Lebanese leaders have traveled to Washington for the first direct negotiations with Israel in more than three decades, attempting to restore sovereignty under near-impossible terms.

According to the ceasefire deal agreed on April 16, Lebanon must “effectively demonstrate its ability to assert its sovereignty” as a condition for extending the fragile pause in hostilities. Israel, for its part, preserves the right to take “all necessary measures in self-defence, at any time” and to keep its forces deployed on Lebanese soil.

This is the framework through which Lebanese sovereignty is to be performed. Beirut is expected to move against Hezbollah’s armament while Israel retains effectively open-ended military freedom inside Lebanese territory. From Washington’s perspective, the logic is clear: Hezbollah is weaker, Tehran is under pressure, Damascus is amenable, and the government in Beirut has never been more willing to accede to US demands.

But a government easier to influence is not one that can actually govern. There is a way to disarm Hezbollah and consolidate Lebanese sovereignty, but it is not the current path imposed by the US and Israel.

In 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). It succeeded in driving the PLO leadership out of Beirut but did not produce a stable Lebanese government or a settlement aligned with Israeli preferences. The Lebanese Civil War entered a new and more brutal phase, epitomized by an Israeli occupation that lasted until 2000. That occupation became one of the central conditions in which Hezbollah emerged and consolidated.

The government of Prime Minister Nawaf Salam and President Joseph Aoun, brought about with US-Saudi backing after the 2024 war with Israel ended, is the first national unity government to include Hezbollah and its allies. The government has outlawed Hezbollah’s military wing, expelled the Iranian ambassador, and ordered the authorities to identify, arrest, and deport members of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Lebanon’s current deterrence arrangement cannot be broken militarily before it is replaced politically. Hezbollah’s arsenal is not just a military fact; it is also the hard expression of a political claim: that the Lebanese state, as it exists, cannot reliably defend parts of its population against Israel and therefore an alternative structure of deterrence is necessary.

Washington says it wants a stronger Lebanese state and a weaker Hezbollah. But its actions increasingly suggest something else: not the construction of sovereignty, but the management of fracture under Israeli military primacy. That path is unlikely to end in neat annexation or orderly control; what is more likely is a conflict that proves far harder to stop once it is set in motion.

Source: www.aljazeera.com