Israel and Lebanon agree on a US-brokerred deal to ceasefire

The Department of State on Wednesday announced that the United States has brokered a major ceasefire breakthrough between Israel and Lebanon.

One should pause at such a declaration. For decades the border between Israel and Lebanon has served as a theater of managed violence, where the ambitions of a distant theocracy in Tehran have been permitted to play out through the proxy army known as Hezbollah. Now, after negotiations that began on May 29 and culminated in a trilateral meeting held June 2-3, something resembling progress is claimed, but let's breathe.

“As a result of the U.S. led negotiations, Israel and Lebanon agreed to the implementation of a ceasefire,” the department said in a joint statement.

“Israel and Lebanon reaffirmed that they have no hostile intent toward one another and committed to continuing direct negotiations to build confidence, resolve all outstanding issues, and work toward a comprehensive agreement between the two countries.”

The conditions attached to this deal reveal its fragility and its realism. 

The agreement is conditional upon Hezbollah, that Iran-backed, Lebanon-based terrorist group, ceasing all attacks, withdrawing its fighters from southern Lebanon’s South Litani Sector, and preventing the re-emergence of non-state armed groups. Pilot zones are to be established under the exclusive control of the Lebanese Armed Forces. These measures, modest as they are, acknowledge a truth too often evaded in diplomatic circles: that Lebanon has for years been less a sovereign state than a hostage held by an Iranian militia.

“Hezbollah is not just an enemy of Israel and an enemy of America, but that it is an enemy of Lebanon,” officials said.

Here at last is language that refuses the usual equivocations. Hezbollah has bled Lebanon dry, turning a once-prosperous country into a launchpad for rockets and a pawn in regional conquest. Its disarmament and removal from the border are not optional extras in any serious peace process. They are the precondition for Lebanon’s own survival as anything other than a forward operating base for the Islamic Republic.

Both sides are scheduled to meet again during the week of June 22 to continue negotiations toward a comprehensive peace treaty. Any permanent agreement to end hostilities must be reached directly between the two governments and brokered by the U.S., the department added.Whether this fragile framework holds will depend on something rarely discussed in the polite language of State Department statements: the willingness of the West to enforce consequences when Iran and its proxies test the limits, as they inevitably will. 

Ceasefires between Israel and its neighbors have too often served only as pauses for rearmament. This one, if it is to mean anything, must mark the beginning of Hezbollah’s strategic defeat and the slow reclamation of Lebanese sovereignty. The stakes could scarcely be higher, for Israel’s security, for Lebanon’s future, and for the credibility of American diplomacy in a region that has learned to measure resolve by deeds rather than declarations.

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