Reports in recent days have suggested that direct negotiations between Israel and the government may soon begin. The talks, which are the result of a French initiative, would focus on reaching a non-aggression declaration within a month. The declaration, according to an article at the Axios website, would include Lebanon’s initial recognition of Israel, and a commitment by the Lebanese government to respect Israel’s sovereignty. France, for its part, has denied the details of this report, while confirming that it is seeking to mediate between the sides.
The context in which this initiative has emerged is particularly notable. Israel and the Iranian proxy Hezbollah are currently at war. Following Hezbollah’s decision to open a front on behalf of Tehran, Israel is pounding Hezbollah targets throughout Lebanon and expanding a buffer zone along the border, while Hezbollah is launching missiles and drones, mainly at Israel’s north and sometimes beyond it. Israel has signalled that a large-scale ground invasion may commence, should Hezbollah persist in these efforts.
The purpose would be to drive Hezbollah back from the border, reducing its capacity to fire at border communities. The subsequent reality, presumably, would resemble the one that currently pertains in Gaza, in which an Israeli military buffer is placed and remains between Israeli civilian populations and a hostile Islamist militia. An incursion of this magnitude, however, would be unlikely to take place without US approval, which does not appear to currently be in place. The present Israeli manoeuvres north of the border do not represent the beginning of an operation of this scope.
The French initiative, it appears, was born precisely to prevent such a large-scale Israeli military operation. Herein lies the problem with it, and the dilemma facing Israeli decision-makers.
On the one hand, any chance for direct negotiations with a neighbouring state should not be dismissed, or scoffed at. Any chance to finally normalise the status of Israel’s relations with its smaller northern neighbour ought to be welcomed. But the specifics of the Lebanese case need to be understood. In this case, the not always pleasant substance beneath the diplomatic niceties is crucial.
Specifically, and bluntly, Lebanese sovereignty is a fiction. As of now, the country is under a de facto occupation of the kind which Iran has practised and at which it has excelled across the region over the last three decades.
Perhaps the best way to understand this is to think of Hezbollah as a kind of “deep state” in Lebanon, but one which answers to and is operated by a foreign power. This deep state maintains itself both within and alongside the formal state. It is represented in parliament, it serves in government, individuals close to it are in senior positions within the official security forces and in key parts of the economy. But at the same time Hezbollah maintains its independent military and civil structures alongside those of “official” Lebanon. Most crucially, the organisation’s armed forces are stronger and better equipped than those of the state. The Lebanese state thus lacks the physical capacity to take on and disarm Hezbollah, even if it wished to do so. The Lebanese Armed Forces are about 50 per cent Shia, with roughly 30 per cent Shia in the officer corps. If ordered to fight the Shia Islamist militia, they would be likely to splinter.
There is also the matter of will, at the highest level. The entire Lebanese political elite, with the exception of Hezbollah itself, are traumatised by the civil war that ran from 1975-1990. They share a visceral fear of any return to the civil strife of those days. They understand that any attempt to confront Hezbollah could usher in something as bad or worse as that war.
The Lebanese political elite and its various mouthpieces in the west have sought over the years to obfuscate this situation, and the corruption and weakness which it reflects. They have tried to deflect and distract, claiming that the Lebanese situation contains subtleties and complexities too intricate for the plodding western mind to grasp, that time must be afforded them or the situation will be made worse, that inaction is preferable to hasty or ill-considered measures and other stratagems. In this, western policy elites, including but not limited to that of France, have sought to assist and indulge them, seeking above all to avoid confrontation.
The people who have paid the price for this polite fiction are the residents of northern Israel, whose lives are disrupted every few years by the predatory attentions of the Iran-directed Shia Islamist militia, which is the real power in the country.
The problem with the new French initiative is that it looks like the latest iteration of this dynamic. The details in the Axios report (denied by France) suggest that in return for the tantalising dangling of eventual recognition, Israel will withdraw within a month from positions it has held in Lebanon since the start of the current war. The Lebanese Armed Forces would deploy south of the river to disarm Hezbollah, while a UN-established force would be responsible for Hezbollah’s disarmament in the rest of the country. So far, so familiar.
None of this takes into account the possibility (or certainty) that Hezbollah might decline to be disarmed by these forces, and what would then happen. That is, in practice this initiative appears designed to remove the dynamic toward determined Israeli action to drive Hezbollah north, in order to allow the fictions that benefit the Lebanese political elite to remain in place. It remains to be seen if Israel will fall for it.
Jonathan Spyer is an analyst, writer, and journalist, writing on Middle Eastern affairs
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