Lebanon Between Two Guardianships: Rebuilding the National Consensus

While the reservations surrounding the US-sponsored framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel are numerous, profound, legitimate, and entirely justified, given the text’s failure to secure any meaningful gains for Lebanon, this does not mean that Lebanon should embrace the Islamabad track or the Switzerland agreement between Washington and Tehran, whose collapse, far from being unexpected, resulted from a combination of political and non-political factors.

This fragile Switzerland agreement clearly reflects the deep mistrust between the two opposing sides. Tel Aviv has consistently sought to fuel and deepen that mistrust in pursuit of its own immediate interests: resuming the war from where it left off, further degrading Iran’s military capabilities, even if doing so failed to bring about the regime’s collapse, contrary to the expectations or hopes entertained during the early stages of the conflict. At the same time, it serves Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by buying him additional time, improving his standing ahead of the parliamentary elections, while allowing him to continue delaying, slowing, and stalling the judicial proceedings against him.

Supporters of the negotiating option in Lebanon, regardless of whether it is direct or indirect, a distinction that events have now overtaken, can today argue that this approach spares Lebanon from becoming directly entangled in any renewed war between Washington and Tehran. True, the war has not stopped in Lebanon, and Israeli violations of Lebanese sovereignty continue on a daily basis. Yet the situation has not, at least so far, deteriorated into the total collapse of the front as it did in previous months. This may well be linked to reports that the US administration informed Benjamin Netanyahu that the Lebanese track was not contingent upon the collapse of the Switzerland agreement.

However, this fundamental observation, namely Lebanon’s exclusive right to negotiate on its own behalf and its equally legitimate right to reject any attempt by another state to negotiate in its place, in contradiction with the most basic principles of sovereignty, principles that should be protected against violation regardless of its source, does not diminish the right of Lebanon’s political forces to criticize the framework agreement and point out its shortcomings without immediately facing accusations of treason from every direction.

It is true that the Lebanese people have reached an advanced stage of collective exhaustion after enduring an endless cycle of recurring wars. No party can any longer justify dragging the country into conflicts that exceed its capacity to endure. The scale of destruction across southern Lebanon now makes it imperative to move beyond traditional approaches based on igniting wars that produce no meaningful outcome. Yet it is equally true that the many flaws embedded in the framework agreement between Lebanon and Israel are unacceptable and incompatible with Lebanon’s national interest. The Lebanese state must acknowledge them as such and treat them as shortcomings that warrant renewed negotiations.

In practical terms, what will strengthen Lebanon’s official position is rebuilding a national consensus around the negotiating process through the adoption of a coherent negotiating plan founded on national principles and constants that cannot be compromised. Foremost among these are establishing a timetable for Israel’s withdrawal and preserving Lebanon’s right to seek legal redress against the aggressor before international bodies.

Strengthening the state’s position certainly does not require denying Lebanon’s various political forces the right to criticize it. Still less should it mean accepting Israel’s involvement in implementing decisions that are, by definition, the responsibility of the Lebanese authorities, particularly the issue of establishing the state’s monopoly on arms. This is already a sensitive and complex decision, one from which there can be no retreat if Lebanon is finally to build a functioning state after a delay that has become both intolerable and unacceptable.

Ultimately, however, Lebanon cannot rely on the notion that the Lebanese state should call upon Israel or seek its assistance in carrying out the task of establishing the state’s monopoly on arms, nor can it accept placing the Lebanese Armed Forces in a position where they are effectively placed under the scrutiny of the Israeli military in the performance of their national and military duties, under a security tutelage superior to their own. Even if this was never the Lebanese negotiator’s intention, and certainly not one of his objectives, it nevertheless constitutes one of the practical consequences of the framework agreement: the absence of a clear timetable for Israel’s withdrawal, rebranded instead as a “redeployment,” together with the novel concept of “experimental zones,” which, in practice, subject the Lebanese Army to a daily test. At a minimum, this risks placing it in the midst of an internal confrontation that Israel could exploit to shift the conflict into Lebanon itself and broaden the scope of the confrontation.

At the same time, certain Lebanese actors have no choice but to align themselves with the broader national consensus that rejects war and refuses to see Lebanon once again become either the fuel or the battlefield for settling regional conflicts, particularly at a time when those conflicts appear to be entering a new phase of escalation. They must place the higher national interest above all else, bridge the deep divide that has emerged between them and the rest of Lebanese society, and undertake a serious reassessment of the transformations that have unfolded over the past three years, transformations that require new approaches to the liberation of occupied territory and the opening of a new chapter.

While Israel cannot be absolved of its aggressive designs against Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria, it must also be acknowledged that the decision to enter the support war was both hasty and devastating. It failed to achieve its intended objectives and resulted in enormous human and material losses, squandering the historic achievement of the liberation of 25 May 2000, when Israel withdrew, for the first time, from Arab territory unconditionally, without a peace agreement or even a security arrangements agreement, in what appeared at the time to be a humiliating flight and retreat. Israel sought to erase that image through the last two wars and continues to do so today.

To be perfectly clear, Lebanon is in no position to provide support to Tehran, nor should it be expected to do so. Such an undertaking far exceeds the country’s capacity to bear. As for the statements declaring that Hezbollah will not leave Iran to face the United States alone, they reflect a profound denial of the new realities and a striking absence of even the most basic forward-looking vision of the phase now unfolding. More fundamentally, they strike at the very heart of Lebanon’s national interest.

The worst possible outcome for Lebanon and the Lebanese people would be to find themselves subjected to a dual tutelage: an American-Israeli tutelage on one side and an Iranian tutelage on the other. Between the two, it is the Lebanese people, and they alone, who pay the price.