Ibrahim Majed : The Great Betrayal of Lebanon
Background to the negotiations
The critical background is what we’ve been saying here, there and everywhere: The MoU is in the process of being shaved to a document that is meaningless.
Lebanese President Aoun pressured his own military delegation in Washington talks. He put pressure on his own. Bear in mind the Lebanese military do not want to fight Hezbollah as they are of course fraternal, sometimes of the same families, and besides that, they will lose.
—
𝗟𝗘𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗘𝗦𝗘 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗜𝗗𝗘𝗡𝗧 𝗣𝗥𝗘𝗦𝗦𝗨𝗥𝗘𝗦 𝗠𝗜𝗟𝗜𝗧𝗔𝗥𝗬 𝗗𝗘𝗟𝗘𝗚𝗔𝗧𝗜𝗢𝗡 𝗜𝗡 𝗪𝗔𝗦𝗛𝗜𝗡𝗚𝗧𝗢𝗡 𝗧𝗔𝗟𝗞𝗦
The Lebanese President is applying intense pressure on individual members of the country’s military delegation, acting at the explicit behest of Israeli officials and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Operating through Ambassador Simon Karam and Ambassador Nada Hamadeh Moawad, the administration is pushing the military to accept “experimental zones” outside occupied villages. The delegation is also being pressured to operate in high-risk areas deemed operational threats by Israel, such as the strategic Ali al-Tahir Hill, and to participate in a joint photo session with Israeli military representatives. The internal rift has escalated to the point where the political leadership is actively considering expelling the military team entirely from the Washington talks. This friction directly coincides with intensifying chatter in both Washington and Beirut regarding the potential dismissal of the Lebanese Army Commander.
𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗚𝗥𝗘𝗔𝗧 𝗕𝗘𝗧𝗥𝗔𝗬𝗔𝗟 𝗢𝗙 𝗟𝗘𝗕𝗔𝗡𝗢𝗡
The rage echoing across Lebanon is completely justified, and there is no point in masking the reality: the Lebanese political elite, led by President Joseph Aoun, have executed an act of total treason. While citizens have paid with their blood, lives, and homes, a weak and spineless administration went to Washington to sign a trilateral framework that functions as nothing short of a national betrayal. By finalizing a deal that leaves Israeli forces entrenched in a massive “security zone” inside Lebanese territory, the presidency has effectively sanctioned a foreign occupation on our own soil.
The treasonous nature of this agreement lies in the absolute submission of the state’s leadership.
President Aoun and his government have chosen to celebrate a microscopic pullback from just two “pilot zones” as a diplomatic victory, deliberately gaslighting the public. In reality, the presidency has accepted a deeply compromised status quo that abandons the vast majority of southern Lebanon, trading away the country’s territorial integrity for empty photo-ops and political survival in the eyes of Washington. Even more infuriating is how the president has willfully signed away Lebanon’s skies and safety. Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely exposed this betrayal, explicitly boasting in a recorded video statement that Israeli forces will not withdraw from their “security zone” and will remain on Lebanese soil as long as they see fit. Netanyahu stated that any deployment of the Lebanese army is entirely dependent on the “recommendation” of the Israeli military, meaning Israel controls the ground while reserving full, unrestricted freedom to bomb any perceived threat at will.
Aoun’s administration didn’t negotiate a ceasefire; they rubber-stamped an arrangement that serves Israel’s strategic goals perfectly, leaving Lebanese families completely defenseless under a legalized permanent shadow of foreign airstrikes.
This spineless treason completely spits on decades of sacrifice and actively threatens to push Lebanon into a catastrophic civil war. By acting as proxies for foreign interests and forcing an agreement that fractures domestic consensus, the president and his political clique are turning Lebanese against Lebanese, setting the stage for internal bloodshed. While the country was trapped in a regional tug-of-war, the president rushed to finalize a deal from a position of absolute, pathetic weakness. Instead of standing firm on the country’s dignity, this regime of traitors has given the occupiers exactly what they wanted, compliance, presence, and a free pass to continue their aggression while deliberately igniting internal division and erasing Lebanon’s independence.
—
The Big Scheme of things
This of course knocks the Mou, first paragraph, out of the water. The requirement is clearly that Israeli forces must retreat from Lebanon. When do we declare the MoU dead? There are many ways that this action can be argued and ‘throws so much shade’ on the MoU that the ‘spirit of the MoU’ (to coin a phrase) has departed. A perfectly valid question and some will accuse me of not knowing how ‘diplomacy’ and negotiations work. To those I say pfew! With this very prominent issue on the MoU, where were our so-called vaunted ‘negotiators’. They did not even get a observer seat at this table. That, ladies and gentlemen, tells it all, about many of the negotiating actors, bit players on this stage.
Berletic states it clearly: “The US will not end hostilities against Iran, Russia, or China until fundamental, GLOBAL structural changes take place to PHYSICALLY stop US aggression, both direct and by proxy”.
Professor Hudson states it clearly as well: It’s up to you, the rest of the world, to put in place some mechanism to enforce some kind of international law and not just say, well, gee, we don’t like what the United States in Israel did, genocide is wrong, killing civilians is wrong, bombing schools and shooting children especially is wrong, but what are we going to do about it? Well, it’s the job of other countries in the world to think of what they can come up with to do. This may require creating a United Nations that will be free of the American and NATO and American satellite vetoes, and this new United Nations, with the same principles that the United Nations Charter had in 1945, will now have an authorization for its own military power and the economic power to nations that attack other nations in violation of international law to impose sanctions on them.