Dana El Kurd (2:51)

callzone Media. Hello everyone. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. My name is Dana El Kurd. I'm a researcher of Arab and Palestinian politics and today I'm joined by Ilya Ayub. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Ilya Ayub (3:07)

Yeah, yeah. Hi Dana. Thank you for having me. My name is Ilia. I'm originally from Lebanon. My background is in both history and journalism and I often write about the region. I'm also part Palestinian and I also write a lot about Israel and Palestine. And obviously in the past few years I've been covering and also worrying a lot about what's been happening.

Dana El Kurd (3:29)

Yeah, thank you so much for joining us, especially at such a difficult time for the listeners. We are recording March 22, 2026 and Israel's attack on Lebanon is ongoing. So we're really grateful to Ilya for joining us and talking to us about what this means and what we're seeing on the ground. Yeah, so maybe I'll start there. Can you lay out for the listener what is happening in Lebanon right now?

Ilya Ayub (3:55)

So what's been happening in Lebanon is directly connected to the US Israeli war on Iran, which started what about 22, 23 days ago or something like that. That was in itself in the context of negotiations between the Americans and the Iranians in Switzerland, mediated by Oman. And just moments later, really that same night, the bombing of Iran started in Lebanon, or rather the way Lebanon enters this story is a couple of days after the assassination of Khamenei Ayatollah of Iran, Hezbollah launched rockets towards Israel and this was used by the Israelis as effectively them saying that we will unleash hell on Lebanon. And that's often how it's been reported. What is often missed even in that context, Amin, is that there was a so called ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon and HEZBOLLAH Obviously for 13 months before that. But that so called ceasefire and the reason I'm saying so called ceasefire had already been violated by the Israelis. And this is figures that come from the UNIFIL, the UN peacekeeping forces in Leb over 15,000 times. Whereas they themselves, in fact even the BBC today, I saw an article today acknowledged that Hezbollah had not violated the ceasefire, which, you know, just, I guess, tells you also where the. Where the mood is at in terms of the coverage since then. Like in the past three weeks, the hell. And this term was used by Israeli officials themselves, that has been unleashed on Lebanon has been unprecedented. And even by Israeli wars on Lebanon standards, which is saying a lot. As of time of recording, at least 20% of the entirety of Lebanon has already been displaced. And for the most part, these are people that had already experienced displacement at least once in 2024 when this war started, if not older patterns of displacements going back to the civil war and the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon in the 80s and 90s and so on. And pretty unclear where this is headed because just hours before we even started recording, they escalated their bombings of bridges connecting south Lebanon to the rest of Lebanon, bridges over the Litany river, which is one of the rivers in the south, as part of the attempt to cut off the entire region of south Lebanon from the rest of the country. And, yeah, we can get into, obviously, more of the details and the impact that this is having on Lebanon itself, of course, because this tends to be, unfortunately, like, not covered as much.

Dana El Kurd (6:18)

Yeah, thank you. So to kind of summarize, because they decided to launch a war against Iran, and obviously there's so much to say about that, we're not going to be able to address every aspect of this conflict. But because of that, and after particularly the assassination of the Ayatollah, Hezbollah launched rockets, and then the Israelis, who had already been breaking the ceasefire between them and Hezbollah that had emerged over the past year, decided to kind of ramp up their attacks. And when we say ramp up their attacks, you know, you've mentioned, like, the destruction of infrastructure, cutting off the south, basically clearing villages, et cetera. The Israeli officials, including Netanyahu, have said they want to impose what they called the Gaza model on Lebanon. So what can we understand from. From this kind of comment?

