The Lebanese frog in the pot
The Israeli method in Lebanon resembles this old image of the frog in a pot. It is not thrown directly into boiling water. We put it in warm water, light the fire, then let the temperature rise. A village first. Then a road. Then a house. Then a suburb. Then an ancient city. Then an evacuation order. Then another one. At each stage, it is explained that this is not yet the total war, that it is only a security measure, that we must wait for the next meeting, the next mediator, the next map, the next press release.
Lebanon knows this diplomatic cuisine too well. He is asked to negotiate while his territory burns. He is asked to be reasonable while his displaced civilians are looking for a mattress, medicine or a road that is still open. He was asked to prove his good faith while villages in the South were emptied, Tyre received evacuation orders, archaeological sites were damaged, Beirut remained under threat and every ceasefire became a vocabulary exercise. Apparently, a ceasefire can now mean this: one party stops responding, the other continues to strike, and everyone calls it a process.
We must ask the question simply. What is the point of negotiating with a state that requires a unilateral ceasefire, while retaining the right to bomb, demolish, move and choose the rules of the game alone? What is the point of a text if the next day, or the following week, planes, drones and evacuation orders remind us that the feather did not replace the force? The first condition is not a technical detail. It is moral, political and legal: a complete, complete and reciprocal ceasefire. Not a break for one and a destruction license for the other.
Reciprocal ceasefire as a starting point
Lebanon does not need a decorative ceasefire. He doesn’t need a formula that reassures chanceries, calms markets and lets people in the South count explosions. He needs a complete halt to military operations, strikes, incursions, demolitions, fire and threats of evacuation. A ceasefire that does not apply to both sides is not a ceasefire. It’s an injunction. It is a guardianship of a people’s right to live.
The official vocabulary has become absurd. We are talking about conditional truce, de-escalation mechanisms, indirect negotiations, security guarantees, areas to be tested, progressive withdrawal, right of reply. Behind this very clean grammar, there is a much less elegant reality: Lebanon is ordered to stand still while Israel retains the military initiative. It’s not about peace. This is an arrangement in which Israeli security becomes the only unit of measurement, while Lebanese security remains a secondary variable.
This is where sarcasm becomes almost useless, as the situation mocks itself. Lebanon is being asked to be a responsible State, but its sovereignty is treated as a diplomatic mat. We ask him to send his army to the south, but we hit his soldiers. He was asked to protect his heritage, but he was bombed near his classified sites. He was asked to support the negotiations, but was told that the strikes would continue as long as Israel deemed them necessary. What a beautiful school of international law: one sign, the other fly over.
The Lebanese authorities may participate in negotiations. They must even do so, because a State cannot give up diplomatic channels. But negotiating does not mean accepting to be neutralized. Negotiating doesn’t mean waiting for the fire to rise a little longer. Negotiating does not mean turning every violation into a regrettable incident, every death into collateral damage, every village destroyed as a footnote. A serious negotiation begins with a minimum condition: the reciprocal cessation of violence.
Slow normalization of abnormal
The most dangerous is not only the spectacular strike. It’s usual. This is the time when an evacuation becomes a routine, a cut-off road becomes a traffic card, a destroyed house becomes a statistic, a empty city becomes a fait accompli. The frog technique in the pot works because it turns the exception into room temperature. After a while, we no longer ask why water heats up. We only ask how fast to adapt.
South Lebanon is experiencing this gradual rise. The villages are empty, the inhabitants leave for Tyre, Saida, Beirut or elsewhere, and the cities of refuge are warned. Civilians are told to move, then move again. The right to stay at home becomes almost suspicious. Simply living near a border, camp, road or old neighbourhood is enough to become a risk. An entire population learns to read the maps published by a foreign army to see if they can sleep at home.
