Israel is occupying southern Lebanon and calling it a security buffer. Families can’t go home. Workers can’t get back to their shops. Villages sit empty because a U.S.-brokered “process” has no timetable and no end date.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but this don’t pencil out for the people living under that occupation. The Rome talks just produced an agreement on “pilot zones” that sounds technical and provisional, but what it really means is this: families in places like Froun and Ghandourieh have to wait until the U.S. and Israel decide the Lebanese Army is ready, Hezbollah is disarmed, and everything else on the list is checked off. That list could take years. It could take a generation. And until it’s done, those families are stuck. No job to go back to. No house to rebuild. No school for their kids.
The U.S. calls it “productive and positive.” A Lebanese military source told UPI there’s no clear timetable and the areas aren’t even defined yet. A senior Israeli official says “additional preparations and understandings are still needed.” Nobody’s checking on any of this, either. Not UNIFIL, not the UN Truce Supervision Organization, not U.S. boots on the ground. The same parties with the most to gain from delay are the ones deciding when delay is over.
The man who used to run a shop in one of those pilot zones can’t open his door. The woman whose home is in the buffer zone can’t bring her children back. The village that was a community is now a vacancy, waiting on a political process that has no clock. Walzer, in Just and Unjust Wars, says occupation is supposed to be temporary, under strict moral constraints. The occupying power has to maintain order, protect the population, and withdraw as soon as possible. But this occupation is being stretched into a long-term arrangement through a negotiating process the occupier itself can stall. The U.S. is the honest broker, the arms seller, and the security guarantor all at once, selling weapons to one side while guaranteeing the other. The pilot zones are a six-mile buffer zone carved out of a sovereign country, and the people inside it are the ones paying the price.
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun says efforts are underway to end the war and secure withdrawal, but the Rome agreement didn’t include a clear timetable, and the areas are yet to be defined. The arms contracts keep flowing. The diplomatic process keeps going. And the families in southern Lebanon keep waiting. Eisenhower, in his farewell address of January 17, 1961, paragraph 24, warned of the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” by the military-industrial complex. That power is in the diplomacy that justifies the hardware’s use, and every extension of an occupation rewards perpetual conflict.
The strategic record is plain. Occupations don’t end because the occupier suddenly finds religion. They end when the cost of staying exceeds the cost of leaving. Right now, with U.S. support and a diplomatic process that has no endpoint, the cost of staying is low. The cost is paid by Lebanese civilians, by regional stability, and by the American citizenry who foot the bill and get told it’s all part of a productive, positive process.
It’s not. The people of southern Lebanon deserve to go home. Their families, their jobs, their communities are all held hostage by a process with no end.
The man whose shop is closed, the woman whose house is empty, the village that’s been hollowed out. Just people going home.