The current US-led diplomatic efforts to establish a peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel are examined in light of the structural constraints that continue to shape Lebanese statehood and security governance. The argument is made that, in the absence of a Lebanese state monopoly on the legitimate use of force, such efforts risk producing a form of 'security peace' based on Israeli dominance rather than a sovereign Westphalian settlement. The historical, domestic and institutional constraints are assessed to show that an agreement negotiated externally, without a comprehensive internal political settlement, is unlikely to lead to long-term stabilization. Instead, such an arrangement could perpetuate asymmetric power relations and lead to renewed domestic instability.
Few Middle East ceasefires outlive their initial pauses. The 27 November 2024 cessation ending thirteen months of Israel-Hezbollah conflict was no exception, drifting until March 2026 when Israel resumed major military operations after Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into the Iran war, a decision Beirut could neither authorize nor prevent. Unexpectedly, April/May 2026 Washington talks established the first formal negotiating track between Tel Aviv and Beirut since the failed 1983 agreement. While the 14/15 May round extended the partial truce by forty-five days; establishing parallel political and military tracks for late May and early June, this process presents a fundamental illusion; one that risks yielding little more than a quick fix or a bogus peace agreement.
The Egyptian and Jordanian Models
Two precedents structure the regional imagination of Arab-Israeli peace. The 1979 Egyptian-Israeli treaty returned the entire Sinai to Cairo, secured Egypt around USD 1.3 billion in annual US military assistance, and removed the largest Arab army from the strategic equation against Israel. Egypt gained sovereignty, aid, and decades of relative external stability. It paid, however, with two decades of Arab isolation, the assassination of Sadat, a permanent ceiling on its troop deployments in Sinai, which has become uncomfortable in light of Egypt’s changing threat perception since 2023, and a society that has never warmed to the agreement.
The 1994 Wadi Araba Treaty delivered Jordan-recognized borders, a water-sharing regime and a US security partnership. It also entrenched what is now routinely described as a ‘cold peace’: a treaty that survives despite—and increasingly against—the preferences of the Jordanian street, periodically destabilized by Israeli conduct in the West Bank and Jerusalem and by the genocide in Gaza. For Amman, peace brought sovereignty over previously occupied territory and a US umbrella, at the price of strategic dependence and chronic costs to domestic legitimacy.
Both templates share three features that matter for Lebanon: territorial restitution as a precondition, a US security guarantee as the connective tissue, and recognition that the agreement would be elite-driven and unpopular. None of these three conditions is presently on the table in the Washington track.
Lebanon's Current Negotiating Position?
The current Lebanese negotiating posture has been articulated most clearly by Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, who insists Lebanon seeks ‘peace, not normalization’ with Israel, and by President Joseph Aoun, who has accepted direct technical contacts but ruled out a high-level political meeting in the short term.
Lebanon’s declared objectives of achieving a comprehensive ceasefire, a full Israeli withdrawal, demarcating land borders, confirming the maritime border agreement and arranging a prisoner exchange remain stalled, with broader arrangements regarding the state’s monopoly on force being deferred to an uncertain future. Yet these goals face a daunting reality: the need to navigate the complex domestic vetoes wielded by the political establishment, combined with the profound resistance within the Shiite constituency and the structural fragility of a state hollowed out by years of external dominance and economic collapse. Recent data underscores the absurdity of this diplomatic theater; despite ceasefire extensions, military operations continue, with thousands of civilian casualties and thousands of housing units destroyed in just a few weeks.
By any reasonable standard, this is a negotiation conducted under active fire. It is in this context that we must read President Aoun’s declaration to “do the impossible”; a head of state does not announce his intention to do the impossible unless the possible has already been exhausted. This threshold that has been breached three times in the past 25 years, marking the failure of previous attempts to decouple the state from the logic of armed non-state actors.
