Nov. 27: The Obama Empire Claims a New Province

---

---

The Big Story

Note to readers: There will be no Scroll tomorrow or Friday as we celebrate Thanksgiving. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming on Monday, Dec. 2.

In our Monday edition, we said that the emerging cease-fire deal in Lebanon was bad news for both the United States and Israel. Apparently, neither country’s leadership was paying attention to The Scroll, since the deal was finalized on Tuesday with a 10-1 vote of the Israeli security cabinet and took effect on Wednesday morning. So it goes.

For readers interested in understanding what the deal means, we highly recommend yesterday’s edition of the “Rootless” podcast featuring Tablet Editor-at-Large Liel Leibovitz and Tablet News Editor Tony Badran, which we will link at the end of the Big Story. But the main point to understand is that despite talk of a wonderful Israeli “victory” from assorted think-tankers, the deal effectively restores the status quo of Oct. 6, 2023—except worse.

The basic framework of the cease-fire is UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war, and the new deal reinstates most of 1701’s features, including toothless calls for the demilitarization of southern Lebanon and disarmament of Hezbollah. We say toothless because, under the new deal, “enforcement” of this “demilitarization” and “disarmament” will fall to the same forces that oversaw Hezbollah’s entrenchment in southern Lebanon over the past two decades, namely the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). The LAF, which has received billions in U.S. funding since 2006—including via an insane Obama-Biden scheme to directly pay LAF salaries with U.S. taxpayer money—is, generously, an “agglomeration of hostile sectarian militias, partly created and thoroughly infiltrated by the IRGC,” as Kyle Orton puts it in UnHerd. Less generously, it is a Hezbollah auxiliary and money laundering front. UNIFIL is little better—like UNRWA in Gaza, it has been thoroughly bribed, coerced, penetrated, and subverted by the local terror group to the point that it, too, acts as a de facto Hezbollah auxiliary, sharing intelligence and equipment with Hezbollah and co-locating its forces with Hezbollah’s to act as a screen against Israeli attacks.

To prevent further war, in other words, the new deal doubles down on the same framework that led to the war. The “innovation” is a new U.S.-French international “committee,” which will “monitor” alleged violations of the cease-fire and maybe, perhaps, grant Israel permission to strike Hezbollah—if the LAF fails to do so, and if the United States and France feel like allowing Israel to bomb Lebanon, which is the entire outcome the cease-fire deal was constructed to avoid. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed that Israel retains the freedom to hit Hezbollah at will, but U.S. officials are taking a different view. A Tuesday article in Walla News quoted U.S. officials who said that Israel will retain freedom of action in southern Lebanon “in accordance with international law,” but that north of the Litani River, “Israel will not have automatic freedom of action.” Here’s Walla (featuring a Google translation from the Hebrew):

According to [the U.S. officials], in such cases Israel will have to transfer the information it has to the international monitoring mechanism and hold preliminary consultations with the U.S. If the Lebanese army does not handle the issue itself, Israel will receive American support for its own action.

“There are restrictions on the military activity that Israel can carry out. It is impossible to sign a cease-fire agreement if Israel can shoot whatever it wants in Lebanon and whenever it wants,” said a senior American official.

In other words, the United States is officially declaring Lebanon as a U.S. protectorate, while downgrading Israel from sovereign ally to vassal, under the formula laid out by Tablet’s Tony Badran in his essay “The Ottoman-American Empire.” Israel will now be formally dependent on U.S. (and French) approval to act against the Iran-sponsored terror group to its north, even as Washington extends its protective umbrella to that terror group via its sponsorship of the LAF. Why? Well, as Badran explained in late July:

The purpose of large-scale U.S. investment in Lebanon and its state institutions, as well as the building of an embassy that resembles a LEED-certified version of the Crac des Chevaliers in the hills overlooking Beirut, is not to attempt a hostile takeover or, to use the insufferable jargon of Washington hands, to “compete” with Iran. The last time there was perceived hostility in the American involvement in Lebanon, Iran blew up the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks and kidnapped and murdered U.S. citizens in Beirut throughout the 1980s. No, the U.S. involvement is understood by all to be friendly and beneficial, aimed not at undermining the Iranian domain but at consolidating it in a joint venture. Much like the British with the Ottomans, American involvement in the Iranian realm is that of a patron—only not for the purpose of managing a declining empire, but for the inverted goal of consolidating the realm of an artificially inflated middle power that will administer the region under America’s aegis, for a price.

