Thread on the Salam government's attempts to obstruct Iran's cease-fire talks and prolong the war:
The “Salam government” will soon become a term that not only designates this current illegitimate administration in Lebanon, but acquires the force of political condemnation and disgrace, emerging as a new descriptor for forms of political treason that exceed the historical analogies typically invoked. Comparisons to Vichy or to the government of Mahmoud Abbas are analytically inadequate, since both were the product of occupation and, in the case of the former, defeat. What makes the Salam government historically unique, and necessitates a new conception of collaboration, is how it is actively defying military victory and the liberation of its territory while also relentlessly obstructing a ceasefire that Iran was on the brink of securing for Lebanon, pursuing instead a prolongation of the war, further occupation, and potentially annexation of that territory. 1/7
The Salam government’s decision to enter into talks with Israel immediately following a massacre that killed over 350 civilians and injured more than 2,000 was coordinated with Israel, with the sole purpose of obstructing the consolidation of a ceasefire that Iran was close to finalising for Lebanon. While it may appear that the government is attempting to pre-empt Iran and claim credit by declaring a ceasefire on Tuesday, it has in fact acquiesced to the continuation of hostilities, as the Israeli ambassador to the US made clear that Israel agreed only to a follow-up meeting to advance a “peace agreement” with Lebanon while explicitly refusing to discuss any ceasefire. 2/7
The Salam government is reportedly proposing a return to the November 2024 agreement, advancing a framework in which Israeli strikes would be confined to so-called "imminent threats from Hizbullah," in other words, Shia areas and Shia civilians, while neutralizing the rest of Lebanon. This decoupling of negotiation from the cessation of violence, and the re-legitimation of a ceasefire-warfare model, restores a status quo ante in which Israel retains the latitude to strike across Lebanon, expand its occupation of Lebanese territory, and prevent the return of displaced populations , effectively reproducing the very conditions that compelled Hizbullah to strike Israel on March 1. In other words, what the Salam government is offering is normalization with Israel without a cease-fire whereby Lebanon normalizes Israel’s war on itself. 3/7
The Salam government is aware it’s not a genuine negotiating partner, lacking the strategic leverage that actors like Iran possess, but it does possess two potential deliverables:
derailing the Iran’s ceasefire talks with the US, and presenting itself as a viable fifth column government capable of engineering internal strife. This would necessarily entail its willingness to comply with Israel’s reported demand to remove the current army chief, Rudolf Haykal, who has refused to destabilize the country by attempting to forcibly disarm the resistance, and replacing him with a figure aligned with Israeli preferences. 4/7
Whether it is capable of doing so or not, the Salam government has now placed itself and Lebanon in a highly dangerous position, as it becomes directly accountable to Israel in a way that differs from earlier phases, when Hizbullah and its Shia constituency bore the primary burden of confrontation. Should the government be unable to deliver the promised strife, it risks triggering a shift to the Gaza model of negotiations, in which Israel treats Lebanon as an undifferentiated battlespace, intensifying attacks on civilians across sects and potentially targeting state officials themselves, including those engaged in collaboration. 5/7
The government is effectively counting on civil strife as its primary bargaining chip with Israel, weaponizing the displaced Shia—now numbering over one million—as a point of pressure on Hizbullah and exploiting what it perceives to be its Achilles’ heel.
Indeed, Hizbullah is structurally constrained in how it can respond domestically, given its long-standing aversion to civil war and the catastrophic risks such a scenario would carry for a community already bearing the full weight of the war. This constraint helps explain Hizbullah’s continued restraint at the level of internal politics, including its reluctance to precipitate governmental collapse through the kind of mass mobilisation seen after 2006, or to resort to arms internally as it did in May 2008. Unlike those earlier moments, the current context is one of active war, and a massive displaced population, a convergence the government has deliberately engineered and is now deliberately exploiting. 6/7
This does not alter the trajectory but merely delays the inevitable; in other words, prolonging what is highly likely an eventual Iran-brokered agreement while making its attainment more protracted and costly, with continued massacres, further immiseration of the displaced and an elevated risk of civil war in the interim. Such will be the legacy of this co-belligerent, fifth-column political authority, which has made “Salam government” a byword for a form of treason without historical precedent. 7/7
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