dismissed Hezbollah’s actions as a danger to Lebanon’s security. He declared a ban on Hezbollah’s military activities, demanding the movement surrender its weapons.

The Lebanese Army evacuated its positions along the border with Occupied Palestine, as the Israeli regime forces were set to advance into Lebanon.

As the Israeli regime expanded its renewed bombardment of Lebanon into its second week, Salam proclaimed that Lebanon was “ready for negotiations with Israel in any format”.

Speaking to European leaders, President Aoun reiterated Lebanon’s full commitment to the ceasefire and readiness for talks with Tel Aviv. This offer was reportedly rejected by the genocidal regime.

The Israeli regime, of course, does not want nor recognize any form of negotiations. It has always been transparent about its territorial ambitions and genocidal intent toward Lebanon. Failure or unwillingness to resist the colonial conquest will not lead to benevolent concessions or pity from the colonizer.

Zionist-imperialist discourse in Lebanon

The Lebanese authorities claim that Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into the war. This narrative has, in fact, long been part of the dominant discourse peddled by pro-US political elites and the dominant media in Lebanon.

Among the vocal opponents of the resistance is current Foreign Minister Youssef Raggi, a member of the Christian nationalist far-right party “Lebanese Forces” headed by convicted war criminal Samir Geagea. The party has a history of collaboration with the Israeli regime, including in the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Raggi previously alleged that “Hezbollah’s weapons brought occupation onto Lebanese territory and must be handed over to the Lebanese State,” and that “Israel has the right to continue its attacks as long as Hezbollah retains its weapons.” This is precisely the Israeli regime narrative.

The Zionist discourse is part of the imperialist violence that has been imposed on Lebanon and the region of Western Asia. Although Lebanon is under significant US control and has been a site of Israeli terror for eight decades, it is absurdly not the Israeli regime but the Lebanese resistance that is now framed as the occupying power and existential threat in Lebanon.

Part of this discourse entails the racist framing of Hezbollah’s primary electorate, the Lebanon’s Shiite population, as foreign invaders located outside of the idea of a Lebanese nation and as executors of a so-called “Iranian agenda” – itself a concept that is void of meaning but is exhaustively reiterated in the anti-Iranian propaganda campaign waged by US proxies in Lebanon to manufacture consent for alignment with the Israeli regime.

The Zionist claims that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, that it was dragging the country into the war on behalf of an allegedly evil “Iranian agenda” and that it was holding the Lebanese people hostage have been central to US-Israeli propaganda efforts aimed at vilifying the resistance and its supporters in order to weaken the country internally in support of the expansion of Israeli hegemony over Lebanon.

The absurd framing of the resistance to genocidal violence as the cause of that very genocidal violence relies on a Zionist interpretation of history that obscures eight decades of Israeli colonial aggression against Lebanon.

The Israeli regime carried out its first massacres of civilians in South Lebanon during the Nakba of Palestine in 1948 and has since invaded the country on numerous occasions, long before Hezbollah emerged as a popular resistance movement in reaction to that very Israeli occupation.

Lebanon is part of the Zionist project of ‘Greater Israel’. The country’s population is targeted because it stands in the way of the Zionist settler-colonial conquest. The recent threat by Israeli finance minister Smotrich that Dahiye, the suburbs of Beirut, would soon look like Khan Younis is yet another genocidal threat, which the Israeli regime has been issuing for decades.

Lebanese government as an Israeli proxy

The dominant political and media agenda was set to vilify the resistance. The insistence on disarming Hezbollah has dominated Lebanese political discourse for the past year.

This US diktat has been clearly formulated. US Special Envoy Tom Barrack has been rather transparent about the US agenda imposed on Lebanon. Barrack, whose name appears more than 500 times in the Epstein files, made clear that the US would support the Lebanese Army so that it could fight Hezbollah, whom Barrack identifies as “our enemy”.

According to the American goals, then, the Lebanese state and its institutions, including its army, are supposed to be weak and serve as proxies of the United States and the Israeli regime. Lebanon should never be able to resist Israeli colonial endeavors.

Such a scenario has long been the case elsewhere in the region. Lebanon remains the last state within its immediate surroundings that has not officially and fully aligned itself with the apartheid colony.

But, according to the Zionist project, just like the “Palestinian Authority” in the occupied West Bank, the Jordanian monarchy, and Syria under the rule of US-backed former Al Qaeda leader Abu Mohammad Jolani, Lebanon is supposed to serve as a loyal proxy of the US-Israeli hegemony in Western Asia.

In this scenario, the role of the Lebanese authority would be to police its own population and suppress serious dissent and defense against the Israeli regime.

In failing to react to the Israeli aggression during the past fifteen months, and indeed largely ignoring them, while demanding that the people who are under Israeli occupation - and who have been largely marginalized by the Lebanese state throughout the existence of that very state - disarm in the face of the genocidal threat, the Lebanese authorities are facilitating an incremental surrender of their remaining sovereignty to the Zionist conquest.

Absurdly, but probably due to a lack of any logical narrative, the Lebanese authority’s adherence to American-Israeli orders has been presented by the same elites as a step toward Lebanon’s sovereignty. Today, the coherence between the Israeli regime and the Lebanese authorities is transparently evident.

Denijal Jegić is a researcher and author based in Beirut. He holds a PhD in American Studies. His work focuses on colonialism, resistance, and media representations with a particular emphasis on Palestine. He is the author of the book “Trans/Intifada: The Politics and Poetics of Intersectional Resistance.”

(The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Press TV.)

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