The point of doing this now, presumably, is to attempt to “lock in” the Obama-Biden Realignment policy after the change in administrations. While Trump’s foreign policy team will no doubt be more sympathetic to Israel, and more hostile to Iran, than Team Obama-Biden, it will also be loath to greenlight the resumption of active hostilities in Lebanon, especially given the apparently boundless ability of Republican foreign policy hands to delude themselves with fantasies about strengthening Lebanese “state institutions” to “resist Iran.” Incoming National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, for instance, bizarrely sought to claim the cease-fire as a victory for Trump, writing in a Tuesday X post that “everyone is coming to the table because of President Trump” and praising the “concrete steps towards deescalation in the Middle East.” Maybe he should take credit for Biden’s pier while he’s at it.

But if the deal is so bad, why would Netanyahu agree to it? In a speech on Tuesday, the prime minister laid out three primary reasons, glossed here by Tablet contributor Michael Doran:

There have also been reports, as we indicated Monday, that the Biden administration was dangling the threat of further UN sanctions, potentially including an international arms embargo, if Israel refused to play along. In a Tuesday article for Foreign Affairs, Jonah Blank recommended that the lame-duck Biden administration “recognize Palestinian statehood, sponsor a resolution on a two-state solution at the UN Security Council, and enforce existing U.S. legislation on arms transfers,” and our guess is that Washington quietly made some or all of those threats to the Israelis. The Israeli leadership also appears to have been eager for French cooperation in defusing the threat posed by the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Indeed, on Wednesday morning, shortly after the cease-fire took effect, the French Foreign Ministry, which had previously been coy on the warrants, announced its opinion that Netanyahu, as the leader of a country that was not a party to the ICC, might have “immunity” from prosecution. So that’s nice.

On the optimistic side, there has been some pushback to the deal from Congressional Republicans. In a Tuesday letter, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wrote that he was “deeply disturbed both by reports that Obama-Biden officials exerted enormous pressure on our Israeli allies to accept this ceasefire and by how those officials are characterizing Israel's obligations… Obama-Biden officials are already trying to use Israel's acceptance of this ceasefire to ensure that Hezbollah and other Iranian terrorist groups remain intact across Lebanon, and to limit Israel's future freedom of action and self-defense.” Cruz went on to say that…

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said that under the ceasefire Israel retains full freedom of action to counter Hezbollah if the group attacks Israel or tries to rebuild its terrorist infrastructure. The United States should allow and assist Israel in doing so, and I am committed to working closely with the Trump administration and my colleagues in the incoming Congress to ensure they are able to do so.

We hope that’s true. But in the long run, the Israelis need to be working to reclaim their sovereignty, not outsourcing more of it to an increasingly pathological superpower patron in the hopes of the Republican “cavalry” arriving. The Trump administration, meanwhile, should be focused less on “helping” the Israelis—or, God forbid, the Lebanese—than on dismantling the imperial structure that Team Obama-Biden has erected in the Middle East. As Tablet has been arguing for more than a year, this structure positively requires the reduction of Israel to passive vassal status using the leverage afforded by the current U.S.-Israeli aid relationship, thus laying the groundwork for outcomes like the one we saw in Lebanon this past week.

Both countries would do well to rethink this relationship over the coming four years. As Jacob Siegel and Liel Leibovitz wrote last July:

The alternative to this unequal relationship based on dependence is a more forthrightly transactional relationship, which would allow Israel to benefit economically, diplomatically, and strategically. It might also, we believe, diminish the current American infatuation with treating the Jewish state as a moral allegory in U.S. political psychodramas, rather than as a tiny country in the Middle East with its own local challenges and considerable advantages to offer the highest bidder. The current hyperpolarized atmosphere around Israel is not good for anyone—not for an America whose political class is looking to distract people from its own failings; not for a majority of the world’s Jews who live in Israel; and not for American Jews, who have come to identify their civic role with serving as props in an expiring piece of political theater. When the curtain comes down, they’ll find themselves without a role—and cut off from the 3,000-year-long Jewish historical continuum that is, or was, their inheritance.

Listen to Tony and Liel’s conversation here:

Read Tony’s dissection of the Obama-Biden imperial scheme in “The Ottoman American Empire” here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/ottoman-american-empire

And read Jacob and Liel’s argument for rethinking the U.S.-Israeli relationship here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/end-american-aid-israel