The talks between Lebanon and Israel ramped up a notch at the end of the week, when US President Donald Trump hosted the negotiating teams, led by Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter, and Lebanese Ambassador to the US Nada Moawad, in the Oval Office for their second meeting in two weeks.
Trump’s involvement in this second meeting is an indication that his administration is taking the prospects of reaching an agreement between the two countries seriously, and undoubtedly, pressure will be placed on both sides.
The upshot of the meeting was an agreement to extend the ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon for another three weeks, beyond the 10 days that had initially launched the talks between the two countries, still in an official state of war, the first such meetings since 1983.
US Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa also attended the meeting.
But of course, the primary reason that Israel and Lebanon are at odds in the first place, and the main issue that needs to be tackled, was absent: Hezbollah.
‘The problem is not Lebanon; The problem is Hezbollah’
Huckabee hit the nail on the head when he said in Washington, “The people of Lebanon and the people of Israel are neighbors, and they want to get along – and they can get along… The problem is not Lebanon; the problem is not Israel. The problem is Hezbollah.”
Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar, in an Independence Day address last week, also made it clear that Lebanon wasn’t the problem; it was Hezbollah that was the common enemy of both countries.
He called on the government of President Joseph Aoun to “work together against the terrorist state that Hezbollah built in your territory. This cooperation is needed by you even more than by us. It requires moral clarity and the courage to take risks. But there is no real alternative for ensuring a future of peace for you and for us. And for you, for Lebanon, a future of sovereignty, independence, and freedom from the Iranian occupation.”
Trump wrote in Truth Social after the summit that the “meeting went very well! The United States is going to work with Lebanon in order to help it protect itself from Hezbollah,” but he didn’t provide details of what that would entail.
The question of whether the ceasefire and continuing talks will yield real results was clouded by the aims of the Lebanese delegation, as delineated by a Lebanese official to Reuters after Thursday’s meeting: an Israeli withdrawal, the return of Lebanese detained in Israel, and a delineation of the land border in the next phase of negotiations.
Nothing at all about Hezbollah.
Leiter understood that, saying during the meeting that the talks must focus on rooting out Hezbollah rather than on Israel withdrawing its forces. “If Hezbollah and IRGC operatives continue to be treated with kid gloves, a real process of achieving our mutual goal will remain unachievable,” Leiter said, according to remarks shared by the Israeli embassy in Washington.
Because Aoun is in a precarious position, a weak leader of a failed country with a terrorist organization in control, he’s not necessarily reaching out to Israel with an olive branch.
In a speech last week, he laid out Lebanon’s objectives of agreeing to a ceasefire and talks with Israel.
“There will never be any agreement that infringes on our national rights, diminishes the dignity of our resisting people, or abandons a single piece of the land of our nation,” he said. “Our objective is clear and declared: to stop Israeli aggression against our land and our people, to obtain Israeli withdrawal, to extend state authority over all its land by its own forces, to ensure the return of prisoners and to enable our families to return to their homes and villages, in safety, freedom and dignity.”
Nothing at all about Hezbollah.
For the ceasefire to continue and for talks to be fruitful, the main focus must be on how to defang and marginalize Hezbollah.
If Trump has a plan, he should share it with the sides, and he should make it clear to the Lebanese government that Israel is not going to withdraw from its security zone or stop targeting terrorists who are threatening the lives of the residents of the North, until that happens.
Because, let’s be clear. It’s all about Hezbollah.
Source:
www.jpost.com
