CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Trump and Netanyahu’s War on Lebanon Threatens Stability and Long-Term Security

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Middle East professor of political science Oren Barak explains Lebanon as a fragile state and how the ongoing conflict with Israel exacerbates the region’s destabilization. Groups such as Hezbollah will continue to exist if the basic conditions that led to their emergence continue.

The geopolitical landscape of Lebanon has been greatly impacted by the threat of regional hard power. In this interview, exclusive to CounterPunch, Oren Barak, the Maurice B. Hexter Chair in International Relations at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains how institutions, non-state actors, and historical conflicts impact both peace and security. As Israel engages in more and more illegitimate state violence amid the war with Iran, greater regional conflict could spin out of control in Lebanon and Syria. Barak’s insight and the Rational Actor Model explains how only diplomacy can prevent complete devastation and achieve a proper desired outcome.

Daniel Falcone: Your research looks at the Israeli state after 1967 and Lebanon after 1920. How do these examples from history explain present-day Lebanon? To what extent is Israel using arguments, or the politics of the past, for long-term security when the offensives are really conducted for expansion?

Oren Barak: In both cases, Israel after 1967 and Lebanon after 1920, the state’s expansion was justified in existential terms, that is, as means to prevent the annihilation of the ethnic or national community. This was because the existing pre-expansion borders were seen as insufficient to prevent genocide. Recall that Abba Eban, Israel’s foreign minister, argued in the UN after the 1967 war that, “The June [1967] map is for us equivalent to insecurity and danger. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has for us something of a memory of Auschwitz.”

Therefore, Jewish leaders in Israel and Maronite Christian leaders in Lebanon argued that their communities needed “secure” or “natural” borders that would guarantee that its members would “never again” be slaughtered. But this was an illusion. The new territories were inhabited by people who did not belong to the........

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