It Could Happen Here - Lebanon’s Agreement with Israel

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

In this episode Dana El Kurd talks with Elia Ayoub about Lebanon’s agreement with Israel, the concerns regarding the agreement, and how it fits in to the broader regional war on Iran.* *Note: This episode was recorded on Thursday July 2, 2026, so does not reflect any subsequent developments. Sources: https://www.972mag.com/lebanon-israel-trap-withdrawal-sovereignty/ https://thefirethesetimes.com https://hauntologies.net https://eliaayoub.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And listen now. Also Media. Hello, everyone. And welcome Dick Could Happen here. My name is Dan Al-Kurd, and I'm a researcher and analyst of Arab and Palestinian politics. Today I'm joined by Elia Ayyub, who is a Palestinian-Lebanese writer and researcher, as well as a podcaster with the podcast of The Fire 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. Thank you for having me again. So today we are 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? So it's technically like it try lateral framework in the sense that it includes, well, legally anyway, the U.S., 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 like 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 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 of, 2. 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 or get to decide when an area that Israel is occupying as in a 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 among the territory that Israel is currently occupying in Lebanon, in which they will allow the LAF, the Lebanese armed forces,

to progressively assess. assert it's, I'm putting this in quotation, you can't see it. Like assert is a 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 why it's bad as well. Oh yeah. We'd like to talk about all the bad. So before we go, get into like all the bad. Where does Hezbollah play into any of this? 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. Hasballah has immediately said that this is a humiliation, its surrender, its 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, you know, 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. And yeah, I kind of genuinely don't see this lasting, but I am also worried about what can come next. I mean, the fact that Israel is, again, the unilateral, you know, judge jury executioner here obviously is a very big problem. But what other issues do you foresee with this agreement? I worry that the Lebanese government in at first having some, I think, understandable concerns over Iran's role in Lebanon, and we can get into that, has solo. I don't know how you would describe it, maybe overcorrected and gone a bit too anti-Iran, which in and of itself I wouldn't necessarily oppose.

I'm not a fan of the Islamic Republic, to put it mildly. And I've always opposed Hezbollah for as long as I can remember. But the timing of doing what they've been doing, and I can get into it now, has been, I think, very, to put it charitably, very puzzling, but I think also like very, very short-sighted and frankly reckless and dangerous. this is all while Israel is bombing Lebanon, I should say. If this was in a context where there was no active war, I wouldn't have as big of an issue with it.

But they've declared the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon to be personal and on grata. They've taken down photos of the Ayatollah by the road to the airport and replaced it with Lebanon Awolan, which is like Lebanon first. They've deported like members of the IRGC, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and done a bunch of like other even like a retortals. things like the president would go on Twitter and say like Iran get out and stuff like that, the president of Lebanon, which again, I have 1,001 issues with the Iranian rule in Lebanon and including my my issues with Hezbollah, but there is only one country that is currently actually

occupying Lebanon militarily and actually bombing Lebanon militarily with its military, I mean, and that country is not Iran. So the priorities of the government in wanting to distance itself from Hezbollah's actions, which I should say have been controversial from the beginning because Hezbollah took a unilateral decision to enter the war against Israel, a decision that was not made with like the rest of Lebanon's approval. So it's been like controversial from the start. And that's what I meant by like the charitable interpretation is that the Lebanese government sort of overcorrected. And instead by by attempting supposedly to distance itself from Iran, what has actually done is made us even more dependent on the United States than we used to

be before. Right. So that's where the things you're describing under normal circumstances would be like, yeah, like, why is Iran so embedded in a lot of these different countries in the region and why does it have such an interventionist role? But you're saying it's reckless in this context where the Lebanese government is basically making itself more at the mercy of actors like the United States and Israel by proxy. Yeah. As of now, like, and I really tried my best to look for some leverage that Lebanon might have, But as of now, I don't actually see any leverage that Lebanon has. It's basically we hope for the best. Like I wish I could put it differently.

But it essentially is under the hope that like the Trump administration is tired of Netanyahu, that it might force the Israelis to to either withdraw from Lebanon or to at the very least stop the bombing or whatnot, which I've seen no evidence of. And as of now, every time a so-called ceasefire has been signed that even Hezbollah agreed to, the only thing that it's done is that Hezbollah would not respond to Israel, Israeli bombings. So the Israeli bombings have been a constant throughout this entire thing, ceasefire or no ceasefire. Since the agreement was signed, they've continued. They haven't stopped. As of time of recording, over 4,200 Lebanese have been killed since the beginning of this latest war, so not even since the beginning since 2023, but since in 2026 alone, because Israel does not discriminate in how they bomb. So to give you the example of those two so-called pilot zones, are they even inhabitable? As of now, I don't know. No, because of the 54 towns and villages, Lebanese towns and villages that the Israelis militarily occupy, at least 46 of them that we know of are either partially or entirely

demolished. So what are those security zones? What does that even mean? But again, the entire problem now is that they get to decide all of that. And again, with all of my issues with Iran, the agreement that the Lebanese have signed with the Israelis, I think, is objectively worse than the memorandum of understanding that the Iranian signed with the Americans that actually also included Lebanon. Because at least in that MOU and that moment of understanding,

it included the sentence territorial integrity and sovereignty of Lebanon, as well as a call for ceasefire, which was a nightmare for Netanyahu. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in? Watch all your favorite podcasts from start to finish right inside the free IHare radio app. Make some noise. Catch every laugh and eye roll on shows like Bestie listen. Hey Jonas and Las Culturistas.

