The Confusion About Lebanon

Friends, Psalm 83 names ten ancient peoples we believe will one day conspire together to assure “That the name of Israel may be remembered no more” (v. 4): Edom, the Ishmaelites, Moab, the Hagrites, Gebal, Ammon, Amalek, Philistia, Tyre, and Assyria. They’re Israel’s close neighbors, and they share one purpose — wiping Israel off the map. Persia, modern-day Iran, isn’t on that list. Its role shows up instead in Ezekiel 38, pictured as a far-off power drawing nearer nations into its orbit in the “latter days.”

Watch the headlines from the last four months and that Ezekiel pattern starts to look familiar: a distant power pulling the strings of Israel’s nearer neighbors. Psalm 83 names Tyre and the rest of southern Lebanon outright. It doesn’t name Iran. But Iran’s own officials, in their own words and actions, keep putting themselves behind the wheel of what’s unfolding there. You don’t need to read prophecy into the headlines to notice the pattern repeating.

A story has surfaced in some corners of Western media that deserves to be called out plainly: Iran, somehow, as Lebanon’s protector. The claim rests on nothing more than Iran’s insistence that any U.S. deal include an Israeli withdrawal. Tucker Carlson has been one of the louder voices pushing it, casting Israel as the aggressor against Lebanon’s Christians and treating Iran’s negotiating posture as a kind of guardianship over the Lebanese people.

Israel didn’t open this front by choice: Hezbollah began firing rockets, drones, and missiles into Israeli border communities within a day of October 7, in solidarity with Hamas, and kept it up for well over a year before Israeli ground forces ever crossed into Lebanon. Israeli forces are in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah — the very organization that threatens the Christian-led government Carlson claims to be defending. And we don’t have to take Israel’s word for that. Lebanon’s own leaders have said it themselves, on the world stage.

President Joseph Aoun, a Maronite Christian, told CNN in early June that Iran was using Lebanon as a bargaining chip in its talks with the U.S. and called the situation unacceptable. That same day, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam echoed the same sentiment asking Iran to stop using Lebanon’s people as leverage in its own negotiations. 

Iran’s leadership, of course, insist it’s not true. But that same week, Iran’s negotiators in Switzerland were celebrating sanctions relief, a lifted blockade, and a reconstruction package — concessions won specifically through progress on the Lebanon front. Iran wasn’t a reluctant bystander to Lebanon’s suffering. It was trading on it.

This isn’t new behavior from Iran’s Hezbollah working inside Lebanon’s borders. In 2005, Hezbollah assassinated Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, the man who had brought Lebanon’s civil war to an end, in a car bombing. In fact, Hezbollah’s 1985 founding charter called openly for an Islamic system of government in Lebanon and there is zero possibility of that coexisting with Lebanon’s constitutional arrangement which requires a Christian president. That’s not protection. That’s a foreign-directed force removing the Lebanese leader who stood in its way.

The claim that Israel threatens Lebanon’s Christians fails completely upon the revelation of where Hezbollah actually operates. In March, the IDF found a tunnel system beneath a church in the southern village of El-Khiam, rebuilt during what was supposed to be an active ceasefire. Days later, Hezbollah took over the Christian village of Qawzah outright, firing rockets and anti-tank missiles from inside it. In May, Hezbollah rockets struck Saint George’s Orthodox Church in Marjaayoun directly, with no Israeli forces anywhere near the building.

The pattern is deliberate: settle weapons and fighters inside religious sites and civilian towns, fire from there, then let the cameras direct blame at Israel.

The clearest evidence came this month at Majdal Zoun, just four miles from the Israeli border, where Israeli troops uncovered a tunnel descending nearly 100 feet underground — past blast doors, through a passage wide enough for a vehicle. All this directly beneath a working mosque. Inside were roughly 50 assembled drones and nearly nine tons of additional explosives, a decade in the building, funded and engineered by Iran throughout, and independently verified by journalists.

So who actually wants this war to end? Lebanon’s own government, under President Aoun, has spent the past year trying to reassert its sovereignty and rein in armed groups outside state control, including taking legal steps toward disarming Hezbollah. Five separate rounds of direct talks between Israeli and Lebanese diplomats have produced one tentative framework after another.

Each time, Hezbollah — which has no legal say in any of these negotiations — has rejected the result. Its leader, Naim Qassem dismissed the talks as a farce, insisting the fighting will continue as long as what he calls “occupation” exists. A senior IRGC commander went so far as to replace the defensive wording with offensive terms requiring the removal of Israel from the region entirely and demanding withdrawal to pre-war lines before any truce could even be considered.  This, even as rocket fire into Israel continues from close range.

Lebanon’s elected government is trying, in good faith, to bring this to an end. Hezbollah — armed, funded, and directed by Iran — keeps standing in the way.

Hezbollah and Tehran have mastered the art of rewriting the narrative to suit themselves: Israeli self-defense becomes “aggression.” A security buffer becomes “occupation.” Continuing to fight becomes “resistance.” It’s a vocabulary built to shift the weight of this war onto the people absorbing rocket fire, rather than the ones directing it. The same playbook — a proxy force, deniability, and a story that recasts the defender as the aggressor — is, at least in type, exactly what Ezekiel’s prophecy describes Persia and its allies doing in the last days.

The same month, Iran tested the same playbook against Washington directly — striking shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, then treating the American response as the provocation.

