Land in Exchange for Peace

“Land in exchange for peace.” That, in essence, is the Israeli-Lebanese agreement reached in Washington between June 23 and 26 – an old formula that remains as relevant today as ever, provided the interests of the people of Lebanon’s devastated villages are placed above all else. The rest is detail.

Yes, land in exchange for peace – but not just any peace. A peace achieved through placing all weapons in the hands of the Lebanese state as we know it: a parliamentary democracy, a land of freedom and pluralism.

It could also be put this way: land in exchange for Hezbollah’s weapons. For contrary to what people think, the Washington agreement is a peace agreement, not a military one. It could be implemented without a single shot being fired.

Hezbollah has spoken of “civil war.” But who wants a civil war? The Washington agreement would allow Hezbollah’s severely weakened forces to be replaced by legitimate, multi-sectarian state forces whose sole mission would be defensive, not offensive. Lebanon has no territorial ambitions in Israel. All it seeks and demands is respect for its borders, as clearly set out in the Washington agreement. And only there.

However, Iran was able to secure a ceasefire – albeit a relative one – in Lebanon by unleashing a barrage of ballistic missiles against Israel. Yet it is unrealistic, given the forces at play, to believe that Tehran could also obtain, through threats, a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon. The only outcome this dynamic could produce is a further toll of death and destruction, coupled with a risk of annexation. In short: a war of a thousand years.

A capitulation agreement? Yes, in the narrow sense of the term. For the peace agreement it imposes is, at its core, as much a Lebanese demand as an Israeli one. The military escalation it brings to an end took place against the will of the Lebanese state, as a result of an Iranian decision to which Beirut was deeply opposed. Moreover, what unnecessary restrictions could it impose on Lebanon? That it forgo nuclear capability? Or having no air force?

Those who designed the Washington agreement not only sought no war, but were also deeply opposed to the militaristic ideology driving Hezbollah. That ideology gave the group the illusion of waging a heroic jihad in the service of God. Yet, as has been seen, this struggle has led to slaughter and potentially irreversible destruction.

Moreover, how could Hezbollah have imagined, for a single moment, that its politico-religious ideology could win over Christians – let alone the other communities that make up Lebanon?

Lebanon belongs to the Arab world, not the Islamic world. Alien to Iranian ideology, peace with Israel is not foreign to the Arab world, part of which has already concluded such peace, while the rest – Saudi Arabia in particular – ties it to the emergence of a Palestinian state.

The Christian community is all the more alien to this way of thinking given that it has itself paid the price for this kind of adventurism during the Crusades. It can be stated without hesitation that the right to self-defense remains sacred, but the Catholic Church has called into question the notion of “just war,” once endorsed by the Church, given the impossibility of meeting its conditions in an age of algorithms, autonomous machines, and nuclear deterrence.

Today, there are no longer any “conventional” weapons. We are all familiar with Einstein’s off-cited quip about nuclear war. A campaigner for nuclear disarmament, he is said to have remarked that if a Third World War were to break out, “the Fourth would be fought with sticks and stones.”

On the contrary, Eastern Christian communities, which have paid dearly for the dispossession of Palestine, now aspire to exercise their rights of access to their holy sites: Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem – places where their Savior lived and rose again, triumphant over death and violence. It is in this sense that they may hope to take up the word left to them by their Savior: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

The earth does not belong to the violent, says the Lord. It belongs to those who, like Joseph Aoun, have learned from war to “hate war.” We heard him speak in this sense during his interview with Christiane Amanpour on CNN. The head of state would do well to set aside airtime to explain the Washington agreement to the Lebanese population.