This mechanics is not neutral. Moving a population, even with Arabic messages and coloured maps, remains a violence. Those who leave don’t leave a hotel. They leave homes, documents, photos, crops, shops, seniors, sometimes graves. Those who remain do not become combatants by obstinacy. They become trapped civilians. The evacuation order does not remove the responsibility for the strike. It does not turn destruction into a proper administrative procedure.
There is also this black irony: the more Israel publishes warnings, the more commentators present the strikes as their own. As if notifying a city that it is going to be targeted was enough to clear the responsibility for the following. Morality then becomes very simple: you have been warned, so your misfortune belongs to you. This reasoning is convenient. It moves the burden on the victim. If she leaves, she loses her life before. If she stays, she will be accused of choosing danger.
Tyre, or memory ordered to leave
Tyre sums up this logic with a particular cruelty. The city is not just a point on a military map. It is a inhabited city, an ancient port, a world heritage site, a place where Phoenician, Roman, Byzantine, medieval and Ottoman history overlaps with everyday life. The new evacuation order of 9 June, which also targets the Christian neighbourhood of the old city, is not just about coordinates. It concerns alleyways, churches, houses, families, hotels, displaced inhabitants the first time and ordered to be a second.
Lebanon officially reported damage in the vicinity of the archaeological sites in Tyre. Ancient elements were reportedly affected by debris: columns, capitals, column bases, mosaics, artifacts. Expertise will be required to accurately measure the extent of losses. But the very fact that these remains are exposed is enough to say the state of the situation. A city listed as a World Heritage Site is subject to evacuation following damage reported to its heritage. And we should continue to talk about de-escalation with a serious face and well ironed sentences.
Here again, Israeli logic is known. Hezbollah is claimed to be targeted, and the area of suspicion is expanded. The neighborhood, camp, road, house, monument, everything can become operational environment. The entire city is under threat of a charge that no one can verify on time. And when Lebanon asks for the protection of its sites, it is implicitly told that it should have better controlled every stone, every alley, every neighbour, every shadow. Magnificent reversal: the assaulted state should provide the certificate of heritage purity before it is agreed not to spray its history.
The problem is not to deny the security realities of the South. Hezbollah exists. Weapons exist. The clashes exist. But this reality does not give Israel an unlimited, extensible, self-referenced right of destruction. International law is not a towel placed on the table when it is clean and removed when the meal becomes embarrassing. The alleged presence of a military objective never exempts proportionality, distinction and precaution. And it certainly does not allow to turn heritage and civilians into consumable decor.
Beirut, the South and the Silence Trap
The same method applies from Tyre to Beirut, from Litani to the southern suburbs. A strike is presented as limited. Another as necessary. A third as a preventive. Then we find out the limit was mobile. The cease-fire becomes a kind of light curtain. We shoot him when we have to talk to the mediators. He is raised when he has to strike. Lebanon is supposed to applaud the staging, because it was given the honour to participate in the discussions.
The most worrying is how violations accumulate without producing a clear political threshold. Lebanese officials have reported thousands of Israeli strikes since the announcement of a truce. Villages have been destroyed or emptied. Tens of thousands of families have been displaced. Lebanese soldiers were killed. Cultural sites are threatened. Yet the international conversation often seems to resume in the same place: what can Lebanon still concede to reassure Israel? Very rarely: what must Israel stop so that Lebanon can simply breathe?
This asymmetry is at the heart of the problem. Israel demands calm north of its border, but imposes the tumult south of that of others. Israel wants guarantees, but gives warnings. Israel calls for security, but produces mass insecurity in Lebanon. Israel demands that Hezbollah cease to exist militarily, but does not first propose a total halt to the strikes, a clear withdrawal, a guarantee of non-aggression and a practical recognition of Lebanese sovereignty. It seems to be a matter of believing that Lebanese sovereignty that has been destroyed by bombs remains a respectable sovereignty.
Lebanese silence would be a mistake. Not because Lebanon must throw itself into a war that would destroy it more. He’s already paid enough for other people’s wars. But because political silence turns the violence suffered into natural data. We need to talk, name, document, seize international bodies, publish maps, count strikes, count deaths, count houses, count damaged sites. Diplomatic politeness must be refused when it is used to make up the obvious.
