On the surface, the launch of Israeli-Lebanese negotiations earlier this week seems like a big deal. In the first face-to-face talks between Lebanese and Israeli officials in more than 30 years, ambassadors from all three countries met under the auspices of Secretary of State Marco Rubio in Washington. But despite Trump hailing the talks as a “historic opportunity” for peace, the process is largely a farce. The relatively low-level ambassadorial meeting included no Israeli or Lebanese decision makers — and unsurprisingly produced little by way of progress.
Moreover, the real “negotiations” are coming in the form of Israeli bombs and artillery fire. Despite the U.S.-Iran ceasefire deal concluded one week ago, Israel has continued to pummel Lebanon mercilessly, killing hundreds of civilians and displacing more than a million Lebanese — including at least 254 killed across Lebanon on the first day of the ceasefire. While Iran has been adamant that Lebanon be included in that ceasefire, Israel and the U.S. have refused any linkage. Thus, after years of insisting that Iran was the center of all the region’s problems, from Gaza to Lebanon to Iraq to Yemen, President Trump now says the Hezbollah-Israel dispute is a “separate skirmish” .
This may be why many critics in the region primarily view these newly launched Israeli-Lebanese talks as a matter of optics , especially given Trump’s penchant for headlines over headway. But the optics of the talks themselves are highly fraught for the Lebanese, giving the appearance of normalization with Israel — if not “capitulation and surrender” — even as it continues to kill Lebanese and wipe out entire villages . In reality, the two sides are negotiating over very different things. Lebanon’s leadership is focused on achieving a ceasefire , after which other issues, including the future of Hezbollah, can be discussed. For Israel — and by extension the Trump administration — the talks are not about a ceasefire but about the terms of Hezbollah’s dismantlement. So far, Israel’s central (and perhaps only) demand is for the Lebanese government and armed forces to disarm Hezbollah and ensure it has no role in Lebanese politics. As Secretary Rubio put it, the talks are aimed at “bringing a permanent end to 20 or 30 years of Hezbollah’s influence in this part of the world.” In essence, what Israel and the U.S. seek is not a peace deal between Israel and Lebanon but an agreement to turn Lebanon’s government into something like the Palestinian Authority (PA) by enlisting it to be Israel’s security subcontractor in the north — which is simply not achievable. To be sure, Hezbollah’s role inside Lebanon as a sort of “state within a state” has been and remains highly problematic. Most Lebanese parties would like to see Hezbollah, which operates as both an armed militia and a major political party, restrained in some way. But while Lebanon’s government has officially called for disarming Hezbollah, it remains too weak to do so coercively without triggering internal strife and possibly even civil war. Together with its political allies, Hezbollah and affiliated factions control just under half of the seats in parliament and are represented in the cabinet by two ministers. For good or for ill, Hezbollah remains deeply rooted in Lebanese politics and society — a reality that even political decapitation and massive military setbacks at the hands of Israel in recent years could not change.
What Israeli and American officials seem incapable of understanding is that Lebanon’s central government cannot carry out such a task without undercutting its own domestic legitimacy — a lesson Israel’s main security subcontractor in the West Bank understands all too well. But whereas Mahmoud Abbas’s PA has long been willing to trade away its domestic legitimacy in return for ensuring its survival, Lebanon’s central government is not in a position to do so — even if it wanted to. With a complicated confessional system of government and a population that is roughly one-third Christian, one-third Sunni and one-third Shiite, Lebanese politics involves a delicate political and demographic balance that is unlikely to withstand the zero-sum propositions demanded by Israel and its backers in Washington.
Herein lies the fundamental contradiction in the Israeli-U.S. approach: only a strong central government that enjoys a modicum of popular legitimacy would be capable of disarming Hezbollah or otherwise neutralizing its influence; and yet everything Israel is doing is only deepening the Lebanese government’s weakness. Unable to protect its citizens, Lebanon’s government is increasingly seen by its citizens as impotent , reinforcing the view that the only solution lies with “the resistance.” This seems so painfully obvious that one wonders whether Israel’s strategy isn’t actually to keep Lebanon weak and divided in order to ensure a constant need to intervene militarily. Israelis, of all people, should understand the dangers of attempting to reengineer a country’s politics through the barrel of a gun, as its disastrous 1982 invasion of Lebanon — which among other things produced Hezbollah — not to mention the recent Israeli/US “excursion” in Iran, clearly demonstrates.
While Israel may have little interest in a viable and functional Lebanese state, the United States, frankly, ought to know better. Even Israeli military officials, unlike its political leadership, understand that Hezbollah cannot simply be bombed out of existence . As problematic as it is, Hezbollah is a product of deeper political realities in Lebanon; addressing the problems posed by it will require an accommodation with those realities, which in turn requires fostering a sovereign and cohesive Lebanese state rather than treating it as a vassal state.