Ilya Ayub (7:09)

Yeah, thank you. It's important to note that such comments are not new at all, and they have also been uttered in times of quote, unquote, peace. So when there isn't any kind of active conflict. In my own article for 972, which I wrote about, I don't know, two weeks ago, so I quoted a number of those politicians, and I'll just mention a few of them here, Yoav Gallant, who has, of course, since been and still has an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, he threatened to send Lebanon back to the Stone Age. And this was in November 2024. The Diaspora Affairs Minister Amishai cheekily declared in September 2024 that Lebanon does not meet the definition of a state. And he described all of the Shia population of Lebanon as, quote, unquote, hostile, which is genocidal language by definition. And even about what, two, three weeks ago or so. Smotrich, who's one of kind of the main far right politicians in Israel today, said that very soon, as I'm quoting, very soon Dahi will resemble Khan Yunus. Dahi being the southern suburb of Beirut where there's a lot of support for Hezbollah and has always been talked about by the Israelis as like one of the quote, unquote, Hezbollah strongholds. In fact, they pioneered, you might say, their dahi doctrine in 2006, so named after Tahiya. There was a war in 2006 as well between Israel and Hezbollah, which is quite explicitly a policy of bombing civilian infrastructure in order to put pressure on their enemy, in this case Hezbollah, which is basically an acknowledgment that they violate international law as state policy. And on March 11, a member of the Knesset for the same party of Smotry S. Motric said, and I'm quoting, we must conquer territory in southern Lebanon, destroy villages there and annex the territory to the state of Israel, end quote. There's another one, Gadi Eisenkot, who was the former chief of staff of the Israeli army, the IDF said around the same time, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, the Dahid doctrine has never been more relevant than right now and it must be implemented, end quote. Dahit doctrine being the one that I just mentioned, and this is, as I said, not new. Whether in the context of talking about Palestinians in Gaza long before the ongoing genocide, whether in the context of talking about the Lebanese and so on, there has been this train of open utterances of genocidal claiming on behalf of Israeli politicians and military leaders. One needs to know this to understand why they act in certain ways in Lebanon. If it was just about targeting their enemies or whatever, that would be one way of doing warfare. But it wouldn't explain detonating entire villages as they've been doing during the so called ceasefire. It wouldn't explain spraying herbicide, which they did about a month ago over large parts of South Lebanon, including parts of Syria for that matter, which killed crops and so on. It would explain them not allowing farmers to harvest their crops. It would explain all of these things. What would explain all of these things? If you take into account what they say their intentions are in Lebanon, or the very least what they want it to happen in Lebanon, if that makes sense.

Dana El Kurd (10:10)

Yeah. It really seems like the Israeli policy, especially now that there's been really no accountability for what happened in Gaza, is basically to pursue maximum violence, including against civilians, and create, I think, kind of like a no man's land buffer zone around Israel. Now, there are some elements of Israeli society that are, like, religious Zionists, like, messianic types who want to, like, settle and, like, expand. But aside from those, those people, like, I think even we would call, like, centrists in Israel or like the liberals in Israel are like, okay, well, yeah, we do need. We do need a buffer. So we need to flatten Gaza. We need. We need to flatten southern Lebanon. And what this translates to, I mean, in Lebanon in particular is, I think, you know, some estimates say over a thousand have been killed in just the past, like, two, two and a half weeks. Yeah. And then millions displaced, right?

Ilya Ayub (11:07)

Yeah, 20% of the country. Lebanon is one of the smallest countries in the world, and South Lebanon is one of the only regions in the country that you might call like a breadbasket in terms of agriculture. So, yeah, 20% of the population has already been displaced, and those are those that could be registered. So you can imagine numbers being higher than that. And as I said, a lot of those people have already been displaced a number of times before, even in 2024, when there was the initial escalation, but many of them even going back to 2006 when there was the war, and in some cases even further back in the 80s and 90s when the Israelis occupied southern Lebanon. And I guess this is really important to note because obviously what's happening today is connected to the war on Iran. Of course it's directly connected. But if one only knows this, I think we miss what I would describe as a bit of an Israeli obsession with Lebanon specifically for a long time. There's, like, historical roots to all of this. It even goes back to the Israelis having ties with the local Christian far right in the 60s, especially as the 70s and 80s during the Civil war, during the civil war in Lebanon. And a bit of this almost ideological thing of like, we will focus on the non Muslims and hope that they're on our side, that sort of thing, which is a policy that the Israelis have done within Israel, Palestine and in Syria. You know, this is an ongoing thing as well, and so on and so forth. I really want to emphasize this because I have had the experience when I read a lot of the coverage and, you know, listen to podcasts, what have you that even among people who don't support the state of Israel, who are very critical of it, there tends to be, understandably, because Lebanon is less powerful than Iran, as not as influential on the global scene or whatnot. But there's usually a tendency to link what happens in Lebanon directly to what's happening in Iran. And this has been true in the past three weeks. And as I said, this is, of course, partly the case. It's not completely irrelevant. Hezbollah did even state that the reason why they launched those rockets was to avenge the assassination of Dayatullah. So of course it's directly related. But there's all of this wider in all the context that can help, at the very least, explain why the Israelis are doing that in Lebanon and also help explain what's happening to Lebanon itself, which tends to be not. Not as focused on.