Peace, Security, and Sovereignty
It is helpful to distinguish between the two meanings of “peace” that the current debate consistently conflates. The first is the Westphalian sense: an agreement between two recognized sovereigns that ends the legal state of war, demarcates borders, regulates trade and movement, and accepts that each party retains the residual right to defend itself within those borders. This is broadly what Egypt and Jordan obtained.
The second is what we might call 'security peace': an arrangement in which one party retains the right to use unilateral force within the other's territory and decides what constitutes a threat. Israel currently exercises this kind of power in Gaza, southern Syria, and, increasingly, Lebanon.
The type of peace on offer determines whether disarmament is a path to sovereignty or merely a precondition for permanent subordination. Recognizing the difficulty of forced disarmament does not automatically imply acceptance of the status quo. A different question is worth posing: would the situation change if the need for this weaponry were eliminated altogether? The answer to this requires us to review a significant hypothesis.
This hypothesis assumes that the disarmament of Hezbollah would lead to peace with Israel. However, Israeli behavior in Lebanon does not support this conclusion. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 and entered Beirut before the Hezbollah party even existed. The justifications shift—from Palestinian resistance to national security, and then to buffer zones—yet the behavior remains unchanged. Today, the Israeli army continues its strikes even after the ceasefire, establishing what it calls “the Ring of Yellow Lines” and declaring buffer zones that simulate the Gaza model. If Israel violates truces in the presence of the party’s weapons, there is no logic in assuming it would abide by them in their absence.
Distinguishing between Israel’s declared goals and its actual intent is crucial. Its actions across Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon reveal a logic driven by security, not peace. While peace implies a relationship between two sovereign equals, the current Israeli security demands the permanent subordination of the other party. Nothing in the current negotiations suggests that Israel accepts the sovereign definition of peace.
Moreover, a historical precedent sheds a different light on the Lebanese dilemma. When Fatah began its armed struggle across the Jordanian and then Lebanese borders, the common argument was that the cause was legitimate, but the means were mistaken. However, this framing obscures more than it reveals, attributing the disaster to a miscalculation when the problem was actually structurally rooted. This made the tragic outcomes inevitable rather than accidental.
The first condition was that these factions had a military capacity that exceeded the host state’s ability to enforce its will, as was the case in Jordan, where there was effectively a state within a state, and in Lebanon.
The second condition was that these factions enjoyed broad social support, which made forced containment politically costly and militarily expensive. Any Jordanian or Lebanese government that confronted the factions with force would simultaneously be confronting a segment of its own people who granted those factions legitimacy.
The third condition—and the most influential in determining who truly holds the power to decide—was that the factions’ strategic center of gravity lay outside the host state’s borders. The metric for measuring profit and loss was not Jordan's or Lebanon's, but that of the Palestinian cause as a regional project transcending both states.
When we gather these structural conditions, Jordan and Lebanon ceased to be sovereign actors; they became mere venues whose resources were exploited and whose people paid the price. It is the same pattern from the tragedy of Black September in 1970 to the Lebanese Civil War, and it ended up with them leaving for Tunisia.
Implications for the Lebanese State
The Fatah analogy is uncomfortable for both sides of the Lebanese debate. For Hezbollah’s supporters, it warns that an armed project whose center of gravity lies outside the host state- historically, Tehran- now Tehran-under-pressure tends to consume that state. For Hezbollah’s opponents, it warns that the simple removal of the armed project does not, by itself, generate sovereignty. The Egyptian and Jordanian cases are instructive precisely because both states began their peace processes already possessing a monopoly over the means of violence on their own territory. Lebanon does not.
