Europe’s condemnation of Israel’s latest strikes on Hezbollah has been as dispiriting as it is revealing. Having already opposed the joint US-Israeli action against the Islamic Republic, Britain and the EU have now adopted Tehran’s own framing of the conflict: that any ceasefire with the regime must encompass Lebanon.
“What Israel was doing yesterday with this escalation of strikes was completely wrong … this escalation is damaging, it’s wrong, it’s going the wrong direction. We want the ceasefire extended to cover Lebanon,” Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said. Her EU colleagues made similar statements.
This is not merely a diplomatic misstep but a strategic error of the first order. Insisting that Lebanon’s sovereignty must be “protected” by folding it into a deal with the Islamic Republic is a contradiction in terms. In making such a claim, British and European leaders tacitly concede what they otherwise refuse to state: that Lebanese sovereignty is a fiction. The country is effectively occupied – not by Israel, but by Iran, acting through its principal proxy, Hezbollah.
If Lebanese sovereignty is to be protected, respectively restored, Hezbollah must be disarmed. Yet whenever Israel moves decisively in that direction, Europe reaches for its habitual response to Israeli self-defence: calls for de-escalation. The consequence is not peace, but the perpetuation of instability and war through the entrenchment of Hezbollah’s power.
Equally troubling is the cursory attention paid to Israel’s own sovereignty. For decades, Israeli civilians in the north have lived under constant threat from Hezbollah fire, forced at times to flee their homes for long periods to escape the missile attacks. Since October 8, 2023, the Shiite terror group has openly joined the war on Hamas’s side, escalating its attacks against Israel further since the Iran campaign – not in defence of Lebanon, but of its Iranian patrons. Since March 2 alone, Hezbollah has fired over 6,500 missiles, rockets, and UAVs at Israeli civilians. Yet European statements treat these war crimes as an afterthought, if they acknowledge them at all.
Instead, the focus has shifted to condemning Israel’s response. Claims of disproportionate civilian harm are repeated with the same lack of scrutiny as during the Gaza war, ignoring the well-documented strategy of Iran and its proxies to operate from within civilian populations, using them as human shields. When France’s president accuses Israel of “indiscriminate” bombing, he crosses a line from unbalanced criticism into outright calumny.
The Lebanese themselves, however, appear to grasp their reality more clearly. The fact that their government has agreed to enter direct talks with the Jewish state is nothing short of historic in a country where mere contact with Israeli citizens has long been punishable by death. Their refusal to be subsumed into an Iranian ceasefire and their insistence on separate negotiations, is a clear attempt to escape the Iranian domination that Europe’s policy would help cement.
The messages from Beirut are unmistakable. The Lebanese government has apparently authorised its ambassador to Washington to meet with his Israeli counterpart, called for Hezbollah’s disarmament, and declared Iran’s ambassador as persona non grata. None of this would have been conceivable without the significant degradation of Hezbollah’s military capacity, achieved not through diplomacy, but through Israeli force. Yet Lebanese intentions must now be translated into action.
Israel’s objectives in Lebanon are limited and clear. Jerusalem seeks neither territory nor domination, only the removal of an immediate and persistent threat: the use of Lebanese soil as a platform for attacks on Israeli civilians. The establishment of a buffer zone is not an act of expansion, but of self-defence, intended to prevent anti-tank missile fire on border communities and avert future incursions.
Peace between Israel and Lebanon is not an impossible dream. But it depends on one essential condition: that Lebanon becomes a genuinely sovereign state, free from Iranian control.
By pressing Israel to halt its campaign against Hezbollah, and by insisting on Lebanon’s inclusion in a ceasefire with the Islamic Republic, Europe risks reinforcing the very instability it claims to oppose.
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