Dana El Kurd (13:16)

I mean. Yeah. Let's discuss for a moment where Lebanon was before these latest attacks, before the ceasefire, before October 7. For the Lebanese people, it has been increasingly unlivable. There's been a financial crisis, an economic crisis. Lebanon has hosted huge amounts of refugees from Syria, from Palestine continues to these conditions now where effectively, like what? Like, half of the country is, like, inaccessible, or some large portion of the country is inaccessible. The capital city is being bombed, residential buildings, like, there's nothing kind of off limits. What is the situation now for regular people who first and foremost have not had any kind of, like, sense of accountability from their own government and have had also Hezbollah sort of, you know, acting unilaterally in some ways. Obviously, this does not excuse Israeli actions in any way. But what's the kind of, like, sense of emotion right now among Lebanese people?

Ilya Ayub (14:18)

I mean, despair is. Is, I guess, one word to describe it. There's. There's definitely a sense of helplessness. Hezbollah is not a popular party in the country in terms of, like, the percentage of the population, the recent actions, whether this one like, after October 7th, the decision to join the war was unpopular and still is unpopular. This is something that the Israelis are trying to capitalize on, obviously, either because they want to just destroy the party or because as part of doing that, they also want to destabilize all of Lebanon. Sort of both of those things are happening at the same time. The current government in Lebanon is led by the guy who was the head of the ICJ when South Africa had started its case of accusing Israel of genocide like, a year or so ago. So he's by no means naive of what Israeli intentions are. But I think what's really important to understand of what's kind of the mood of the country is the sense that no matter what we decide as a nation, it's completely out of our hands. And this goes beyond even questions related to Hezbollah and Hezbollah's actions, because as I said, even when Hezbollah does not launch rockets or whatnot, the Israelis continue to violate ceasefires anyway. They encroach land anyway, they dynamite entire villages anyway. They spray those herbicides and so on and so on anyway. And it's one of those things that it's also important to know this, to understand why there are people, for example, in South Lebanon that, regardless of their personal feelings towards Hezbollah, don't see any alternatives. Because in fact, there are none. Something that I know isn't talked about as much and certainly not covered as much, is the fact that the armed force that is supposed to be the alternative to Hezbollah, the thing that we hear about all the time, that the Americans, what they want is for Hezbollah to be disarmed and for the Lebanese army to take over, and so on and so forth. And this is basically the stated goal of the entire world, in a sense, or at least a good chunk of it. And in fact, it's officially the stated policy of the Lebanese state itself. That is their intention as far as, like, their public declarations and so on. And they have made certain moves to that end as well. But the Lebanese army is the army of a very poor country that has been in economic crisis for a long time. When we had wildfires in 2019, there wasn't even enough equipment to tackle them. And foreign government had to donate helicopters and stuff like that. And that Lebanese army is also heavily subsidized, if you want to say, funded in any case by the United States itself, the same United States that obviously heavily funds and arms the Israelis. Of course, the weapons that the Lebanese get is nothing compared to the weapons that the Israelis get. There's no such thing as an iron dome in Lebanon. None of these things are available to the Lebanese. And so effectively, what is being asked of Lebanon itself, and especially of South Lebanon, of Dahiyya and East Lebanon, ultimately of all of Lebanon, is that just accept your fate. Just accept that there's nothing you can do about the Israelis. There's nothing you can do about their actions in Lebanon proper. I'm not even talking about any actions like rockets towards Israel. I'm talking their actions in Lebanon itself. And they're also asking Hezbollah, for example, to disarm, which in and of itself I am not opposed to. But in the context of what has been happening in the context of what's happening now. I think it's ludicrous to imagine that people in a context like in south Lebanon, who have decades now long experience of seeing Israeli occupation, of seeing Israeli troops on their lands, no matter like multiple different, you know, different prime ministers in Israel taking the charge and whatnot, but that continuing to be this kind of almost eternal fact, in a sense at least that's how it feels. They're being asked to just disarm and hope for the best. That's really effectively the policy towards Lebanon at the moment. I saw an interview with one of the French ministers a few days ago and she was asked why aren't we doing more to help Lebanon by someone in the audience or whatever. And she said that we're sending humanitarian aid and we have unified forces in southern Lebanon and so on. UNIFIL forces, those UN peacekeeping forces, as I said, don't have a legal right to even retaliate against the Israelis, including when Israel bombs them, which it has done at least twice in the past few weeks. The Lebanese army rarely engages with the Israelis. They don't even have the means in the first place. And so what are people expected to do? And this is sort of the context in which everything else almost doesn't matter. Like in terms of whether you personally like the Hezbollah. I certainly don't. And whatever one's personal feelings or even politics is towards a political party because they are also members of the Lebanese parliament, towards the state itself, whatever it is that it really feels that ultimately it's out of our hands. And this is a component of this entire thing that I rarely see, to be honest, discussed as though there are two sides to the story or two equal armed actors for that. Even non armed equal states for that matter. And it's just not the case.

