It Could Happen Here Weekly 243

**Danah Al-Kurd** (0:01)
Cool Zone Media.

**Robert Evans** (0:03)
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions.

**Danah Al-Kurd** (0:28)
Hello, everyone, and welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Danah Al-Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics.
Today I'm joined by Ilya Ayyub, who is a Palestinian Lebanese writer and researcher, as well as a podcaster with the podcast The Fire of These Times, and from the Periphery Media Collective. And today he's speaking to us about the recent agreement between Lebanon and Israel related to Israel's continued occupation of the southern part of Lebanon and continued bombardment. So he's going to talk to us about what the agreement says, why there are so many problems and concerns related to this agreement, and how it fits into the broader regional war against Iran. Ilya, thank you so much for joining us. Hi.

**Ilya Ayyub** (1:10)
Thank you for having me again.

**Danah Al-Kurd** (1:12)
So today we're going to be discussing, as I mentioned in the intro, the agreement between Lebanon and Israel, the framework, which has been quite controversial. So I wanted to just give you an opportunity to give a brief explainer. What is this agreement?

**Ilya Ayyub** (1:28)
So it's technically like a trilateral framework in the sense that it includes, well, legally anyway, the US, Israel and Lebanon. Ostensibly, like what it says it does is that it proposes some kind of future in which Lebanon and Israel, which have been in a de facto state of war for basically forever, to no longer be in that de facto state of war.
The problem, which probably won't surprise the audience of this podcast, the problem is sort of in the details. Like what is it that Lebanon has signed? If you look on the website itself, it's on the American government's website, there are 14 points. It's roughly 1,300 words or so. And already you see what's absent, which is the terms like withdrawal, end of occupation, any of that. There's basically no stipulation whatsoever that the Israelis have to leave Lebanon.
And you will have people who support this zero. So technically that's not true because it says here in number two, the government of Israel and government of Lebanon commit to a reciprocal sequence process with clear conditions, whereby the LAF, which is the Lebanese Armed Forces, will restore effective sovereign authority over all of Lebanese territory. And here is the GRUB, I'm quoting, pending the verified disarmament of non-state armed groups and dismantlement of associated infrastructure, enabling the idea of the Israel Defense Forces to progressively redeploy out of Lebanese territory. What it essentially says and the various points, we don't have to go through all of them, essentially confirm this time and time again, is that Israel will get to define, will get to decide when an area that Israel is occupying, as in the Lebanese territory that Israel is occupying, when that area is officially disarmed, when it is no longer a, quote unquote, security threat. The Lebanese state has no say in the matter. There's no independent like UN type mechanism that would determine that. It's just Israel that gets to define that. And what they're currently doing, which is what the Lebanese government has agreed to, which is part of the controversy that we'll get into, is that they're creating these two so-called pilot zones, which are in the territory that Israel is currently occupying in Lebanon, in which they will allow the LAF, the Lebanese Armed Forces, to progressively assert its, I'm putting this in quotation, you can't see it, like assert its sovereign territorial control. But, and here again is the kind of the devil in the detail, the Lebanese army cannot actually enforce anything. That would still be the authority of the Israeli army, which again is the one that is currently illegally occupying southern Lebanon.
So yeah, we can get into more of the details, but that's sort of in a nutshell why it's so bad, but I can get into more of why it's bad as well.

**Danah Al-Kurd** (4:13)
Oh yeah, we'd like to talk about all the bad. So before we get into like all the bad, where does Hezbollah play into any of this?

**Ilya Ayyub** (4:21)
Well, unsurprisingly, Hezbollah opposes this. In fact, I don't think a majority of the political parties currently in the Lebanese parliament support this, if I'm not mistaken, which is one of the reasons why I don't think this particular agreement, which is the latest of so many agreements between the Americans, Israelis and the Lebanese, at least at the official level, I don't see this lasting very long. Hezbollah has immediately said that this is a humiliation, it's surrender, it's defeat, which is not that unusual. That's sort of how they've been talking about these negotiations for since they started really. And it declared this agreement null and void, which they cannot get more straightforward than that. Their main ally in parliament, i.e. the Amal movement has also come out to oppose this, which is a big deal because that's the Speaker of Parliament. Lebanon is ruled by this kind of Troika, so he's one out of three, which is a big problem for the other two.