This stark institutional deficit leaves Beirut trapped in what Nadim Houry, echoing Georges Naccache’s 1949 warning, calls the illusion of two negations—where merely rejecting Israeli hegemony and condemning Hezbollah's militarism cannot substitute for a coherent sovereign baseline. Confronted with this conceptual vacuum, the Salam-Aoun government finds itself in an awkward middle position. It has declared the state monopoly on arms an ‘irreversible process’, but in practice the army can only implement it incrementally and in coordination with Hezbollah itself, which has publicly rejected the four-month timeline. A treaty signed under these conditions would either be unimplementable on the Lebanese side (creating a permanent Israeli pretext for strikes) or would be enforced by the Lebanese army against its own Shia constituency (creating the very intra-Lebanese conflict that the 1989 Taif Agreement was designed to prevent).
Strategic Implications of a Lebanon-Israel Agreement
A formal Lebanon-Israel agreement signed in the current configuration would produce three strategic effects.
First, it would not deliver normalization in the Egyptian/Jordanian sense because the structural preconditions (territorial restitution, US security guarantees, and a host-state monopoly on force) are absent. It would more plausibly resemble a Gaza-style security regime with a Lebanese signature attached: a formalized yellow line, an Israeli right of pursuit, and conditional reconstruction funding tied to disarmament benchmarks.
Second, it would shift the internal balance in Lebanon rather than settle it. Hezbollah’s armed status is currently the binding constraint on any agreement; remove it through external pressure rather than through an internal political settlement, and the resulting state would be more sectarian, not less. The Lebanese army would inherit responsibilities it cannot discharge without becoming a party to a domestic conflict, as the Lebanese Forces and the Lebanese army discovered between 1976 and 1982.
Third, it would not stabilize the wider region. Israeli strategic doctrine since October 2023 has consistently preferred the language of force and domination to that of compromise and reconstruction, a reality made explicit by unilateral declarations of permanent buffer zones and demolition models. A Lebanese deal signed inside that doctrine becomes another instrument of regional pressure, not a settlement. It would also further bind Lebanon’s economic recovery to a single external patron, the United States, and within Washington, to a single decision-maker currently acting as a predatory hegemon demanding submission rather than building stable regional balances. While Egypt and Jordan endured this structural bind for half a century, a weaker, more fragmented Lebanon cannot absorb it.
Three Plausible Scenarios
1) Managed Stalemate and Fragile Cessation:
The forty-five-day ceasefire was repeatedly extended under international pressure, but it was never formalized as a binding peace treaty. Instead of achieving a final-status resolution, the Washington negotiating process became a permanent crisis-management mechanism. Although Hezbollah has been weakened, it retains its core political veto and military infrastructure. It exercises pragmatic operational restraint to avoid total destruction, while Israel enforces its unilateral yellow lines through targeted aerial reconnaissance and localized strikes. Lebanon remains suspended in a chronic state of 'no war, no peace', which prevents an immediate collapse into civil strife, as well as any meaningful economic recovery or state stabilization.
2) A deal on Israeli terms:
Lebanon signs a formal agreement under sustained military and economic pressure, with disarmament benchmarks prioritized and territorial restitution deferred or made conditional. The army attempts to implement the agreement, but Hezbollah resists. The result is either a frozen agreement that Israel uses as a permanent pretext for strikes or an intra-Lebanese confrontation that fractures the army along sectarian lines. This scenario resembles the 1983 agreement in structure and shares its fundamental flaw.
3) A negotiated internal settlement first:
Lebanon achieves a prior domestic consensus on the monopoly of force before signing any external agreement, integrating Hezbollah’s weapons into a state security framework through a process analogous to post-civil-war Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) programs elsewhere. This is the only scenario that could produce a Westphalian rather than a security peace. It is also the least probable in the near term, because it requires a degree of internal trust and external patience that neither the current Israeli government nor the current US administration has shown any interest in providing.
In short, any peace agreement reached amid ongoing conflict remains a hollow shield, with Lebanese civilians bearing the brunt. Forcing a Westphalian model onto a deeply fractured state will not generate true sovereignty; it will only formalize permanent subordination to a relentless campaign of regional attrition. Without a robust domestic settlement, any external agreement is not just a fragile anchor but also a catalyst for further domestic instability.