Dana El Kurd (19:04)

Yeah, thank you so much for laying that out like that. I think that you're right that it's not well acknowledged how disempowered the international community basically expects people in the region, including the Lebanese, to behave and like accept the fact that they are collateral damage in Israel's perpetual desire for domination.

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Dana El Kurd (22:18)

American political scientist Nathan Brown just published this article called Israel's Forever wars for the Carnegie Endowment. His argument is that there's been a shift in the Israeli policy where he says it used to be Deterrence, domination and diplomacy have long blended in Israeli statecraft. And today he says they've been eclipsed by something harsher, quote, a preference for domination, degradation and the prevention of the adversary's recovery. I mean, I think he's right, though. I think that we've seen kind of a, at least a lower intensity, maybe not as high intensity, but we've seen a long scale policy of domination even before this moment. But I think this moment definitely bring it out. Which brings me to my question of like, for Hezbollah in particular, in the last year, two years, like there have been assassinations, we saw the pager attack. You know, it seems that Hezbollah has been very effectively weakened. And since the Israelis are now kind of going all out, what do you think is going to happen to Hezbollah as a group, set aside perhaps their public support or lack thereof.

Ilya Ayub (23:25)

So it's important to note that Hezbollah comes from a certain context. They rose in the context of south Lebanon, during the Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, they rose as the alternative to existing parties that were either seen as too complicit with the Israelis or maybe too weak or complacent or whatnot. And essentially because there was a need for something like Hezbollah at the time. And again, this is completely regardless of my personal opposition to a lot of their politics, whether it's in Lebanon or especially in Syria. But that question, if you want to call it the Lebanese question, is completely being sidestepped. It's not being tackled whatsoever. And in fact, it's not that dissimilar, I think, from the Israeli attempt to erase or try to pretend as though the Palestinian question as well can be completely sidestepped, that they can just continue to pursue this policy of just complete domination, as you said, make these Abimek accord deals with the UAE and some of the other Arab states, for example, without any mentions of Palestine or Palestinians and so on and so forth. And in the case of Lebanon, it's like less official because there isn't that component. But the spirit of it is pretty similar. There is a sort of like a legalistic framework of the land for peace. And I think explaining that at least briefly would, I think contextualize the quote that you just read out to us here that the Israelis occupied Arab territories in 1967, Palestinian territory obviously there being Gaza, the West bank and East Jerusalem. Egypt, of course, was the Sinai and Syria was and still is the Golan Heights. And so the land for peace worked. In the case of Egypt, they occupied the Sinai and then as part of a peace deal with Egypt they returned the Sinai to the Egyptians. It didn't happen with Syria. The Syrian Golan Heights have been occupied since 1967, were effectively de facto annexed in 1981. They've been annexed for so long that Smotrich himself was born in an illegal settlement in the Syrian Golan Heights. And I'm mentioning this because the Lebanese state, the prime minister I mentioned earlier about what a week ago, 10 days ago or so, said that he's hoping for a land for peace framework, which to me shows just how desperate even they are. They don't know what to do. They have no options in front of them. So what they're hoping is that by doing all of these things, public declarations against Hezbollah, by declaring some of their activities illegal, by I think a few days ago they said the media cannot call them the resistance, for example, which is in Arabic, how they would be referred to, and so on and so forth, these attempts to placate the Americans especially, and so on, and maybe show that we're doing something about this. Can you stop? The Israelis essentially haven't achieved anything. The Israelis have just escalated control, continue to escalate, continue to bomb more and more and more, larger and larger parts of the country. But that land for peace framework, which is the framework since the 60s, basically is as far as I can tell right now the only thing that the Lebanese government hope that they can even use. But the difficulty in all of that, like a, I don't think it's realistic because of the Syrian example, like they haven't, they have never given up the Golden Heights. I don't see any reason why they would if they do decide to occupy all of south Lebanon. And also because the shift, and this is what you were referring to with that quote of that person you mentioned, the shift in Israeli politics in the past few decades, isn't even that, if you might call it strategic, that we're going to do the thing even if it's illegal, we're going to occupy land even if it's illegal. But the ultimate purpose of it is something that resembles some kind of diplomatic negotiation. It's domination almost for its own sake. There is no end goal necessarily. You mentioned there are of course religious Zionists, but you also have others that are not interested in settlements, they're just interested in destroying the land. Like destroying, having this so called buffer zone, which is a euphemism for just. In no man's land, just destroying everything. And so the policy can shift in a sense, but the intention is to just try and dominate for as long as possible for its own sake. And this is a wider pattern in Israeli politics that I don't know how well understood it is, maybe a bit more now than before, because even before the ongoing war in Iran started, Naftali Bennett, who was the prime minister of Israel and reportedly wants to replace Netanyahu in the upcoming elections, said that Turkey is the next Iran. Virtually any Israeli paper, center and further to the right, which is most of them, you read them, there is someone who has at some point, and I'm not talking just a random person, I'm talking like a high ranking politician and military official at some point describe Turkey as being next. And what needs to be understood with all of this is not, oh, can they actually do this or whatnot, because maybe they can't. I don't know, I hope we never find out. But it's that like they can't stop. It's becoming an end in itself. There has to be an enemy. There has to be a constant creation almost of like an external enemy in, like in Israeli political discourse today, because nothing else works in Israeli politics. And this is a shift in Israeli politics in the past, I'm going to say, I don't know, two or three decades. I don't know how one would start counting that shift. And it does go back to the Palestinian question in the sense of them not wanting to address it at all, not even pretending that they're going to, because they've been pretending, obviously not actually doing it, but even pretending that they were doing so with the Ostro Accord and whatnot. There isn't even that. I think it's useful to understand their attitude towards Lebanon as at least in part a continuation of that attitude towards Palestinians. So in many ways, like the Palestinian question itself remains the one that they want to avoid at all costs and whatever that means, bombing Iran, bombing Lebanon, bombing other countries later, I don't know, obviously bombing Syria, they've already done it, and so on and so forth.

Dana El Kurd (29:08)

Genocide as a tool of conflict management.

