The Gaza Doctrine Exported in Visions of a “Greater Middle East”
Tyre has stood for roughly four thousand years, long enough to have survived Alexander the Great and the Roman Empire, and on June 9th, after an Israeli airstrike killed at least eight people in a residential block, the Israeli Occupation Forces simultaneously ordered the entire city emptied for the first time since, what looks to be, the Genocide of South Lebanon started. The Old City and the churches and the camps where Palestinian families exiled in 1948 have raised three generations who never saw the villages their grandparents describe was ordered to go north, cross the Zahrani river, as though four thousand years of staying could be undone by an afternoon’s notice. As if, like Palestinians, the Lebanese people can be made to spin in an endless merry-go-around of Israel’s psychological torture of mass displacement from everything you know and love, only to be made refugees in your land. And 18 days after Tyre’s displacement, the Lebanese government, completely divorced from the will of its people and sovereignty of its own land, has decided that this is what “peace” looks like.
Israel’s finance minister has told Dahiyeh, the part of greater Beirut where hundreds of thousands of people live, that it will soon look like Khan Younis and that the villages of the south will be leveled like Rafah and Beit Hanoun. A threat to made to underscore that Israel has been, and is willing, to level cities to the ground with its people buried underneath. But are we surprised? Perhaps if you read the BBC who describe mass displacement and ethnic cleansing as a voluntary removal, you might be, but for those of us not disillusioned by the Orwellian propaganda, we recognize all too well this is the ideology of Israel: death and destruction for which it can build its utopias filled with Europeans on summer vacations on the bones of the indigenous. The same Israel that has carved Gaza to pieces, leaving less than 40% of it left behind a “yellow line” now has done the same to Lebanon with its own version of that strip behind the Litani, where it plans to finish what the airstrikes started, while white phosphorus burns through groves across the south, the same way it burned through Gaza’s. On April 8th, Israeli strikes hit more than a hundred targets across Beirut and the south in roughly ten minutes, killing 357 people, the deadliest day in Lebanon since its civil war. Since October 7, 2023 , more than 3,700 people have been murdered and over ten thousand wounded, roughly a fifth of the country displaced, sixty-four hospitals and clinics hit, five of them closed, four with maternity wards, and more than a hundred health workers killed, twelve in a single strike.
The Genocide Convention does not require a body count or a particular weapon. Genocide requires intent to destroy a group, in whole or in part, and conditions of life calculated to bring that destruction about. A people do not get killed by the thousands, driven from a fifth of its own country, and have its hospitals, its water, and its farmland destroyed alongside it, by a state whose ministers announce the plan as they carry it out, for any reason except the one with that name. For Israel’s vision of a “Greater Middle East,” greatness apparently means everything except the people who make the region great: the farmers, doctors, poets, children, villages, orchards, histories, and homes that must first be removed so the empire can admire itself in the cleared land. So, the south of Lebanon, is owed our witness of its attempted Genocide, while there is still something left for it to describe.
And yet the word that gets used instead, almost everywhere, is Hezbollah. For two years Hamas did the same work for Gaza, until the dead became too numerous to summarize, and until “journalists” who had called every strike a ‘stronghold’ were forced to start writing down names instead because the dead don’t lie but the living colonizers do. That is why the bombardments on neighborhoods in densely populated cities like Beirut, where several hundred thousand people live, is still filed as a strike on a Hezbollah stronghold, because it creates the plausible deniability for the West to believe it is watching a surgeon remove a tumor, when it is really watching an arsonist call the whole house diseased before setting it on fire. And the same Arab newsrooms that risked reporters to cover Gaza now grow visibly more careful once the people under the bombs are Shia.
The way genocide is now reverberating through Lebanon mirrors the pattern against Palestine: kill the people, murder the journalists, smear them as militants, and let the word “target” do the laundering. Anas al-Sharif, one of the last Al Jazeera correspondents in northern Gaza, was killed last August after months of Israeli claims, fabricated*, that he was a Hamas operative. Months later, in Lebanon, a marked press car was struck and three journalists were killed inside it: Fatima Ftouni, her brother Mohammed, and Ali Shuaib.
None of this is unfamiliar to the south. Its villages were bombed in 1978 and again in 1982, in the invasion that produced Hezbollah, both on the grounds that Palestinians were fighting from Lebanese soil. There is no rest for the wicked. By October 2023, when Hezbollah opened a front for Gaza, the south had already spent years absorbing wars that were never its own. It opened the front anyway, and the reason is older than Hezbollah, older than Israel, older than the borders being fought over now. Every Muharram, the south retells the story of Karbala, of an army that surrounded a small camp, children included, and for days did nothing but cut them off from the river beside it, until the youngest died of thirst, while those who had promised to fight beside them stayed home, and marched the survivors in chains to Damascus, to the court of the man who had ordered it, where a woman who had lost everyone stood before him and refused to be quiet. The story does not end with anyone winning. It ends with a single word, labbayka, “here I am”, said by people who have nothing to gain and everything to lose, to people who have already lost everything, and meant as an answer that does not wait to be asked twice.
This is why the south is being erased, not only because it still has rockets in its self-defense. You cannot sit a people down at a table if their sense of justice has never once asked what something would cost before answering it. There is nothing left to offer them that they have not already measured against Gaza and rejected, and no deal that does not somewhere ask them to stop looking at what happens across that line. For two years, the south has been the one place that has refused, at real and rising cost, to look away from Gaza for even a day. Nobody is destroying it by accident.
On June 26th, Lebanon’s government signed a 14-point framework agreement in Washington that surrendered the south to the occupation of the very people dying to defend it. The deal conditions Israeli withdrawal on the disarmament of the resistance, which means the land of the martyrs stays in Israeli hands until the people who bled for it agree to stop. Article 13 forecloses any sense of justice with Lebanon committing to ceasing all hostile or adverse actions in international legal and political forums, a clause that wipes clean the pager attack on civilians in markets and on streets, the demolition of hospitals, the strikes on medics and journalists, and the indiscriminate killings, every crime, laundered by those who never really cared if they live in the first place. It is shameful to watch a government capitulate to powers who have decided their strategic preferences are worth more than Lebanese life and dignity, when the people of the south have spent two years proving, at a cost that keeps rising, that they disagree. Katz instructed his military the same day to prepare for an extended stay. Smotrich said Israel intends to remain beyond disarmament because it needs defensible borders. Already sounding like the “yellow line” that is swallowing Gaza whole. What began as a cancer in Gaza has become metastatic, the occupation spreading north, the terms of surrender dressed as peace, the same peace, offered now to Lebanon, that was offered to Gaza, written without them, implemented over them, and called, by the people who wrote it, a beginning. I call it a eulogy by the murder.
This agreement will not stop those who will continue, rightfully so, to keep resisting. All it will do is give Israel the international PR to bomb helpless children in their territorial conquest and blame it on Hamas [I mean Hezbollah] because that is how the pattern of permanent expansion repeats.
The Lebanese people sure as hell do not need Israel’s genociders, or Washingtons, telling them what justice looks like. The Lebanese people who have spent years refusing to treat Gaza’s death as someone else’s, now asked to die the same death, on the same schedule, for the same reason, know all too well what real justice is, and how it is practiced. While the rest of the world ignores, with the same unhurried care as Gaza, whether the Genocide of South Lebanon, of the Shia Lebanese, is happening, the people, like the Palestinians, will never surrender their dignity – even if their governments have given it up long ago.
