Barrack says he told Netanyahu to 'give Lebanon a break'
U.S. envoy Tom Barrack has revealed that he had asked Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in their latest meeting in Israel to “give Lebanon a break.”
“Give Lebanon a break, give them a whiff of tolerance and understanding. You can’t be apparently so brutal on everybody,” Barrack said he told Netanyahu, in an interview with Mario Nawfal on the X platform.
“If you give them 30 days -- give us 30 days, 45 days, so that we can go back to the Shias and say, okay, we’ve got something for you now. We’re gonna stop and we have an economic program … You’re not gonna lose anything. But just be the perfume of tolerance and understanding so that they know you’re not pyrrhonic on them, and he agreed,” Barrack added about his conversation with Netanyahu.
“I was amazed. By the way he’s a real guy. He doesn’t bullshit,” Barrack went on to say.
Reassuring that Israel does not want to “take over” Lebanon, the U.S. envoy addressed Hezbollah saying “Israel is not your enemy.”
“The U.S. will stand by the Lebanese Armed Forces, help fund them, and Iran is gonna be gone, whether it’s today, tomorrow or the next day,” he added.
Praising President Joseph Aoun, Speaker Nabih Berri and PM Nawaf Salam, Barrack said he perceives the three leaders “in unbelievably high regard.”
“I think it’s an opportunity for all of us, for Lebanon, to empower them and use them in a manner that hasn’t happened for 70 years,” he suggested.
“Speaker Berri is a legislative dynamic holdover of another era, but we need him. He is the voice and the power, not just to the Amal party, but to the Shia community. We have to listen to him. He has to help us. We have to figure out a path for the south of Lebanon,” Barrack added.
Noting that nobody wants a civil war in Lebanon, Barrack said “there’s not gonna be a LAF (Lebanese Army) military movement to go blow them (Hezbollah) away.”
“There just won’t be,” he stressed, adding that “what we have to do is engineer a way for the Shias to find relevance, respect and save face in this process of not being forced to do something that appears to be incongruent to them.”
Barrack added that the West does not want to “sacrifice thousands of Lebanese lives again in a civil war.”
“Nobody wants that,” he emphasized.
“They (Hezbollah) don’t want a war with LAF and LAF doesn’t want a war with them,” he added.
He also said that U.S. President Donald Trump’s goal for Lebanon and the region is regional harmony and economic prosperity.
Source: Naharnet
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