Ilya Ayub (29:11)

Yeah, yeah, it's just domination for its own sake because they can't imagine any kind of other alternative and they haven't had a need to do so because, you know, as you said, they've gotten away with a lifestream genocide for over two years now. Why would they think differently about Lebanon, a very poor country that, you know, doesn't have that many resources and whatnot. Which isn't to say that they will succeed and they will win and so on, but this is what they've been

Dana El Kurd (29:36)

saying, this is the intention, I think that's very valid. I mean, it's not a coincidence. You said, you know, you would try to trace it back to like the past two or three decades. It's not a coincidence that this mentality and this reorientation of Israel's entire policy especially comes after the end of the second Palestinian intifada and then not even just no meaningful negotiations, no negotiations at all. Like you said, there was the land for peace mantra. The idea with that is that they were going to get peace if they give back land. But the underlying assumption of that is that they would be held accountable by the international community, by their own allies. After the second intifada, basically the Americans and the international community gave up essentially even pretending that Palestinians would ever get anything. This has culminated in now an Israel that, as you said, it's domination for domination's sake. And they think that they can maintain control in this way. Now Turkey is going to be a different beast than Iran. Turkey is a NATO member, but as we've seen in the last couple of weeks, like they don't care about blowing up the entire region. They don't care about the Strait of Hormuz being closed. They don't care about oil fields being attacked. They don't care about, you know, the global economy tanking. Like it's not inconceivable that they attack Turkey. Even if the outcome might be different or we might see like further escalations. It's not inconceivable. And now I just want to point this out. The very kind of pro Israel think tank in Washington, the Foundation for the defense of Democracy. Their new line now is to say land for peace is outdated. Now we need to pursue instead peace for land.

Ilya Ayub (31:24)

There you go.

Dana El Kurd (31:24)

Yeah. Which means acceptance of Zionism earns these people a right to govern themselves.

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Ilya Ayub (34:27)

