It is still too early to declare that peace has come to the Middle East. But the announcement on Thursday that Israel and Lebanon will begin direct peace talks is not something that can be understood on its own. Rather, it is a direct consequence – perhaps one of the first major consequences – of the war against Iran.
With Iran weakened and Hezbollah increasingly cornered, the prospects for a diplomatic breakthrough on Israel’s northern border have suddenly become far more real than they were just a few weeks ago. That does not mean peace is inevitable. There are still real obstacles – the talks are opening even as the IDF continues to operate in southern Lebanon and as rockets rain down on northern Israel.
But for the first time in a long time, there is a window. There are now two governments - in Jerusalem and Beirut – that understand something has changed and that it is worth trying to translate that shift into a new reality.
Could this have happened without the American-Israeli operation against Iran? No. And that is why, even if the war ended without the kind of clear and decisive outcome its planners initially promised, its true consequences may only now be starting to emerge.
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump launched the campaign against Iran - Operation Roaring Lion in Israel and Operation Epic Fury in the United States – they presented it as a campaign with three central objectives: to degrade Iran’s military and terror-supporting capabilities, to destroy its nuclear program, and ultimately to create the conditions for regime change through a decapitation campaign aimed at the leadership, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Of those goals, regime change was always the least immediate. No serious person believed that a few weeks of airstrikes alone would suddenly bring millions of Iranians into the streets and topple the regime. If such change is ever to come, it will have to come from within Iran, driven by the Iranian people themselves.
The more immediate goals were military, and on that front, there is no question that Iran took a serious blow.
Its missile infrastructure was hit hard. Its defense-industrial base was damaged. Stockpiles were destroyed. Launchers were cut dramatically. Military bases were struck. Naval assets were destroyed. Air force installations were attacked. Air defence systems were degraded. Senior commanders and scientists were eliminated. In purely military terms, Israel and the United States inflicted extraordinary damage.
This is real but it should also not be exaggerated.
Because even under attack from two of the most powerful militaries in the world, Iran continued to launch missiles until the final moments before the ceasefire. The salvos might have became smaller and less frequent, but they did not stop until the very end showing that while Iran’s capabilities were weakened, they were not eliminated. The regime retained command-and-control systems to decide when to fire, where to fire, and how to continue projecting force - whether toward Israel or across the Gulf.
The same is true on the nuclear front.
There is no doubt that key facilities were damaged. But damage is not the same as dismantlement. And as long as nearly half a ton of highly enriched uranium remains buried under the Isfahan nuclear complex, it is hard to argue that the nuclear threat has been fully neutralised. That material matters because if it remains in Iran, then the regime will only be a short distance from trying to declare that it has crossed the nuclear threshold.
This is why the talks that will start this weekend matter so much. In order for the military achievements to be preserved a deal needs to be reached that ensures the gains on the battlefield are not lost over time.
And that is why what is happening in Lebanon is so important - because Lebanon offers the first glimpse of what this war may have changed.
The conflict with Hezbollah is not the same as the campaign against Iran, and it is a mistake to pretend otherwise. Some in Europe and even in Washington would like to fold Hezbollah into the broader ceasefire framework with Iran, as though this is all one conflict and can all be solved with one diplomatic formula. It is not.
Iran is a sovereign state run by a radical Islamist regime that has spent decades building a nuclear program, developing ballistic missiles, and financing terrorism across the region.
Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy, but it is also something more immediate and more dangerous in a different way – a terrorist army sitting directly on Israel’s border, with thousands of fighters, anti-tank missiles, underground infrastructure, and a long record of planning cross-border attacks.
No country in the world would accept that reality.
Italy would not tolerate a terrorist militia embedded in the Swiss Alps, armed with missiles and tunnels dug into Italian territory, and then reassure itself that a ceasefire would somehow solve the problem. No serious government would look at that and decide that containment is enough. Such a threat has to be dismantled.
That is how Israel sees Hezbollah. And rightly so.
Which is why the possibility of direct talks with Lebanon is so significant. Not because Hezbollah has changed, but because the strategic environment around Hezbollah has changed. With Iran weakened, its proxies are weakened. This is the regional logic Israel and the United States were betting on when they launched the war, and Lebanon may now be the clearest sign yet that the logic was right.
So while we still do not know what will come of the talks with Iran – what will happen to the enriched uranium and whether the Strait of Hormuz will really open – we do know that the region is shifting.
The Middle East that existed six weeks ago is not the same Middle East that exists today. Iran is weaker. Hezbollah is more exposed. Lebanon is talking directly to Israel and Israel is testing whether military gains can be turned into diplomatic opportunity.
That alone may be the beginning of a different kind of Middle East than the one we have known for decades.
Yaakov Katz is a co-founder of the MEAD policy forum, a senior fellow at JPPI, and a former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. His latest book is While Israel Slept
To get more from opinion, click here to sign up for our free Editor's Picks newsletter.