Lebanon: France Is Confusing the Symptom with the Disease

*This article was originally published in French

Excerpt

More than 300 people were killed in a single day. On April 8, the Israeli army launched its largest wave of strikes in Lebanon since early March, targeting, according to the IDF, more than one hundred Hezbollah command centers and military sites in the span of ten minutes. Israel’s defense minister said that “hundreds of Hezbollah operatives” had been targeted. France’s response, by contrast, was the familiar one: condemnation of “intolerable attacks,” calls for a ceasefire, expressions of solidarity with Lebanon’s national mourning, and threats to reopen the question of the EU-Israel association agreement. This diplomatic ritual returns with every escalation. And every time, it ends in exactly the same place.

France is not ignorant of the facts. It knows that Hezbollah attacked Israel on March 2 on its own initiative. It knows that the Lebanese government did not authorize it, that Parliament did not vote for it, and that the Lebanese people did not choose this war. At times, it even says so, if only indirectly. But it refuses to follow that logic to its conclusion. It acknowledges that Hezbollah is the problem, then insists that it is not Israel’s place to disarm it. So it falls back on the same reflex: ceasefire, resolution, mechanism. It manages the status quo instead of challenging it. And it never fully states what everyone can see: that the Lebanese state either cannot, or will not, disarm the militia that controls it. That any ceasefire without disarmament is temporary by definition. And that this logic condemns Lebanon to an endless cycle of war.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is senior envoy to Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.