Israel’s arbitrary lines and political failures

With every passing day, Israel finds itself sinking deeper into a path from which there is no exit. The weight of its international isolation grows heavier with its continuous wars fought on the lands of others, creating a pattern that makes it impossible to produce the political outcomes Israel envisions.

Seemingly oblivious to the depth of its isolation worldwide, Israel has developed a habit of inventing arbitrary lines. It drew them in Gaza, it drew them in Syria, and now it is drawing the same line across what it regards as its chronic headache in southern Lebanon. These lines have carried many names over the decades: yellow lines, gray lines, buffer zones, security corridors, defensive perimeters, red lines. Israel has been in the business of drawing such lines for the better part of a century, and yet it has failed to achieve what it set out to do through any of them.

The clearest precedent is the “security zone” Israel established in southern Lebanon in 1985, a strip of territory it controlled through a proxy militia and justified as a buffer against cross-border attack. For fifteen years, that zone produced a low-intensity war of attrition that claimed Lebanese and Israeli lives steadily, year after year, with no resolution in sight. When Israel finally withdrew in 2000, it did so in a rushed and disorderly retreat after it became clear there was no more domestic political fuel to maintain their illegal presence in Lebanon. 

Then, the 2006 war on Lebanon killed over 1,000 Lebanese, the vast majority civilians, displaced nearly a quarter of the country’s population, and ended without a single one of Israel’s stated war objectives achieved. Eighteen years later in 2024, Israel launched another war on Lebanon, using almost identical justifications. This pattern keeps repeating itself and fails to produce what it promises, while the people living under bombs suffer the consequences of mindless destruction. 

Israel is now attempting a version of the same arrangement, with a different name in a different decade, in a region that has not forgotten what happened the last time. The fundamental logic that Israel understands but refuses to accept, out of what appears to be a combination of arrogance and stubbornness, is that so long as it fights on the territory of others, no line it draws will hold. The name attached to it is irrelevant. The outcome is the same.

In Palestine, no such line has been made permanent, whether in Gaza, in the West Bank, in front of the yellow line, or behind it. In Lebanon, the calculation is equally clear. No Lebanese actor, whether from the formal state authority or outside it, will submit to lines of division drawn by Israel. Nor will any political agreement with Israel be reached so long as Israeli soldiers remain positioned on that line, and so long as Israel refuses to withdraw fully to positions behind the internationally recognized Lebanese border. Lebanon is unified on the issue of offering no concessions regarding the liberation of Lebanese territory and having no tolerance of Israeli presence on any part of it. That is the reality that lines drawn by force cannot alter, especially when those on the other side have no intention of accepting them.

The Lebanese state, whatever its limitations, cannot survive politically by signing away the south. And the communities of that south have demonstrated, across decades of occupation and bombardment, a capacity for endurance that has consistently outlasted Israeli military timelines. The most likely outcome, if history is our guide, is not a negotiated settlement but a prolonged stalemate that eventually collapses under its own weight, leaving the same fundamental questions unresolved and the same cycle ready to begin again.

Yousef Ramadan is the ambassador of Palestine to Bangladesh