There’s another claim circulating that deserves a direct answer, because it gets the story backward: that Israel’s presence in Lebanon is evidence of a secret “Greater Israel” ambition to expand and dominate its neighbors rather than simply survive among them.

An honest look at the evidence produces the opposite conclusion. Israel is very likely the only nation on earth that has repeatedly given back land it won in wars it did not start: it returned the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt, withdrew fully from Gaza in 2005 (only to watch residents elect Hamas, which immediately began incursions into Israel), pulled out unilaterally from Lebanon in 2000, and has ceded significant portions of Judea and Samaria under successive agreements. By a widely cited estimate from the Jewish Virtual Library, Israel has now withdrawn from more than 93 percent of the territory it captured in the defensive war of 1967.

And what has that pattern brought in return? Rockets. Suicide bombings. The horror of October 7. And now, it seems, a reputation in some quarters as a would-be empire scheming to conquer the region. No other nation faces quite this particular injustice: the more land it surrenders, the more it gets accused of secretly wanting more. Restraint has purchased Israel neither security nor goodwill.

Make no mistake: Iran stands behind Hezbollah in Lebanon, and nothing in the record above suggests genuine interest in peace. Iran demands an Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon while making no matching commitment to stop arming and directing the very proxy attacking Israel from there. It criticizes “Israeli aggression” publicly and threatens to walk away from its own deal with the U.S. whenever Israel responds to that aggression. That’s not just a contradiction. That’s a strategy.

In a cynical sense, it’s a genius move. It drives a wedge between Israel and the United States and lets Tehran cash in every Israeli strike as reputational currency abroad, regardless of what provoked it. Iran will use any excuse to sink a deal it doesn’t fully control and make sure it looks like Israel’s fault when it does.

No nation with drone-launching tunnels built beneath its border villages could be expected to simply absorb that risk and call it peace. Israel cannot be held hostage to a deal it had no part in negotiating, and it must be allowed to defend its northern border against precisely the kind of threat that was sitting, fully assembled, beneath Majdal Zoun.

Israel’s survival was never owed to any single nation or leader. It rests on a promise God made and has kept for millennia — bringing a scattered people back to their land after nearly two thousand years of exile, and preserving them through empire after empire that tried to erase them: Egypt, Babylon, Rome, and the long list of conspirators named in Psalm 83 itself. “Behold He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). That promise has outlasted every power that has ever tried to claim credit for it, and it will outlast this one too.

Which is why a comment from this month’s G7 summit causes one to pause. Speaking with reporters on June 16, President Trump said, “Without the United States, there would be no Israel,” adding that no other president had been “willing to do what I did.” We understand the context. Trump was frustrated with Prime Minister Netanyahu over continued strikes in Lebanon, and American support for Israel has indeed mattered enormously this year.

But gratitude for an ally’s help is not the same as crediting that ally with Israel’s existence. That misperception is an old temptation, not a new one. Centuries before Babylon ever set foot near the land of Israel, King Nebuchadnezzar looked out over his own kingdom and declared, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built?” (Daniel 4:30) — only to be humbled until he learned whose hand had truly built it. The boast changes shape across the centuries, but the pride and the lesson hasn’t.

And history reinforces the exact same point. In 1948, a fledgling nation with no army to speak of held off five invading armies in its first hours of statehood. In 1967, vastly outnumbered and facing a coordinated strike from three directions at once, Israel secured its survival in six days. In 1973, caught by surprise on its holiest day, it turned back invasions on two fronts simultaneously. Military analysts may offer their explanations for each — but taken together, this is not simply a record of skilled generals and good intelligence. It is the same hand that brought a people home from exile still standing watch over them now, exactly as the Psalmist said it would. No single president or ruler accomplished that. No single ruler or president can take it away.

You don’t have to read prophecy into every headline to see what’s actually happening here: a government longing for peace, a militia controlled by a foreign power standing in its way, and that foreign power quietly profiting from the arrangement. Whether or not one reads Ezekiel 38 as a roadmap to Armageddon, the pattern it describes — a distant power using nearer neighbors as leverage against God’s people — is, at the very least, a useful lens for understanding what’s unfolding before us right now. By the time you read this, the framework described above may already look different than it did at its inception. Six rejected ceasefires in, that wouldn’t be a surprise — it would be the pattern continuing..

But clarity about Lebanon and Iran is only half of it — the other half is closer to home. If the God of Psalm 121 truly neither slumbers nor sleeps over Israel — and we believe He doesn’t — then how the nations, and how we as individuals, relate to that covenant people is not a side issue to Him. He tied it to His own promise to Abraham: “I will bless those who bless you, And I will curse him who curses you; And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” (Genesis 12:3). That promise was never a grade on policy or diplomacy. It’s simpler than that, and harder: whether we are blessing, or we are cursing.

That question belongs to the United States as much as to any nation watching this conflict from a distance. And it belongs to every Christian reading this, wherever you’re reading it from. We don’t need a vote in Washington or a headline out of Geneva to answer it. We can pray for Israel’s protection and for Lebanon’s deliverance from the power occupying it. We can refuse to let a vocabulary built to shift blame do its work on us. And we can remember, the next time someone — president or pundit — claims credit for what only God has kept, that the keeping was never theirs to claim in the first place. It belonged to Hashem all along — to God, Himself.