As Lebanese and Israeli officials sit down for the first direct talks in decades, many are treating the negotiations as a diplomatic breakthrough. Yet for Lebanon, talks held under military pressure risk reopening some of the deepest fractures in its modern history. The country's political system has repeatedly been destabilized when regional powers used local divisions to pursue their own agendas, and many fear the current negotiations may follow the same pattern.
A Country Negotiating Under Pressure
On April 14, 2024, the United States hosted the first direct talks between the Lebanese state and Israel since 1983. The two sides expressed their peaceful intentions and their desire to end the war. The rounds of negotiations have focused on how to deal with their common problem, "Hezbollah," and how to experiment with new paths that, for Israel, help to dismantle this organization and, for the Lebanese government, help to restore its sovereignty.
The talks are unfolding amid sharp domestic polarization. For the first time since the Taef Agreement 36 years ago, the Lebanese government banned Hezbollah's military wing after Hezbollah responded to Israeli ceasefire violations, triggering a new round of escalations that reached Beirut. The government framed Hezbollah's actions as foreign war over Lebanese soil and an attempt to drag Lebanon into Iran's campaign, a charge that carried added weight following the Israeli-American war against Iran on February 28 and the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Hezbollah, in turn, rejected both the ban and the direct negotiations as a concession to the Israeli campaign.
The revived polarization has reignited long-standing debates about Lebanon's identity and regional alignment, a dynamic that has historically triggered conflict. Many saw American and Israeli insistence on bringing Lebanon to the table under fire as deliberate pressure, designed to extract greater concessions by exploiting internal stress.
These negotiations are not happening in a vacuum. Lebanon's modern history follows a recurring pattern: foreign powers exploit domestic divisions, while local actors seek outside backing to consolidate their position, leaving the political system unable to resolve its disputes independently and perpetually exposed to regional power struggles.
The National Pact and the 1958 crisis
Lebanon has been of interest to Western countries for years before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Those interests have influenced Mount Lebanon's relations with the Ottoman Empire, securing special treatment and a special political relationship. Therefore, the French colonizers were keen to keep Lebanon connected to France, establishing Greater Lebanon, an expanded border of Mount Lebanon, to secure an independent state from its Arab surroundings. The added lands were historically part of the Ottoman Empire and were predominantly Muslim, with a demand for Arab unification.
Later, resistance to French colonization grew into an independence movement that unified the Lebanese, leading to an unwritten pact that laid the foundation for an independent Lebanon. The National Pact institutionalized the confessional power-sharing between Christians and Muslims. At the same time, both sides renounce their historical demands of Western protection and Arab unification, mandating strict state neutrality.
The national Pact was tested for the first time 15 years after independence, when Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, facing growing internal opposition, embraced the Eisenhower Doctrine and sought Western backing. His opposition, influenced by Abdel Nasser's pan-Arab movement, viewed this move as a call for imperial intervention. In contrast, Chammoun viewed the pan-Arab opposition as a threat to Lebanese identity and as a revival of unification demands.
The situation escalated into an armed rebellion under external pressure to take sides between Washington and Cairo. President Camille Chaoumoun requested an international intervention under the Eisenhower Doctrine, which led to the deployment of American Marines to Beirut. At the same time, the opposition received support from Abdel Nasser through the United Arab Republic. The situation was later resolved, with both sides agreeing to elect Commander of Lebanese Armed Forces LAF General Foad Chehab, who was supported by the Americans and Abdul Nasser, embracing a new formula of "no victors, no vanquished". The resolution of the crisis did not provide structural solutions but instead adjusted the powers to align with the stabilizing regional balance.
The Civil War
The stability restored after 1958 was short-lived. Following the expulsion of the Palestinian Liberation Organization PLO from Jordan in 1970 and their relocation to Lebanon under the 1969 Cairo agreement, the PLO was permitted to manage the Palestinian camps and launch military operations against Israel from southern Lebanon. As Palestinian resistance expanded with broad Lebanese support, the country polarized once again between those aligned with the Arab world and the Palestinian cause and those demanding Lebanese neutrality.
This period also saw a growing labor and political movement pushing for a secular restructuring of the Lebanese state, led by socialist, communist, and pan-Arab parties that allied with the PLO. The deepening divisions eventually ignited a 15-year civil war.
Both the right-wing National Front and the left-wing National Movement sought foreign backing, effectively becoming proxies for regional and Cold War powers. In 1982, the National Front supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and cooperated with it. Following this invasion, the Lebanese government started direct talks with Israel, signing the May 17 agreement, a framework for the normalization of the bilateral relations between Lebanon and Israel.
Through this agreement, Israel intended to restructure the weak Lebanese state to fit its regional project. However, the agreement faced popular opposition backed by Syria, and eventually collapsed. And while the military conflict reached a stalemate, international and regional actors brokered an end to the war and the signing of the Taef agreement, redistributing confessional power. While Israel continued occupying Southern Lebanon, the agreement was used to justify Syria's "tutelage" over Lebanese security and politics.
