Meanwhile, in Lebanon

0:00I'm very pleased to be joined today by Rami Houri. He is the Distinguished Public Policy Fellow at the Esom Forest Institute at the American University of Beirut and author of the Rami G. Houri Substack, which we're going to put in the link. And someone I'm very grateful was able to join us because I think they're obviously momentous and frightening, awful events that are happening in Lebanon, but I feel like it's the second story behind the Iran attacks themselves and something that it was really important to dig into. Rami, what is happening on the ground in Lebanon today with Israel's invasion, even the Associated Press I noticed is now calling it an invasion? What do you think Israel's goals are and what is actually happening on the ground as Israeli forces have moved not only from the Arab but on the ground into Lebanon, further into Lebanon? Well, what's happening on the ground is there really two boxes of things that are happening,

1:03things that have been going on for many decades and some new things that are really new today. So what's been going on for many decades is that the Israelis are pushing into Lebanon to try to destroy Hizballah and force an agreement on the Lebanese government with the U.S. pressure politically to have some kind of agreement, either a non-aggression pact or a border demarcation or a peace treaty, whatever they can come up with. But they think they can do this with political pressure and they want the Lebanese government to carry out the statement or the policy initiated about a month or two ago saying that Hizballah has to be disarmed. The Palestinian camps have to be disarmed. Only the Lebanese government can have arms. To which the Palestinians and Hizballah has said, we're all for that, you know, get that situation ready where the Lebanese government can protect Lebanon and we'll give you all our arms. We'll put them under you or whatever. So anyway, the Israelis are pushing into Lebanon claiming that they have to protect themselves

2:08because they're under attack and they are under attack by Hizballah because of what Israel and the U.S. are doing in Iran. So in the same way that people support Palestine, Palestinians and Lebanese and other support Iranians and the same way that the U.S. supports Israel, you know, if you have an ally, you support them. You go to war for them. You give some of the money, whatever. So that's not new. That's been going on there for many years. They expect the U.S. to approve almost anything that they want to do, which has been the case. Occasionally, the U.S. will put its foot down and say, look, you've got to stop this. They did that with the first cease-fire in Gaza, but look what that came up with. Nothing serious. So even when the U.S. does limit the Israeli military or political moves, it's not in the service of justice, equal justice for all. It's in the service of Zionist Israeli-American supported, hegemonic predatory, racist, apartheid loving militant, imperial-backed aggression.

3:11I use that string of words very carefully, but accurately, I think, because if you look at what Israel and Zionism have done over the years, with the American support and the British for that, and this is what we're ending up with, and now most of the world is basically saying that what's happened in Gaza recently is genocide, it's supported by the U.S. So this process by which we have a new confrontation in Lebanon, the Israeli attacking, destroying things, pushing in with their military on the ground, the new element is the linkage of that with the active war in Iran. This is something new. The Iranians, as part of their cease-fire demands or ending the war demands, want the war to end in Lebanon. They want no threats against Iran and no threats against Lebanon to come from Israel. They want that guaranteed, and they don't accept Donald Trump's casino guarantee.

4:13They want serious people to guarantee any commitment by the U.S. because three times Trump and the U.S. and the Israelis were negotiating with Hamas or with Iran three times in the last six, nine months, and all three times during negotiations they attacked Hamas or they attacked Iran. So there's no credibility left in the U.S. and this is new. Many people had concerns about the U.S. but now there's zero credibility in the word word of the United States or the Israeli government. What's also surprising is how Hisbullah has seemed to withstand, absorb the hits it took in 2024, 25, and now major hits that destroyed a lot of its equipment, its storage, its firing capacity, its leadership, everything, you can communicate. And they seem to have come back in a manner that allows them to do what they're doing

