Israel's 'pilot zones' turn Lebanese sovereignty on its head

Imagine, for a moment, that Country A is conducting an illegal occupation of Country B and regularly slaughtering its inhabitants despite an alleged ceasefire agreement.

By any modicum of logic, a resolution to the situation would first require Country A to stop occupying and slaughtering people in Country B, right?

Wrong - at least if Country A happens to be Israel, which has never felt compelled to abide by international legal or moral standards. Israeli impunity is most egregiously on display in the Gaza Strip, where Israel's genocidal war has killed at least 73,375 Palestinians - or one out of every 33 people - in less than three years, with thousands more buried under the rubble.

Now, Lebanon has also been cast in a Country B role with the help of the so-called "Trilateral Framework" signed in June between the Lebanese government, Israel, and Israel's genocidal sponsors in the United States.

As per the fanciful hallucinations of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the agreement "establishes a clear and structured process to restore Lebanon's sovereignty, disarm Hezbollah and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure, and enable Israel to return to its borders once that threat to its citizens is removed".

Never mind that Israel has harboured predatory designs on Lebanese territory since forever; it was hardly an accident, after all, that the Israeli military perpetrated a brutal 22-year occupation of south Lebanon that only ended in May 2000, when the Israelis were booted out by the Hezbollah-led Lebanese resistance movement (pardon, the "terrorists").

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it abundantly clear that he has no intention for Israel to "return to its borders" this time around.

But Rubio and the rest of the imperial crew in Washington are only too happy to oversee a farcical pursuit of Lebanese "sovereignty" while the occupation entrenches itself on the ground.

'Pilot zones'

The farce centres on the concept of "pilot zones": areas in which, according to the agreement, the Lebanese army "will take exclusive control of the territory to the exclusion of all non-state actors" as Israeli troops withdraw.

Initial reports suggested that two small pilot zones in unspecified locations would kick off the preposterous experiment - which basically grants an occupying army of genocidal psychopaths the right to adjudicate the "sovereignty" of the nation where it has just killed more than 4,000 people in a matter of months, while also entirely obliterating a slew of south Lebanese villages from the face of the earth.

The preposterous experiment... basically grants an occupying army of genocidal psychopaths the right to adjudicate the 'sovereignty' of the nation where it has just killed more than 4,000 people

The pilot zone project finally launched in late July in three villages: Froun, Srifa and Zawtar al-Gharbiya.

By coincidence, none of these villages was ever actually part of the vast swath of Lebanese territory that continues to be occupied by Israel - thus calling into question the whole supposed premise of the Israeli military handing over territory as it withdraws.

Although outside the current occupation zone, all three villages have nonetheless suffered overwhelming destruction - meaning that Israel is charitably allowing the Lebanese army to take control of largely uninhabitable villages that, "pilot zones" or not, still exist within a broader defining context of occupation and devastation.

Further complicating matters is that the Israeli military has opened fire near Lebanese troops as they deployed, ie Israel's ostensible allies in the quest to recuperate Lebanese "sovereignty" by disarming Hezbollah - the only folks, it so happens, who have ever been capable of defending Lebanon against Israeli incursions.

Blaming Hezbollah

A 29 July Reuters dispatch from Zawtar al-Gharbiya, headlined "First test of US-backed 'pilot zones' in south Lebanon lays bare difficulties", lamented that the project was "off to a painfully slow start" and would be "no easier to repeat elsewhere".

The article acknowledged that, "even after a ceasefire last month, Israeli troops remained in the [occupation] zone, razing villages and ordering residents who had fled not to return".

And yet in typical western corporate media fashion, everything was still somehow all Hezbollah's fault, with the article divided into subsections with titles like "Hezbollah drew Lebanon into Middle East war" and "Hezbollah disarmament remains key".

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Nowhere does Reuters find it necessary to mention that, when Hezbollah "drew Lebanon" into war earlier this year, Israel was not only already occupying various locations in the country's south, but had also been blissfully bombing and killing Lebanese in violation of a November 2024 truce.

And God forbid the media ever remind anyone that Hezbollah's very existence is a direct result of none other than Israel's own violations of Lebanese sovereignty, namely the diabolical 1982 invasion that killed tens of thousands of people in the country.

Now that the Lebanese are being given the chance to show that they are "credible partners" for a US-Israeli regional vision, the whole pilot zone thing smacks of the infantilising Orientalism of the Oslo Accords of the 1990s - when Palestinians were granted the opportunity to try their hand at a semblance of semi-self-governance under ongoing occupation.

In the end, Palestinian self-rule amounted to Palestinian self-policing on Israel's behalf - which is pretty much exactly the arrangement that Israel is trying to pull in Lebanon.

According to Marco Rubio, the Trilateral Framework "builds a realistic path out of endless conflict". But as territorial conquest proceeds apace under the cover of "pilot zones", there is no realistic path out of conflict as long as Israel is calling the shots.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.