Israel has ended negotiations with Lebanon before they have even begun. As it so often does, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has imposed a fait accompli in southern Lebanon that the Lebanese state, given its current capabilities, will find impossible to reverse.
Most of the villages Israel has occupied since the war began on 2 March have been reduced to ashes. Rebuilding them and allowing residents to return would require a large-scale international effort that no one, at least for now, seems willing to fund. Such an effort would also depend on Israel withdrawing from the dozens of positions it has set up inside Lebanese territory, but there is little to suggest that it intends to take that step any time soon.
The villages have been wiped off the map. Entire towns such as Bint Jbeil and Al Khiyam, among the largest and most historic centres of Jabal Amel, have been reduced to rubble, with barely a stone left standing. This devastation reflects an Israeli vision, seemingly formed in advance, of what the border area in southern Lebanon should look like.
Israel pursued a similar approach in the West Bank while negotiating with the Palestinian Authority over the final stage of the Oslo Accords. It scattered thousands of settlement units and bypass roads across the territory, then built the separation barrier at the start of the Second Intifada.
Since then, any talk of dismantling settlements or establishing a contiguous Palestinian entity in the West Bank became little more than fantasy. The realities Israel creates on the ground, reinforced by its vast capabilities, enter negotiations as facts that cannot be ignored.
Familiar patterns
The same pattern has unfolded in Gaza, where the Israeli army now controls around 60% of the Strip and confines two million Palestinians to what is left of it. For those crowded into camps unfit for human life, any prospect of a solution—even a purely humanitarian one—has been all but foreclosed.
