People gather on Friday at the site of an Israeli air strike in Beirut.Emilio Morenatti/The Associated Press
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute.
Despite having been formally at war since Israel’s founding in 1948, and the concomitant displacement of thousands of Palestinians into Lebanon, officials from both countries met at the U.S. State Department on Tuesday.
The meeting, hosted by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, was deliberately kept to a modest scale, involving only the ambassadors of each country in Washington. Still, they represented a considerable breakthrough in bilateral relations and a reflection of the scale of possibility in the midst of this crisis.
What’s needed now are uncharacteristic degrees of Lebanese boldness and Israeli caution. However, the two rivals share a common goal: a Lebanon free from Hezbollah domination and an Israel free from Iranian proxy attacks.
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This involves a particularly delicate dance. Israel’s numerous bloody interventions in Lebanon, dating back to 1978, have typically only made Israel less secure. Lebanese resentment over those attacks is enormous and generational. However, anger in Lebanon over Hezbollah’s persistent conflicts with Israel on behalf of Tehran has been building since 2006, when the group set off a major conflict by ambushing Israeli soldiers. Hezbollah only survived that political backlash by apologizing to Lebanon and feigning surprise at Israel’s massive retaliation; that disingenuous apology served its purpose, and an uneasy status quo resumed.
Even worse was the 2023-24 conflict, in which Hezbollah sparked a limited confrontation with Israel to preserve its pro-Iranian bona fides following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel. By early 2024, Israel steadily intensified its assault on Hezbollah to ensure Iran couldn’t make strategic gains at the expense of Israelis and Palestinians, and after months of escalation, in September, 2024, Israel unleashed a massive barrage of attacks against Hezbollah that badly damaged its missile and drone arsenal, decimated its political leadership and eliminated its battlefield commanders. Lebanon, meanwhile, reeled from a campaign that it did not seek and which served no national interest.
Since then, Hezbollah appeared to be licking its wounds and rebuilding as the Lebanese army worked to disarm the group in the south. But when the U.S. and Israel began attacking Iran on Feb. 28, Hezbollah shocked many in Lebanon by launching an ineffective wave of projectiles against Israel. This provided Israel with a welcome opportunity to resume the conflict that it has considered unfinished business since 2024.
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That has helped prompt the biggest development in recent months: mass outrage in Lebanon against Hezbollah. That new political atmosphere has emboldened President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam to declare Hezbollah’s paramilitary activities illegal and encourage the military to forcibly disarm it. But the Lebanese Armed Forces, and especially commander Rodolphe Haykal, continue to fear that the loyalty of Lebanese troops could be split if the government ordered a nationwide crackdown against Hezbollah’s weapons.
Israel and Lebanon now share an interest: forcing Hezbollah to morph from a large paramilitary organization with a political wing into a more normal political party without its own private army and foreign and defence policies. Hezbollah also apparently senses a tipping point, in particular concluding that if it doesn’t restore its paramilitary credibility now, it will slink inevitably toward terminal decline and become just another Lebanese parliamentary bloc.
Israel is now bullying Beirut by essentially depopulating southern Lebanon, with an apparent effort to target the region’s Shiite communities, which theoretically could provide Hezbollah with support and recruits. But repeating the brutal tactics of near-total displacement and destruction that Israel has carried out in Gaza to Lebanon will only thoroughly sabotage its own aims.
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It’s ironic enough that Lebanese leaders need Israel to do the crucial heavy lifting to drive Hezbollah fighters away from the border and toward disarmament. The deeper and more significant irony is on the part of Israel, though: that its government must choose between fostering a much-strengthened Lebanese state, however imperfect, or allowing for a Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon. Every time Israel undermines the Lebanese government and military, or tries to force Beirut into acting too quickly and crudely against Hezbollah and thus risking a new civil war, Israel fatally undermines its own core goals.
Beirut and West Jerusalem don’t trust each other. But they should share the common goal of defanging Hezbollah and creating a sustainable modus vivendi at their border. Neither can get what it wants without the other, meaning forbearance and sensitivity, always rare in international relations, will be exceptionally important.
The Washington meeting was a crucial step. Now Lebanese and Israeli officials need to move carefully but seriously to finally achieve what both, for very different reasons, want. Changing attitudes toward each other may be the most difficult and decisive transformation each must now make, because otherwise, Iran and Hezbollah will yet again prevail.