Negotiate, but not on your knees
Lebanon must negotiate. But he has to negotiate standing. This formula may seem grandiose. Yet it is minimal. Negotiating standing means not accepting that the discussion begins after admitting the other’s right to continue to strike. Negotiating standing means demanding a complete, full, simultaneous and verifiable ceasefire. Negotiating standing means that the Lebanese army should not be sent as part of a still bombarded setting. Trading standing means that civilians must not be the currency of exchange for a security architecture written elsewhere.
It’s not about giving Hezbollah a white-seing. Lebanon cannot live forever with several decisions of war. The issue of arms, the South, the State and sovereignty must be addressed. But it cannot be treated under Israeli fire, with villages destroyed as arguments of persuasion. A Lebanese national debate is not an aircraft capitulation. Sovereignty is not rebuilt by bombardment. It is rebuilt by institutions, by law, by internal consensus, by real guarantees and by cessation of external aggression.
The temptation of some mediators is to ask Lebanon to resolve its internal problem while Israel retains its freedom of action. It’s convenient. It is even very elegant on paper. Lebanon disarms, Israel observes. Lebanon deploys its army, Israel checks. Lebanon changes its internal balance, Israel reserves the right to strike if it does not like it. This is called a plan. In a less diplomatic language, it looks like a spreading surrender with paragraphs, appendices and hand-hand photographs.
The starting condition must be reversed. First, total cessation of strikes and violations. First, withdrawal from occupied positions. First, end of demolitions and evacuation orders. First, an international guarantee for the protection of civilians and cultural sites. Secondly, discussions on security arrangements, the role of the army, border guarantees and internal arrangements. Any other order is to ask Lebanon to repair its roof while a neighbour continues to throw stones at it.
The simple moral that is complicated
Sometimes it is useful to return to a simple moral. We are not seriously negotiating a ceasefire with someone who explains that the ceasefire means above all your silence. Lebanese cannot be asked to accept strikes as a price for future peace. The gradual destruction of the South cannot be described as a security pedagogy. We cannot turn every neighbourhood into a suspect, every civilian into an obstacle, every monument into an acceptable damage.
Israel’s criticism is not a critique of Israel’s security. It is a critique of a policy that claims to seek security through the permanent insecurity of others. It is a criticism of a government that wants negotiations without reciprocity, a peace without equal treatment, a ceasefire without an effective cessation of fire. It is also a criticism of those who, abroad, always find a polite way to say in Lebanon that he has to wait a little longer. A little more patience, a little more smoke, a little more razed villages, a little more damaged heritage. The frog, after all, has not yet complained loud enough.
Lebanon does not have to prove that it deserves not to be bombed. He does not have to deserve the protection of his civilians. He does not have to present a perfect dissertation on the monopoly of force so that his archaeological sites are spared. He doesn’t have to negotiate his breath in slices. The protection of a sovereign country is not a favour granted by the one who strikes it. It is a principle. And when this principle is violated, the first requirement is not a new round table. This is the stop of the violation.
We’ll say reality is more complex. She is. It is said that there are Hezbollah, Iran, the United States, regional hostages, missiles, negotiations, balances, Israeli elections, American calculations. All of this exists. But complexity must not be used to make injustice acceptable. It must not drown the central sentence: no lasting settlement can begin with a single-way ceasefire. If Israel wants to negotiate, he stops hitting. If mediators want to be taken seriously, they demand reciprocity. If Lebanon wants to survive politically, it refuses to cook slowly in the pot prepared for it.
The next discussion must therefore begin with this obvious, so unpleasant to lovers of ambiguous formulae: a total, complete, reciprocal, verifiable ceasefire, without unilateral exception, without permanent right of destruction, without evacuation card transformed into a bomb permit.