5:17out to keep resisting the Israeli invasion. To the point where the Israelis are now saying, the Israeli military leader is saying, we can't do this very much longer. We're stressed out in Lebanon and Iran and maybe in Yemen soon, we're running out of equipment, our people are exhausted, they're afraid, whatever. So that's new that Hisbullah has been able to take these big hits and resist. If you go back now, some graduate students somewhere, if any of you have a graduate student looking for a nice topic, go back over the last three years, document all of the mainstream media and U.S. political and Israeli political statements about Hisbullah has been dealt a death blow, they can't do anything anymore. And then look at what Hisbullah is doing today, I'm not totally saying everything Hisbullah is doing is great. But what I am saying is that most of what the U.S. mainstream media and political class

6:17and the Israeli media and military class, most of what they've said about Hisbullah is not true. I mean, it's not been as weakened militarily as people thought it was. It's been weakened, but not knocked out as people that it was pretty much a figment of its old self and can't do very much, it's still been, and they've actually shown in the last week that they have more sophisticated defensive, mostly offensive weapons, missiles, drones, anti-tank projectiles that are guided in a sophisticated way, and they're able to achieve, they've been hitting targets in Haifa, they've been hitting targets in central Israel. Their aim is not to kill a lot of Israelis, their aim is to destabilize Israel and scare the daylights out of it to get it to stop its aggression and then force a serious negotiation. A third thing that's new is the combination of Israeli military pressure with the U.S.

7:21government, political pressure on the Lebanese government. The U.S. has been telling the Lebanese, we're ready to give you billions of dollars, and the World Bank is ready to give you billions of dollars to rebuild Lebanon, which is a Lebanon's amiss, not only because of the fighting with Israel, but because of their own corruption and economic collapse and other things. And the U.S. has basically been telling the Lebanese government, we're not going to give you any of this stuff until you disarm Hisbullah and you do something nice with the Israelis. Whatever that is is up to them to determine. Well, this is a replay of the whole colonial period and this is new. The Lebanese government before was always getting suggestions from the U.S. but now it's much more out in the open. A fourth thing that's new, you shouldn't ask this question Peter, because I've got a list of where I wrote down this, which is probably right in a column at some point. What's also new is that the Iranians and Hisbullah and Hamas to a certain extent have

8:27been fighting from the perspective of existential analyses. They feel that if they don't fight to the end and defend themselves and their lands and their rights that they're wiped out, they'll be not just defeated, they'll be wiped out of history because the Israelis with their American bulldozers and support from other people come in and destroy every remnant of anything that shows that there was a Palestinian or Lebanese or something here. So this existential motivation, which is so clear now, is more clear than it was before. Another thing that's clear is that the Israelis are, they developed the Dahi doctrine 15, 20 years ago, totally wiping out an area of Beirut where Hisbullah was and turning it into a desolate wasteland. And Gaza, they took it to one step further into a full genocide and they've done it almost

9:29across all of Gaza. Now they're trying to do this in Lebanon to a certain extent. We don't know how far they're going to go, but it seems that there are, I mean, some Israeli senior officials have openly said, let's turn Beirut into, you know, Dair and Bala or something. So the implementation of the Gaza-style genocide, at least at the level of the destruction of the territory, not necessarily killing all the people, that's something new. And sorry, one last point. The Israelis seem, and I'll say seem, because I try to be careful with what I say, because it's, I don't have the evidence fully, but most analysts I talk to and most people are respect in the region, say the same thing. The Israelis seem intent on creating a new regional political map in which they are the rule makers. They are the Hedramans.

10:30They don't want to occupy all Lebanon. They don't want to occupy all Syria or Iran or Iraq or what they want to call shocks. They want anybody who rules in these territories to be differential to them, to be essentially unofficial vassal states. And this is new. It wasn't so clear, it wasn't so clear before. So those are the main things that I would say are, sorry, one last important one. Before the Israelis did the genocide against Gaza, they and the Americans conducted a political genocide against the international rule of law. They destroyed all the bases of the international rule of law, the ICC, the ICC, the ICC, the UN resolutions, the Human Rights Council. Any dimension of international rule of law has been at least neutered if not wiped out. And this is new. So the context in which this is going on is that the law is what Trump and Netanyahu say

11:33it is, but what's going on in the ground in Iran and Lebanon suggests that the Trump and Netanyahu visions may not achieve what they want because the pushback has been so severe and significant.