Lebanon Prime Minister Nawaf Salam took office in January last year with many fanfares. A former leading judge of the International Court of Justice has been praised for leading side the court’s ruling that Israel is plausible commitment to genocide in Gaza. As Prime Minister, he has pledged to “rescue, reform and rebuild” Lebanon.
However, after taking office for more than four months, Salam has failed to achieve domestic reforms, increasingly advocating for a US-friendly agenda in line with Israel’s interests.
In a series of highly publicized speeches and high-profile media interviews, Salam reiterated the repeated cliches about resuscitation of Lebanon’s economy. Meanwhile, it dismissed armed resistance (both Palestine and Lebanon) and called for “peace” following normalization with Israel. His attitude reached a point that bothers football fans who chanted “Zionist, Zionist” when attending last week’s game.
Economically, Salam has not launched a single developmental project of value and has not implemented any financial or financial policies aimed at addressing the root causes of Lebanon’s financial collapse or mitigating high inflation and unemployment.
Salam’s plan for bank reform is in installments. First such laws were accused of lifting bank secrets and often entrenching corruption among political elites.
Lifting secrets is, in principle, a positive step. However, granting international organizations blanket access to bank accounts under the pretext of fighting money laundering and terrorism also raised suspicions of calling laws for national or foreign forces targeting foreign communities associated with Hezbollah.
Moreover, the secret has historically been the main incentive to attract foreign capital to countries that rely heavily on the services sector. In the absence of serious economic plans, the secret ends spell out the end of capital inflows other than family remittances.
A mediocre vision
There are no signs of such a serious plan. In addition to hoping that Lebanon’s capital will play an intermediate role in reconstructing Syria, Salam’s vision is a mediocre replay of the old calls of Lebanese expatriates and Arab Persian Gulf capital to be leaked through summer tourism.
In contrast, Israel’s reconstruction in Lebanon after the destructive war is pending. Salam paid lip service for the post-war reconstruction. Its estimated cost is $11 billion. In fact, he does not provide a single donor meeting or invited assistance from a country that is willing to provide it without attaching a string.
Worse, before formulating concrete measures to strengthen Lebanese forces to restore deterrence without seeking guarantees against continuing violations of Israel’s Lebanese sovereignty, the restructuring of the union with disarming Hezbollah aims to intimidate war-torn Lebanese communities.
A judge celebrated for denouncement of Gaza’s genocide may be remembered as the perpetrator and the prime minister who tried to normalize
To add fuel to the fire, Lebanese authorities appear to be adopting security measures that reinforce Israel’s sectarian logic.
During the war, Israel intentionally targeted the Shiite population, suggesting that this was a war against Shiites, not the general Lebanese people.
After the war, the Lebanese government carried out wholesale operations to stop and search normal Lebanese Shiites returning from Iraq or Iran at airports on suspicion of importing funds to Hezbollah, in a clear case of sect profiling.
The restoration impasse plays in favor of Israeli expansionist designs to clear border villages of their inhabitants, in the hopes that conditions will be annexed when they are permitted or converted into dead “buffer” zones.
Salam ignores the country’s violations of the southern borders and the intentional disregard of its displaced people, in stark contrast to his obvious enthusiasm to strengthen control along the border with Syria and speed up portrayal of these boundaries. On a recent visit to major intersections between the two countries, Salam declared that “the intersection of the border is a mirror of Lebanon’s sovereignty.”
This selective application of sovereignty fits the historic colonial logic of securitizing borders between Arab countries, and underestimates violations of territorial integrity at its border with Zionist states.
In the footprints of Abbas
Salam’s reactionary politics, transcends sectarianism, becomes more evident with Palestinian armed resistance and the treatment of paths to liberate Palestine. Not satisfied with seeking to disarm Hezbollah, Salam dismissed the effectiveness of the Palestinian armed struggle as a bygone relic.
He also supported the efforts of Palestinian authorities Mahmoud Abbas school to disarm Palestinian camps in Lebanon despite the fact that they are light, inert and pale compared to Israeli arsenals and daily fire volumes.
In speaking of the gestures, Salam presented Abbas with the Honorary Award during his recent visit to Lebanon. He praised his Palestinian counterpart as a “warrior of peace” and an “architect in Oslo” who had obvious insight into moving from the path of revolution to the concept of a nation.
The dissonance between Salam’s assessment of the “political interests” of the “peace process” and the tragic aftermath of Oslo further underscores the unstable logic of performance sovereignty and the empty rhetoric of state-building.
Salam appears to advocate a similar path in Lebanon. His archaic remarks about the end of the era of “exporting the Iranian Revolution” are not nonexistent Iranian efforts to establish Islamic governments in Arab countries, but rather a clear side jab of Iranian-backed armed resistance against Israel.
These statements were followed by media statements welcoming normalization with Israel in line with the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. The initiative supports solutions for the two states that are currently dying.
After a quarter-century of Israel’s incommunity, repeated calls to implement this initiative before ending Gaza’s genocide and ensuring the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from newly occupied Lebanese territory put the horse of peace in front of the wagon of justice. It also violates the fundamental principles of international relations that involve relying on the reliance on the threat of force or force for effective diplomacy.
Salam’s own effectiveness in translating his words into actions is questionable. He comes from a prominent politician, but unlike his predecessor, he has no Lebanon social foundation or political influence. This is especially true because tenure after 2026 depends on the outcome of parliamentary elections.
But he is not alone. His inflammatory rhetoric aside, the prime minister’s defeatist politics and geopolitical integrity with the pro-US military is in sync with the more measured people of President Joseph Own. The pro-Israel overture of Ahmed al-Sharaa, the new ruler of Syria, is likely to melt Salam and his camp even further.
The future of the last active frontier of non-Palestinian resistance is at risk if Salam and other regional leaders bring Lebanon closer to US orbit and tie the ropes of Lebanese communities that have resisted Israeli occupation in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza.
The problem no longer concerns Hezbollah or Hamas, but the fate of an armed struggle against Israeli occupation and colonialism. Among these changing sands, the judge celebrated for denouncement of Gaza’s genocide may be remembered as the prime minister who sought to normalize with its perpetrators.
Hicham Safieddine is Canadian Research Chair of Modern Middle Eastern History and an Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of the Bank State: The Financial Infrastructure of Lebanon (SUP, 2019), Editor of Arab Marxism and National Liberation: The Selected Written by Mahdiamer (Brill, 2020), and Co-editor of Clarion in Syria: The Patriots’ Call to the Civil War of 1860 (2019).
(Source: Middle Eastern Eye)