It's a political vision that does not see the other as human, as having agency, as deserving anything really. It's not like they have an opposing side or an opponent that they want to defeat, but ultimately have some kind of settlement and move beyond that or whatnot. There is no long term plan is what I'm trying to say, I guess and maybe to emphasize a bit more in the case of Lebanon. So what happens next for Hezbollah, for example? I'm not entirely sure. I don't think anyone really knows. It seems clear that the Israelis underestimated their capabilities. But to what extent that will matter if the Israelis continue to just bomb and bomb and bomb Lebanon for weeks on end, if not months on end, so on, I can't tell. What I can tell is that in the same way as the Israelis want to ignore the Palestinian question, but it's still there, it haunts them in a way, because I work on hauntology. In case of Lebanon, there is also that in many ways that if you look at the shift in discourse even within Israeli politics From let's say 70s, but especially 80s onwards, I'm not going to say it was never good, but there was a stronger component of Israeli politicians, let's say a higher percentage of them anyway, that were, for lack of a better term, pragmatic, that were willing to have concessions, that were willing to have whatever, if only because they just did not want to deal with occupying a foreign country that they had no intention to legally annex, as they did with the. Legally, none of this is legal, but within Israeli law, I mean, as they did with the Golan Heights. And so that's what I'm saying in the case of Lebanon, that it's almost like the worst case scenario is what's currently happening and that's completely regardless of what happens to Hezbollah, because Hezbollah can disappear tomorrow and the problem will continue to be the same, if not just get worse. The country has no economy to speak of. The currency was already devalued during the economic crisis, was one of the highest devaluations in the world. And there are no prospects going forward in terms of making this a country that can even sustain itself. It's already very import dependent. But if you exclude South Lebanon and it being a breadbasket, East Lebanon as well, by the way, a breadbasket. And that's another area of Lebanon that the Israelis have been constantly bombarding, to paraphrase that Israeli minister, that like Lebanon is not a state, it's not a nation. It doesn't, it doesn't. It's just a place that's, that's on the map. And that will pose a problem obviously, first and foremost for us, like for the Lebanese and people who live in Lebanon. But it is also a problem geopolitically, It's a problem internationally. It will freak out the EU in terms of the refugee crisis because the EU has actually counted on Lebanon to keep a lot of people in Lebanon. They send like a billion euros, I think it was two or three years ago or something like that. I wrote about it for this year at the Time, actually, because Lebanon had the highest percentage, maybe still does now, I don't know, of refugees per capita, so to speak. Like, compared to citizens in the world, 1 million or so Syrian refugees with roughly 5 million Lebanese or something like that. Along those lines, there's no census in Lebanon. So I'm saying all of this to sort of emphasize why there is this sense of despair in the country and why if that's not even remotely addressed, whatever fires we're seeing now, whatever, like, horrors we're seeing, I just don't see any. Any way they will stop anytime soon. Whatever happens, even to Hezbollah next, there's no reason to imagine that some other group wouldn't be formed at some point because people live there. People are from that land. We're talking about a million people. They have nowhere else to go. It's not like the Lebanese passport is so good that you can just, you know, go on a flight and go elsewhere. There's nowhere else. They're just going to stay in Lebanon. And many of them would want to, of course, go back to south Lebanon. This problem is not going away. But if you hear the rhetoric of yo Netanyahu and your other politicians, like, this is not part of the picture. This has nothing to do with what their intentions are. They're exclusively talking to other Israelis. The debate is not whether we should destroy south Lebanon or whether we should destroy Lebanon itself. The debate is what do we do once it's destroyed. And even that is barely a debate. But, like, that's the extent of where it goes in terms of, like, Israeli discourse. And yeah, I guess maybe just to drive the point