The day following the launch of “Hezbollah’s” six rockets which reopened the southern war front, the Israeli military announced the deployment of additional  soldiers into the south of Lebanon and has taken control of new points in the name of creating a “buffer zone” along the borders.

Therefore, these are additional areas the Israeli occupation gets to bite off on top of the five points occupied during the 2024 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

When some people echo “the resistance brought the occupation”, at first glance, the words may seem simplified, unjust, or “zionistic” , according to “Hezbollah’s” ethics and taboos. However, one has to reflect on the historical narratives that has accompanied the decades-long tragedies of the south, without neglecting the growing Israeli threat.

Yes, Israel is, historically, an occupying power, and its security project can always turn into additional occupied territories it claims to own, but southern Lebanon’s experience since the 1970s reveals a more complex dynamic.

The south was not only a battlefield with Israel, but was also a regional bargaining chip, managed in Damascus and Tehran as much as in Beirut. Every time the decision of war left the context of the Lebanese state, a new window opened to re-draw the maps without the opinion of those who own the land.

During the 1970s, when the south was turned into a base for the Palestinian armed factions following the infamous 1969 Cairo Agreements, the Lebanese government was deeply fragmented. Loose borders, absence of a weapons monopoly, and sovereign decision scattered. Cross-border Palestinian armed operations were used as a pretext for Israel’s Operation Litani of 1978, and then for the 1982 invasion. At the time, the occupation was not a passing incursion but was translated to a “security zone” whose occupation lasted until 2000, the year of the south’s liberation.

Here is where the pattern becomes obvious, an Israeli expansion project that invests in a security event in a weak sovereign environment, turning it into a long-term geographical project. But the 1990s added another, more complex dimension. After the Taif agreements, Lebanon officially emerged from the civil war but had not prepared its strategic plan.

Syria’s presence in Lebanon which began during the war and lasted for many years afterwards, was critical/decisive, and the south became part of a regional structure of power based in Damascus and Tehran. At the same time, the Syrian-Israeli negotiation efforts kicked off after the 1991 Madrid Conference. The negotiations centered around the recovery of the Golan Heights, reaching  advanced stages during the Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Benjamin Netanyahu administration, before culminating under Ehud Barak during the Shepherdstown Peace Talks in 2000.

At that stage, the south of Lebanon was not separated from all of this but was very much an indirect pressure point in the hands of the Syrian government. Escalation or de-escalation in the southern front was not a purely Lebanese decision but was part of the fragile balance between Damascus and Tel Aviv.  At every turning point in the negotiations, whether they faltered or neared a critical point, the Lebanese southern factions reacted. To understand the scene better, a look at newspaper archives helps to understand the association between the talks with the flaring up of the southern front.

In 1993, after the escalation of “Hezbollah’s” attacks on the northern Israel, the latter launched the Operation “Accountability”. The widespread airstrikes led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of civilians. The timing was not isolated from the Israeli-Syrian negotiations context. The south was used as a two-way message between the two sides: for Damascus it was a front to be ignited at the order of Hafez Al Assad, and for Israel, Lebanon would be the one to pay for said ignition.

In 1996, a bloodier déjà-vu. The Israeli Operation “Grapes of Wrath” in the south ended in the first Qana massacre where over a hundred Lebanese civilians were killed in an Israeli airstrike that targeted a UN compound. Once again, the confrontation did not end by a military decision but with a political understanding known as the “1996 Israeli-Lebanon Ceasefire Understanding”, which was established by a monitoring group consisting of the United States, France, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

Syria’s official presence in the monitoring group was an acknowledgement of its role in setting the southern front’s beat. The south was not just a resistance front but was a component of in the Golan Heights negotiation equation as well as the power and role of Syria and Iran.

The 2000 withdrawal and the lost opportunity

When Ehud Barak’s government decided to withdraw from the south of Lebanon in 2000, it was done so unilaterally, without a comprehensive agreement with Syria. The withdrawal could have turned into a moment to regain full Lebanese sovereignty, but in the Syrian-Hezbollah discourse at the time, the decision was seen as a tactical step or a “deception” aimed at snatching the Lebanese card from the hands of Damascus. There were attempts to draw skepticism and an escalation in media campaigns against the withdrawal with a warning against the idea of deploying the Lebanese army in the South.

Israel withdrew but the Shebaa Farms file remained stuck due to Syria’s refusal to draw the borders to justify the continuation of the arm equation. At that stage, any call to deploy Lebanese soldiers to the south or restrict weapons to the government were met with the accusation of “agent”. Simply put, the deployment of the army in the south was forbidden. Just like that, liberation did not turn into a project for a government, but to affirm the dogmatic regional arm equation from the outside.

The borders remained completely quiet for six years until the 2006 war which reproduced the dynamic but in a different regional context. “Hezbollah’s” capture of two Israeli soldiers was presented as deterrence and a recovery of hostages, but the Israeli extensive response transformed it into a comprehensive war of destruction against Lebanon. It ended with then-Secretary-General of “Hezbollah”, the late Hassan Nassrallah, uttering his famous phrase: “If I had known”.

Hezbollah had provided the ammunition for Israel to launch a devastating war, from which it emerged “victorious” on top of the rubble of people’s homes. Resolution 1701, which ended the war, established a new framework but did not end the duality of military-making decisions. The south remained a gray area, neither full war nor full sovereignty!

Then came the October 7, 2023, operation and the subsequent Hezbollah-Israel war waged by Hezbollah, which ended in a massive setback in terms of its leadership and military capabilities, with Israel establishing points it occupies inside Lebanese territories. Now, with talks of Israeli “defensive positions” or “buffer zone”  the same question repeats itself: who preceded whom?

Israel does indeed hold an expansionist security project that could transform to a geographical reality. But, in the history of the south, every major expansion is accompanied with a security event used as a leverage. The expansionist intention may be constant, but the opportunity is created when a door is opened.

Saying “the resistance brought the occupation” is not a moral judgement, but the description of a dynamic. The south in the nineties was a Syrian bargaining chip in the negotiations for the Golan Heights. After the year 2000, it became a component of the broader Iran-Israeli equation. In both cases, the decision was never Lebanese. Between the Israeli hegemony project and the countervailing project of regional influence, the Lebanese land remained a permanent testing ground.

The question that arises today is not whether Israel is expansionist — as it is part of its political and security fabric — but whether Lebanon will remain an arena managed according to the interests of others or  a state that monopolizes the decision of peace or war.

Experience has proven that when the south is used as a card, it turns into a space vulnerable to being chipped away. And when it managed outside a unified national strategy, every tactical operation becomes a potential strategic loss.

The people who live in the boarder villages are not living in a theoretical strategy. They live in everchanging maps. Between the speech of resistance and the discourse of security, the simple and hardest question remains: who holds the decision when a front is opened, and who pays the price when the new borders are redrawn?