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It might actually be just with the doctor. Or the economist. Ordered. Listen to Wellness Actually on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about Iran more specifically for a moment. I mean, Lebanon has taken out the ambassador, has made all of these kind of rhetorical shifts away from the Iranian regime, obviously a display for the U.S. and for Israel. But Iran, how has it responded? How has the government responded?

And how does this agreement relate to the MOU that Iran signed with the United States? So it's quite complicated because the MOU was signed just about a week or so before. So the deal between the Iranians and the Americans was signed roughly agreed upon. I don't know if they signed these things. Roughly a week before this one, the one between Israel and Lebanon via America, the tripartite one, as they call it. One interpretation that I've seen is that by going directly to Lebanon, America actually managed to bypass these kind of bullet points that Iran was putting forward. So like, let's say Iran is saying, there should be a ceasefire in Lebanon and that there should be like territorial integrity and sovereignty. In the meantime, the Lebanese state is saying to Iran, like, you do not negotiate on our behalf.

So there are Americans go to Lebanon directly or Lebanon goes to the American. And they supersede it. They supersede this and they do a negotiation. or they get the Lebanese to sign this latest agreement directly, which of course does not include Iran anyway. So the main differences between the MOU between America and Iran and the agreement between, let's say, Israel and Lebanon, is that Israel had no part whatsoever in the MOU.

And if it had come to pass, if the Iranians had basically gotten what they were asking for, the Americans would have been forced at least legally to pressure the Israelis to leave Lebanon, altogether, no ifs and butts, no negotiated exit, whatever that means, no making up pilot zones, none of that stuff. It would just be, you've been doing this occupation illegally, you need to leave as simple as that. That's been the Iranian position, which is not a position that most Lebanese would disagree with because it is just a fact. Right. And it's interesting. I mean, obviously we don't

want to speculate, but it is interesting that Iran made the ceasefire in Lebanon so kind of central to a lot of their demands, right? Yeah, it's not that surprising to me, I think, because they see this as saving Hasbullah. So like it's almost like an easy thing to do. It doesn't cost them anything in a sense. It would have, of course, put pressure on the Israelis, which they're happy to do since Israel and America

started the war against Iran in the first place. Right. And it would, you know, give some kind of breathing space for their main ally in Lebanon, which is Hezbollah. Yeah. So in and in of itself, I don't think it's surprising that they included it. Maybe they knew that Lebanon would reject it officially, given their position of the Lebanese government, you know, thus far.

And I can't know for sure. But yeah, in and in of itself, it doesn't surprise me that they went for this. Because one other thing I should say that they were proposing in that MOU is a so-called deconfliction cell. The details of which are not entirely clear to me yet. And at this point may never happen anyway. But the way it's been interpreted that I saw is that it was that it was. would see its influence in Lebanon restored. So there's also like a self-interest in all of that, but not in a militarily occupying way.

So for me, it's not that the option has been either an amazing option or a bad option. It's more like either we get the Iran option, which is not ideal but still functional or a catastrophic option, which is the one that we actually got with the Israelis. Right. And I mean, we've had some episodes about Iran. I've hosted a few people about Iran. And I think it bears repeating that their strategy, their ability to kind of withstand even this level of severe warfare in the latest escalation has depended on their allies in the region and kind of the diffusion of Iranian power to non-state actors essentially. Yeah.

So what was the public reaction to the Lebanese government signing this agreement? The Lebanese public reaction, to be clear. Yeah, the most immediate reaction on the streets has been by, of course, by Hezbollah and its ally Amal in which they, you know, they burn stuff down, they yelled, they threw stuff at the cops and stuff like that. The Secretary General of Hezbollah, as I said, has declared it not in void and so on. As for the rest of the country, there hasn't been any kind of mobilization against it, but they shouldn't be interpreted as consent. It's more, I think, in my view, that the Lebanese population as a whole has been exhausted by nearly three years of war now. and there is an appetite for kind of diplomacy. In fact, there's been a poll, a nationwide poll that was just released a few days ago

that says that roughly 54% of the population support diplomacy versus 35% that support armed resistance. Now, the 54% that support diplomacy, which is not just over half, it's not because they believe this is the best option. It's more that they believe, I think, this is my interpretation. It's more that I think most people genuinely believe that there are no other options. So it's more like, I think, a reflection of how desperate the situation is more than anything else. It should not be confused with any kind of warming up towards Israel.