home, that if the Israelis themselves are not stopped in one way or another by their allies, obviously America has the biggest leverage, or the EU being the second closest one in one way or another, whatever the means are. Economic boycott, withdrawing your ambassador, as Spain has done a couple of weeks ago, but just like on a global scale, like, even maybe dwarfing the boycott campaign against apartheid, South Africa at the time. This problem is just going to expand. And people listening to this, of course, see a version of that. Iran can just close the Strait of Hormuz and then suddenly everyone. This is everyone's problem. Israel and America bombing those oil depots. And of course Iran has also done that in retaliation, but proportionally, still more the Americans than the Israelis has polluted. I forgot the number, but the equivalent of 84 countries combined in terms of, like, the toxins released in the air, these are things that people in Iran are breathing in. And the entire region relies on desalination plants. And the Americans bombed one in Iran. Iran retaliated and bombed another one in Bahrain. If that continues, who knows? There's been increasing attempts, not just attempts, actual strikes, including just yesterday against, like, nuclear facilities or, like, close enough to nuclear facilities. So who knows what would happen then? To say it's out of control would be meaningless at this point. But there are levels of where this can go. And Lebanon is, in a sense, deceivingly small. There's a book called Beware of Small States that talks about Lebanon, because a lot of the world is happening in Lebanon, to put it maybe metaphorically, and the trends that are being done to the Lebanese or to people in Lebanon, like the dahi doctrine in 2006 was then used in Gaza, obviously. And now they're saying that they're going to use the Gaza methodology in Lebanon, just like it came back to Lebanon, in a sense. But the point is that this will continue. There is no objective reason to believe that if Hezbollah is destroyed and completely disarmed and what have you, that this problem is going to go away, because if anything, a new beast of some kind is going to be created in the fires in the same way that Hezbollah was created in the initial ones. And so, yeah, the problem ultimately, and I say this as someone who has been campaigning, writing, gotten death threats from Hezbollah supporters in 2019 when I was, as part of the protest, we were beaten up by them. This comes from no sympathy whatsoever towards them. It's just an acknowledgement, I'm also a historian, that they come from a certain context. And if that context is not acknowledged at all, and in fact, the conditions that brought them are now much worse than even the 80s, why would we believe that something else won't come along later on in one way or another? And this notion that the Israelis have just a buffer zone and then destabilize Lebanon endlessly, or whatever it might be, it also comes from this sort of imperialist hubris that they believe that this won't harm them in one way or another, that they can endlessly and permanently have a neighbor to their north that has a lot of armed components and also constantly at war, or whatever it might be. It's hubris. It's imperialist hubris, and it's also extremely, extremely dangerous, even beyond just what would happen to people in Lebanon.

Dana El Kurd (41:44)

Yeah, it's hard to, like you said, underscore how apocalyptic this is turning out to be, whether it's we're worried about the refugee waves that are going to be generated because of this, whether we're worried about the ecological impact, whether we're worried about non state actors, militia groups, violent groups emerging in the future, like on every level, this is not sustainable. I don't know. I feel like I'm screaming into a void. Except we've known, we've known, like you said for decades that this is not sustainable. This is not a sustainable situation in the Middle east. And I want people to know that this is not a Trump problem. This has long been a problem of American decision makers. Biden in particular also bears a lot to blame for this situation. It's just like you said, it's, it's an imperial hubris, both on the part of Israel and the United States. But it's also at its root, the, the fact that they completely dehumanize people in the Middle East. Like they, they don't see them as, as human beings that will have human reactions. So, yeah, I'm, I don't, I'm not saying, I'm not adding anything to what you're saying. I'm just emphasizing here because I'm as outraged as you.

