An opening for Lebanon-Israel peace

The Hill

4 days ago

A career in American diplomacy in the Middle East is a humbling affair. Whenever you heard well-meaning American officials speak of the birth pangs of a 'new Middle East,' you knew it was time to update the embassy's evacuation plans and re-stock its bunkers.
And if anyone in charge spoke of peace in Lebanon of all places, you knew to supplement the evacuation plans with an IQ test for anyone so detached from reality. For the history of American-Lebanese relations is one strewn with inflated expectations and deflated ambition. And not a few corpses.
This time, it could be different.
I spent almost two weeks in Beirut and Jerusalem on the eve of the Israel-Iran '12-day war.' Compared to my previous 40 years visiting and living in those two cities, I sensed something new: an opportunity for true peace. Not just a cease-fire, not just an armistice, but the potential for a lasting peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon.
Some people on both sides countered that I was crazy. But no one made a good case as to why it is impossible. After all, there is an old Lebanese adage, 'Lebanon will not be the first Arab state to make peace with Israel, but it will not be the last.' As the regimes in Syria and Iran took over Lebanese decision-making on such matters from the 1980s until just a few months ago, that concept became something of a joke.
Iranian clerics and Syria's Assad family, through their Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, were the ones making life and death decisions of war and peace for all Lebanese. They were happy to stoke war with Israel in south Lebanon while they themselves stayed above the fray. For two decades after the Israel Defense Forces withdrew from south Lebanon in 2000 (verified by the UN), Hezbollah kept the military pressure on Israel to serve these foreign interests, while the Lebanese people bore the burden.
Israel and America have changed that equation. Hezbollah as a fighting force has collapsed, the Assad family now graces Moscow not Damascus, and Tehran is in survival mode, unable to defend its own air space, let alone project power. The result is a once in a lifetime diplomatic opportunity for Lebanon and Israel. Timing can be crucial in statecraft and diplomacy; the moment to move toward peace between these two states is now. Lebanon is no longer held hostage to foreign interests and American influence is high.
The emotional leap toward peace is daunting for some after so many decades of death and destruction. But the actual issues in play are not. There is no territorial dispute. Israelis seek security, not Lebanese soil. After the Israel Defense Forces withdrawal, Hezbollah distorted and exploited colonial-era border anomalies to keep alive the pretext of 'resistance to occupation,' anomalies which few in Lebanon take seriously today.
The real issue is security. Full implementation of the 2024 cease-fire would help, but it may not happen in a political vacuum. The cease-fire calls for the complete disarmament of Hezbollah 'starting in' the area between the border with Israel and the Litani River, an 18-mile wide swath. During the first six months of the agreement, the Lebanese Armed Forces — equipped and trained by American counterparts for years to prepare for this moment — has progressed. But it has neither completed the task in the deep south nor begun elsewhere where Hezbollah maintains arms.
If Lebanese officials do not keep their side of the cease-fire and disarm Hezbollah, the Israel Defense Forces will likely do it for them, at a price to the authority of the state and its leaders. It will not just be a humiliation to those leaders, but a tragedy for all concerned if they fail to grasp the opportunity to regain full sovereign control of their state.
Yet the dilemma for the Lebanese is in part political. Even with the Iranians out of the equation, fear of reigniting sectarian tension and conflict has an almost paralytic effect on Lebanese decision-making. Having benefited for so long from Hezbollah's arms and state-within-a-state behavior, Lebanese Shia now fear payback, whether from Israelis or other Lebanese sectarian communities with whom there is uneasy coexistence.
A context of peace — beyond the absence of war — can be instrumental. Few Lebanese I met could imagine a horizon with Israel beyond a return to the 1949 armistice. Yet that agreement was never suspended — nor did it ever prevent wars in Lebanon or violations of its sovereignty by Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians or Iranians.
Others recoiled from a UAE-style normalization. Yet the nature of a peace agreement can be determined by the parties and need not be modeled on the Abraham Accords. A peace agreement will have the solidity to convince the people of south Lebanon that their future is in safe hands — those of an army upholding a peace treaty as durable as those of Egypt and Jordan with Israel. And to be honest, it is the only way to boost confidence and security sufficiently for the return of investments, expatriate deposits, and tourism not just to stabilize south Lebanon, but rebuild a nation suffering one of the worst financial crises of modern times.
A moment exists for active, disciplined, persistent American diplomacy, not just to implement the cease-fire but to work toward real, formal peace and solidify the realignment of regional power that President Trump finalized with recent strikes in Iran. American diplomacy can help remove from contention the many regional problems Iran manipulated, not least of all those in Lebanon. That window of opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.
David Hale is a Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow at the Middle East Institute. Hale previously served as U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon, and Special Envoy for Middle East Peace.