In a country where the public administration struggles to perform even its most basic functions, the announcement of a programme to train 50,000 people in advanced digital skills was presented as a bold promise of renewal.
Partnering with a global technology giant like Oracle to upskill civil servants and students in cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, the Lebanese state appeared keen to project an image of transformation, suggesting it was not only managing collapse but attempting to modernise despite it.
The initiative will see tens of thousands of Lebanese receive structured training in modern digital tools, data systems, and emerging technologies. Its goal is to improve administrative efficiency, support digitisation, and equip the public sector with skills aligned to global standards.
Presented as a grant with no direct cost to the state, the programme has been framed as both an economic opportunity and a technical shortcut, offering expertise from outside at a time when domestic institutions have been weakened by emigration, underfunding, and years of institutional erosion.
Yet, the promise is hard to separate from the condition of the state expected to deliver it. Lebanon's administration operates on depreciated salaries, chronic electricity shortages, uneven internet access, and outdated equipment, with entire departments struggling to function reliably day-to-day.
Under such conditions, large technology partnerships are rarely neutral technical fixes. Instead, they introduce pre-packaged systems and assumptions about how the state should work at a time when Lebanon lacks the capacity to define those terms itself.
The MoU signed between the Lebanese state and Oracle last month must be understood in this light. While officials have stressed that the agreement is limited to training and does not involve public sector data, the distinction between skills and systems is far less clean in practice.
Cloud and AI skills are learned within specific platforms, and once people get accustomed to working within them, those same tools begin to shape how systems are built, secured, and run, often long before the institution realises it has become dependent on them.
This is not an issue of immediate data transfer but of how digital infrastructures take shape under conditions of institutional weakness, and how decisions made in the name of urgency quietly reorder control and exposure over the long term.
In a country still technically at war with Israel, and already deeply dependent on foreign technology providers, particularly one with strong ties to Israel, those choices carry implications that deserve far more scrutiny than the assurances that have accompanied them.
Oracle as a partner and technological dependence
Oracle is one of the world's most deeply embedded suppliers of enterprise software to governments, providing core database, financial, human resources, and cloud systems used by state institutions for decades.
In many countries, Oracle's dominance is not the result of a single decision, but of cumulative integration, as training, licensing, support, and system design gradually converge around one vendor, progressively narrowing the space for alternatives.
For Lebanon, the appeal of such a partnership is immediate, as Oracle offers established training programmes, internationally recognised certifications, and a ready-made ecosystem that promises structure at a time when the state struggles to generate it internally.
For civil servants whose salaries have been eroded by economic collapse, the opportunity to gain marketable skills, particularly those recognised beyond Lebanon, carries clear personal value, even if the broader institutional payoff remains uncertain.
Politically, the partnership allows the government to frame the initiative as a modernisation effort aligned with international standards and capable of attracting external support despite the depth of the crisis. For donors and diplomatic partners, it fits a familiar capacity-building narrative that signals "reform" without requiring immediate confrontation with Lebanon's entrenched political economy.
What has been largely absent from discussion is the structural risk this creates. Training large numbers of public sector workers within a single proprietary ecosystem makes it more likely that future systems will be built around the same tools, not because they are necessarily the best option, but because they are familiar and institutionally reinforced.
Over time, that familiarity turns into dependence, making it costly and difficult for the state to change course.
Oracle's ties to Israeli military and intelligence agencies
Oracle's global footprint cannot be separated from its long-standing role within state security and intelligence environments. The company has specialised in managing sensitive data at scale, embedding its systems within defence ministries, intelligence agencies, and security-aligned institutions across the United States, Israel and allied countries.
Its growth has relied less on discrete projects than on deep, long-term integration, where technical reliance and political alignment often evolve together.
This pattern is particularly clear in Israel, where Oracle has operated for decades and maintains a substantial operational presence. Its databases and enterprise systems are used across government ministries, security agencies, and military bodies, including air force operations, intelligence analysis, and population management mechanisms applied in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Oracle's cloud infrastructure in Israel includes fortified underground facilities designed to host high-sensitivity security workloads, explicitly geared toward military and intelligence use.
This places Oracle firmly within a security ecosystem shaped by US law, strategic alliances, and defence priorities, regardless of how individual contracts are framed. While such relationships are rarely foregrounded in public announcements, they form part of the context in which the company operates globally and shape the legal and political frameworks governing its technologies.