And that same poll, which again was nationwide, 87% of people in Lebanon identified Israel as their main enemy versus 51% that identify America and 38% that identified Iran. And this is across sects. So usually when you see the reporting, you could be led to believe that it's only Shias in Lebanon that oppose Israel. but actually it is really a cross-sect that Israel is a deeply unpopular state in Lebanon, which is not surprising because it's been bombing Lebanon for on and off decades now. Right. You've written about this for 972 Mag. You have another article coming out, I'm sure, or it's already out, I'm not sure, but I will definitely link it in the show notes by the time this episode airs. Is there anything you feel like we missed and that listeners should know?

It's very difficult to know where things are heading in terms of the security situation in Lebanon. I would argue that kind of the specter of a civil war, whatever that actually looks like, is never too far away and hasn't been too far away for a while now. I don't think it's likely in the traditional sense of multiple armed actors in the near future. It largely because I think the population is really exhausted. But the Israeli war on Lebanon has created kind of this fault line

that's very, very difficult, I think, to overcome now. And it's not, again, a fault line between pro-Israeli. and anti-Israel, both sides of this fault line are technically anti-Israel. It's more of like what the priorities should be for the Lebanese states. And it's created a sense for a lot of people who are from southern Lebanon that is currently, as we're speaking, still being bombed. It is giving the sense that the rest of the country is abandoning them. And this sort of grievances is quite literally what gave us Hezbollah in the first place.

Hezbollah was created in the mid-80s. This was a couple of years, two, three years after the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. Iran really started, which was not even the first one. It was the second one. It was just the biggest one. It would last for 18 years. And in those 18 years, this obscure group that did not really exist grew in popularity because they were the most effective one, thanks to the fact that Iran was backing them, until they became the de facto kingmakers of Lebanese politics for a couple of decades after that. So the worry here is not even that I feel that like history would just repeat itself and whatnot. It's more that there does.

doesn't seem to be any actual path forward that proposes any alternative to people from southern Lebanon, which is roughly a fifth of the country in terms of both sides, more or less, and population more or less. Those people have nowhere else to go. They will go back to their homes when they can. They go back to their lands if their homes are destroyed and they will try and rebuild, as they have done already in the past, if not once, sometimes more than once. And if there isn't a solution for them that is just a fair,

solution that brings them justice that stops the Israeli bombings and permanently forces the Israelis out of Lebanon, there's going to be some force somewhere that's going to find a way to appeal to that population. And if they're not offered an alternative, they will seek that alternative, which again is the history of Hezbollah in the first place. So as much as I oppose Hezbollah for very Lebanese reasons, like and as the Lebanese myself, because of the sectarianism and authoritarianism and so on, that's a completely separate question for me than the right of people who are under military occupation to resist that military occupation because that is actually a right that's guaranteed under international law. And I'm really worried as now, and I'm not just speaking

for myself here, that's virtually everyone I know, that the situation is getting to the point where essentially the Lebanese state is hoping that the Americans would just pressure the Israelis and the way it's been happening as of now is that they would pressure them here and there a bit but not much and then the rest of the time they just let them do whatever they want with American tax money of course if they don't actually force the Israelis

to withdraw from Lebanon it can create like a a whole different political beast in a sense that would be even more violent I think we're specifically talking about Lebanon but this is the case in so many contexts in the region is that when the

conflicts are unresolved When the violence is unresolved, then it'll only perpetuate more violence. Everyone I know has been warning about that in every context in Palestine and Lebanon. So it's extremely depressing. But thank you so much for sharing your insights with us. And I will link Aaliyah's work in the show notes. And, yeah, hope you all stay safe. Thanks, Jenna.

It Could Happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcast from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, Coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form.

We're launching Podlandia, A.O. Rewatch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain, on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life. Guestrars, collaborators, and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song.

Well, I thought you were all going to write a song. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. A.O. Rewatch on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up fam? I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of Everyone Watches Women's Sports, a new podcast from Together and I Heart Women's Sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines.

Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shoutouts to you, Naomi. The viral moments. I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. And the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports.

Listen to everyone watches women's sports on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier, and Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men. Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika, and I'm out.

Listen to You're the Problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Nick Titoro. probably know me from NYPD Blue, the longest yard, or Spike Lease Black Klansman. And on my new podcast, Delivering Happiness with Nick Tatoro, I deliver pizza to a new guest.

I've shared a slice with everyone, from Seth Rollins. What are you doing? My belt. To Bill Burr. I don't think I've ever met somebody so exactly out of their mind as I am. And now, we even have more great guests

coming up, including the great John Tuturo. It's called Happiness. Delivering Happiness. And many, many more. Open your free High Heart Radio app. Search Delivering Happiness with Nick Tuttle. And listen now. This is an IHeart podcast.

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