Druze leader Walid Joumblatt believes Israel will remain in southern Lebanon for decades.
“They will never leave,” he tells On The Record with Hadley Gamble from his home in Beirut. "The Americans are withdrawing. What is left is [Benjamin] Netanyahu controlling and expanding his own territory, his biblical empire."
It is a stark reading of the region from a man who has lived through Lebanon's civil war, the Syrian occupation and the assassination of his father. But it captures a shift visible across the region. With the US pulling troops out and Russia consumed by its own war, Israel is the region's dominant military power.
As evidence, he refers to the scale of destruction in Lebanon. In earlier incursions, he said, southern Lebanon survived as a place. This time Israel is "just trying to eradicate all the memories of the south of Lebanon, as if they are preparing for settlements, colonies”.
Israel now holds "security zones" on three fronts: across southern Lebanon, in southern Syria beyond the 1974 disengagement line, and over nearly 70 per cent of Gaza, according to Defence Minister Israel Katz. On October 21, he said Israel would not withdraw from any of them.
"The policy of Israel, past, actual and future, is to erase Palestinian nationhood from Gaza to the West Bank, and expand to Syria and Lebanon," Mr Joumblatt says. "It doesn't matter who wins."
Israeli officials claim their troops have destroyed more than 60 villages and about 23,000 structures in southern Lebanon. Israeli displacement orders have covered about 2,000 square kilometres south of the Zahrani River and residents are barred from returning. Israel's far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich called in March for the annexation of all territory up to the Litani River.
Lebanon's Health Ministry says 4,389 people were killed between March 2, when Hezbollah joined the regional war in support of Iran, and October 12. The group has been badly weakened but not broken. US and Israeli estimates put its losses since February at about 2,500 fighters.
A June framework agreement between Lebanon, Israel and the US ties a phased Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah's disarmament. Israel calls the deal "performance-based" and says its troops will stay as long as Hezbollah remains a threat.
Seven rounds of direct negotiations have followed. Military talks at US Central Command ended on October 22 without agreement and with no further meeting set.
Mr Joumblatt says Lebanon has mistakenly chosen "the path of [US Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, which will lead us to nowhere". The belief of some Lebanese ministers that Washington will press Israel to leave is, in his words, "a total fallacy".
Mr Joumblatt also dismisses the disarmament demand itself. Most of the area south of the Litani has already been cleared, he says, but drones have changed the arithmetic. "They will tell you there is a factory of drones in Baalbek. You want to go there? It's absurd."
Disarmament, in his view, can never be fully achieved, which is precisely why it suits a force that intends to stay.
Israel's threats are growing rather than diminishing. On October 14, Mr Katz warned that if Hezbollah joined any Iranian attack, areas around Nabatieh and the Litani would become part of a permanent "security zone", residents wold be forced to leave Beirut's southern suburbs and more than a million Shiites would be displaced.
"He said it, not me," Mr Joumblatt says. Asked whether Lebanon was simply waiting, he replies: "Unfortunately."
The same logic applies in Syria. Israel moved past the 1974 disengagement line after the fall of former president Bashar Al Assad in December 2024 and Mr Joumblatt says its forces are now about 40km from Damascus. Part of the prize, he says, is water. "Mount Hermon is water."
Syrian President Ahmad Al Shara, whom Mr Joumblatt backs, has no army to resist. Assad destroyed the military by turning it on his own people and Israel "will not ever allow him to have a modern army", he says.
But Mr Joumblatt's sharpest words were aimed at members of his own community. The Druze, an offshoot of Islam with about a million members across Syria, Lebanon and Israel, straddle the very borders Israel is now redrawing.
In Syria's Sweida province, much of the territory is held by militias loyal to Hikmat Al Hijri, a Druze spiritual leader who has advocated breaking away from Damascus under Israeli protection.
Since April, his camp has run an administrative council for what it calls Jabal Bashan, the biblical name for the Druze mountain. In August, he declared the Druze an "inseparable part" of Israel and on October 7 his supporters marched through Sweida waving Israeli flags.
"He's not a religious leader, just a puppet in the hands of the Israelis," Mr Joumblatt says.
Those who follow Mr Hijri "have chosen to be used by the Israelis as good soldiers", Mr Joumblatt adds. "They are going the wrong path of history."
Israel's own Druze community, he says, decide nothing. "The Israeli government decides."
To Mr Joumblatt, the pattern on both sides of the border points to a single project – a belt of Druze-populated territory, running from the occupied Golan Heights through southern Syria and along the edge of southern Lebanon. That would give Israel strategic depth under the banner of protecting a minority.
Arab and Turkish analysts have for more than a year described such a route, sometimes called "David's Corridor", running from the Golan Heights towards eastern Syria. Israel has never acknowledged any such plan.
The evidence is growing. This week, Damascus sent troops to Sweida as Israel was reported to be flying surveillance and radar equipment into the province. Syrian Foreign Minister Asaad Al Shibani has accused Israel of funding and arming Druze militias, and a senior Syrian official has warned of an imminent Israeli-backed offensive.
In February, the Israeli military created a new post to liaise with Druze communities in Syria and Lebanon, filled by Maj Gen Ghassan Alian, a Druze officer.
In March, The National reported that Israeli officers had privately urged Christian and Druze villages in southern Lebanon to push out Muslim residents, both Shiite and Sunni, who were sheltering among them. More than 200 people fled.
This week, Israeli tanks advanced towards the outskirts of Hebbariyeh in the Hasbaya district, the Druze-majority corner of southern Lebanon that borders Syria.
Israel says its role in Sweida is to protect Druze from a massacre, a claim it made amid the events of July 2025, when violence in the province left about 1,700 people dead. Mr Joumblatt does not dispute the killings, but he says Druze fighters also drove Bedouin families from their homes and that a mission of inquiry and a compromise should have followed. "Nothing happened," he says.
He insists Mr Hijri does not speak for all Syria's Druze, many of whom live in Damascus suburbs alongside Christians and Muslims and are alienated by his separatism.
Mr Joumblatt invoked Sultan Al Atrash, who led the 1925 Druze uprising against French rule, and his father, Kamal Joumblatt, an Arab nationalist assassinated in 1977. "I feel that I am abandoned by some Druze," he says. "Never mind. I will go on my own, even if I stay alone."
For a minority, abandoning Arab solidarity is "suicide", Mr Joumblatt says.
With traditional counterweights gone, focused elsewhere, Mr Joumblatt says Israeli power will be unchecked "It doesn't mean that while they [America] were present it was more calm," he says. "But it was significant."
Asked whether America has left a vacuum and Israel is filling it, he answers yes to both.
Russia, a patron of Assad's regime in Syria, is in the fifth year of its war in Ukraine. Europe has been sidelined by Washington. Saudi Arabia is absorbed by its conflict with Yemen's Houthis – the Iran-backed group has launched missiles and drones at airports in Riyadh, Abha and Dammam, killing 22 people. "The Arab world nowadays is powerless," Mr Joumblatt says.
He would like Lebanon to become a neutral state similar to the Swiss model, but says that requires the consent of its neighbours. "Israel will not ever accept that."
His prescription at home is the one he has offered for years: a national dialogue, built on the principle that only the state may bear arms, leading to a negotiated decommissioning of Hezbollah's weapons, with Iran's backing.
Critics, including some western diplomats, say he is too soft on the group. "Tough enough to civil war?" he says in reply, recalling how the Lebanese military splintered when it was turned on its own people in the 1980s.
His request of Washington is brief. "Give us some better diplomats here, and better policy there."
Then he returns to his central point. With the US stepping back, Israel feels free "to do whatever they want, everywhere, anywhere, using force".