Taef catalyzed local resistance that successive governments legitimized, fueling further political intervention and division, rather than resolving it.
The 2005-2008 political schism
Following the assassination of the prime minister Rafik el Hariri in February 2005, the Cedar revolution erupted, demanding an end to Syrian tutelage. The international community responded with Resolution 1559 mandating Syrian withdrawal and the disarmament of all militias — directly targeting Hezbollah, which the opposition accused of involvement in a wave of assassinations.
Lebanon polarized once again into two rival coalitions: the March 14 alliance, backed by Western nations and Gulf states, demanding the resolution's application and restored sovereignty; and the March 8 alliance, including Hezbollah and backed by Syria and Iran, who saw the resolution as an American-Israeli mechanism to strip Lebanon of its capabilities and subordinate it to Western hegemony.
The political polarization culminated in the May 2008 crisis, when the government moved to dismantle Hezbollah's fiber optic network and replace the security chief at Beirut's airport. Hezbollah perceived these as hostile acts and deployed its forces, seizing western Beirut and parts of Mount Lebanon.
The 2008 crisis was rapidly resolved through regional mediation that, again, formalized the shift in the balance of power rather than addressing the inherited causes for this imbalance. The Doha agreement forced the government to rescind its decrees, guaranteed March 8 a "blocking third" in cabinet with veto power over sovereign decisions, and, mirroring the 1958 resolution, mandated the election of LAF commander Michel Sleiman as president.
The agreement entrenched a de facto state of parallel powers, pushing each camp into defensive positions where national sovereignty itself became a perceived threat. That underlying fragility was fully exposed following the 2023 war, which revived the fault line between the resistance and sovereignty camps.
Direct Talks and the Return of Old Fault Lines
Since October 2023, Lebanon has endured an escalating conflict that has led to an increasingly complex situation day by day and exacerbated political polarization to levels unseen since the civil war, despite efforts to maintain internal peace. Hezbollah's involvement in a military front in support of Gaza brought back the discussion on the decision of war and peace. The devastating losses Hezbollah suffered in the 66-day war of 2024 and the fall of the Assad regime, a key ally to Hezbollah, in December of the same year, represented an opportunity for Hezbollah's opposition to readjust the political system.
Following the ceasefire agreement in November 2024 and the revival of resolution 1701, International actors brokered a political resolution that elected General Joseph Aoun, the commander of the LAF, as president, ending a 2+-year presidential vacuum. The elected president, along with the new government, clearly stated their willingness to restore the state sovereignty over the whole Lebanese territory.
However, this resolution was fragile due to Israel's continuous violations of the ceasefire agreement, which Hezbollah leveraged to challenge the new government. While Israel, along with the US, initiated a war against Iran, Hezbollah used this regional moment to readjust its situation by responding to Israel's violations, rejoining the war, and instrumentalizing the ideological connection with Iran by connecting the fronts.
In response to threats of further escalation, the Lebanese government outlawed Hezbollah's armed wing and responded to Trump's efforts to arrange direct talks with Israel. Hezbollah considered the government's response as a move toward the Israeli campaign. Hezbollah announced its rejection of any outcome of the Lebanese-Israeli talks and insisted on tying Lebanon to the Iranian-American talks in Islamabad. The American direct talks and the Iranian insistence on including Lebanon in their memorandum of understanding reflect the regional challenge over Lebanon's future position. At the same time, the Israeli insistence on continuing the talks while under fire, arguably backed by the US, is seen as a way to expose Lebanon's vulnerability and push the government toward further concessions.
Sovereignty Between Foreign Projects
Historical events in 1958, 1975, and 2008 have demonstrated Lebanon's vulnerability to imbalances and the difficulty of its political system in navigating regional challenges peacefully. While local imbalances previously catalyzed foreign interventions, the current crisis is working in the opposite direction: foreign intervention — in this case, Israeli aggression — is exposing local vulnerabilities and imbalances, and exploiting local unrest for hostile gains.
Lebanon's history since independence does not present a series of domestic failures in isolation; rather, it is a predictable by-product of geopolitical engineering. Direct talks, influenced by shifting regional alliances and imbalances, risk turning Lebanon's sovereignty into a bargaining chip in a broader regional struggle. The aim is not to cultivate a sovereign state, but to align Lebanon completely with the Israeli-American security architecture. This is achieved by threatening civil unrest to accomplish what military campaigns alone cannot. Conversely, Hezbollah's insistence on linking the Lebanese front to Iran as a defensive measure only exacerbates the political paralysis. Ultimately, while the recent memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran has prompted new regional efforts to mediate Lebanon's internal conflict, this merely confirms the state's historical constant. Lebanese unity is rarely achieved through domestic sovereignty, but is instead temporarily engineered when foreign powers find it strategically convenient to halt the division.