Ilya Ayub (43:05)

Yeah, yeah. And the thing is, it's sort of the same principle, in a sense, of that same understanding that also led me to, like, for years now, to oppose the Iranian regime. It's that same understanding. It's not just that their brutality towards people within Iran, of course, but they have engaged in imperialist campaigns in Syria most notably, but also in Iraq and in Lebanon. It's like a different kind of thing. But there is that, that component of it as well, that hasn't contributed to make them a better opponent of the Israelis or the Americans. If anything, it's made them weaker. One of the many problems, but I think the biggest one now is that this is, and this is completely regardless of the ethics of the Iranian regime, which I've opposed for several years as well. This has nothing to do with supporting them or excusing their actions or anything like that, but just understanding why the Israelis are acting, specifically the Israelis are acting the way they have been acting for years now. There is this tendency. I mean, if you go on the Garden, for example, now you see like crisis in the Middle east and then you can click on it and then just go back years and years and years as though it's the same thing. As though, like, you know, it's just this place that has crises and in, almost like you expect that this will happen. But as I think people know a bit better now with the global component of it, this also has A global ramification. Even the technologies that are being pioneered, if you want, by the Israelis and also by the Americans to some extent in places like Gaza, then get exported elsewhere. Palantir is now going to be. Palantir AI is now going to be a core component of the US Military. These are things that are like. Because that's what I mean by like, Lebanon is deceptively small. It's like, it's not important geopolitically for the most part, but because that is the case, and of course, Gaza as well, then it allows. It has allowed the Israelis to get away with a lot of things. So maybe this is, I don't know, a cliche or, I don't know, it's a meaningless thing to repeat. But the problem really goes back to impunity. The problem really goes back to the fact that nothing the Israelis have ever done, at least in the past several decades, has had any consequences to them, to what they do to the region and so on. And this is absolutely a bipartisan problem in America. None of this would be possible without the Americans. There's a very good argument to be made that if we're talking about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, we need to say the American Israeli occupation of Palestine, the bombing of Lebanon, we need to say it. It's also an American. None of this would be physically possible, diplomatically possible, economically possible, were it not for this unconditional support that the Israelis have gotten from the Americans for decades and decades now. If Biden had done anything about Israel's genocide in Gaza, really almost anything, I don't think we would be where we are today. And so, no, this is not a Trump problem. It's just that Trump being Trump is making it much worse, speeding it up, it's just exploding everything even faster, speeding it up and adding new dimensions to it and so on and so forth. But the problem goes back to American imperialist hubris. A lot of people not knowing what they're even doing in the region and the consequences of it all. So, yeah, I'm not someone who tends to be very pessimistic necessarily, and stuff like that, but there's a lot of ways in which what is currently happening in terms of the Israeli and American war in Iran and Israel war in Lebanon and so on, that can just go to different levels that I genuinely, and I'm someone who has even reported on conflicts for a long time now, generally struggle to even imagine. And I don't want to sound like I'm just panicking or anything like that, or there is a component of that, but it is a real problem that if Israel is not stopped in any way at this point, this will continue and there's no objective reason to believe otherwise.

Dana El Kurd (46:51)

Yeah, extremely alarming to say the least. But thank you Ilya so much for making the time to explain this. I'll link to the Fire these times in the show. Notes Ilya has a excellent podcast and it's not Lebanon specific, it's kind of an internationalist perspective. Full disclosure, I've been on it many times. I've produced some episodes so so yeah, there's not a bias, but it really is a good, very good podcast. In any case, thank you so much Ilya, and hopefully we'll have you on on better times.

Ilya Ayub (47:24)

Thanks. Thank you. Then thank you for having me.

Dana El Kurd (47:29)

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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