Lebanon’s agreement with Oracle needs to be understood in this context, despite official efforts to present it as separate from it. The issue is not whether the training programme itself involves Israeli entities or immediate access to data, but how digital systems evolve once skills, standards and architectures begin to align with a company so deeply embedded in US and Israeli foreign security and intelligence infrastructures.
Following criticism of the MoU, Minister of State for Technology and Artificial Intelligence Kamal Shehadi sought to draw clear boundaries around the agreement, stating that it "does not in any way include a data exchange or access to any information from the Lebanese public sector" and was "strictly limited" to training.
He added that the deal does not violate Lebanon's Israel boycott law, despite Oracle's major underground data centre in Jerusalem, because it was signed with the "American" parent company.
The emphasis of this response rested on intent rather than structure, treating training as a discrete activity that can be cleanly separated from the systems in which it will later be applied. In practice, however, skills rarely exist in abstraction once trained personnel begin designing, procuring, and managing digital systems inside the state.
The US embassy reinforced this framing, with ambassador Michel Issa at the signing, welcoming the partnership as an investment in Lebanese talent and highlighting its potential to equip public and private sector workers with practical skills in programming, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.
What remained unaddressed is the way large-scale training programmes shape institutional behaviour over time.
When training turns into infrastructure
These concerns were raised explicitly by SMEX, a Beirut-based digital rights organisation, which questioned the framing of the Oracle initiative as a "free" grant shortly after it was announced. The organisation warned that Oracle's training programmes focus overwhelmingly on its own proprietary products, creating a pipeline in which skills acquisition and vendor alignment are effectively inseparable.
SMEX also challenged the assumption that the absence of formal data-sharing provisions offers meaningful protection. In contemporary cloud ecosystems, data does not need to be explicitly transferred to become exposed. When it is generated, processed, and stored within proprietary systems governed by foreign legal frameworks, control is already diluted, even if no data is formally handed over.
"The most alarming things are the approach of the Lebanese government and the decision makers in this country, where they consider anything free from tech companies or initiatives to collect data as a positive step from the West," SMEX executive director Mohamad Najem told The New Arab. "Unfortunately, this is not true."
Najem pointed to the absence of institutional reflex, noting that there was no visible risk assessment, no public debate about alternatives, and little evidence that decision makers weighed long-term exposure against short-term gain.
"With the digitisation that is happening in Lebanon, we need to be on alert about the kind of infrastructure we need to adopt, and who is controlling it," he said.
"This kind of initiative, if it succeeds, will make Oracle one of the digital infrastructures of Lebanon, and our data will be collected, stored, processed, analysed, shared [...] within Oracle. This is happening without any risk assessment."
A fragile state, deepening exposure
Najem situates Lebanon's decision within a global context in which such dependencies are increasingly contested. Across Europe, governments have begun reassessing their reliance on US technology firms, investing instead in open-source solutions and sovereign digital infrastructure, alongside legal frameworks designed to constrain corporate power and assert public oversight.
"We have seen in Europe how countries, one after another, are investing in open-source software, building their own digital infrastructures, and stepping back from US tech companies where the risks are high," he said, citing weak governance, lack of regulation and close ties with Israel, as well as alignment with the tech circles surrounding Donald Trump.
Lebanon, by contrast, is moving in the opposite direction at a moment of acute vulnerability. Oracle's presence within Lebanese public institutions also predates the current agreement, with contracts renewed by the central bank, Électricité du Liban, and other government bodies in recent years. The December memorandum does not initiate this relationship so much as expand and normalise it.
"For now, unfortunately, we only see an amateurish approach to data protection from the decision makers, and anything free is welcomed, and they are trying to break the rules to make it pass, like Starlink, and this Oracle deal," Najem told TNA.
For a country still technically at war with Israel, the political implications of such integration are difficult to separate from the technical ones. The risk does not lie in a single breach, but in long-term exposure, in systems that become too embedded to replace, and in decisions taken under pressure rather than guided by strategy.
While Lebanon's digital transformation is necessary and acquiring technical skills is essential to any serious reform effort, the significance of the Oracle deal lies less in what it promises today than in how it quietly reshapes control and dependence over time, often without public debate and long before its consequences become visible.
Sarah Khalil is a senior journalist at The New Arab