'Land for arms': Can Israel finally make a peace deal with Lebanon work?

Historically, Lebanon is the land where the best-laid plans go to die.

None of those assumptions survived contact with Lebanon’s reality. Again and again, it has proven wrong those convinced they had finally found the formula for stability.

History is not the only reason for caution. After all, this is the Middle East, where powerful regional and outside forces with conflicting interests lurk seemingly around every corner, intent on tripping up any progress.

Nevertheless, what happened this week was a tiny – but potentially significant – step forward.

What makes that agreement potentially historic is that it goes well beyond another temporary ceasefire. A product of five rounds of the first direct political negotiations between Israel and Lebanon in more than 40 years, it establishes a permanent security framework by explicitly linking Israeli withdrawal to Hezbollah’s disarmament.

Call it land for arms.

That linkage is what distinguishes this initiative from nearly every previous attempt to stabilize southern Lebanon.

Earlier efforts focused primarily on changing Israel’s behavior – persuading it to withdraw, relying on international peacekeepers, or assuming that time itself would somehow calm the border.

This framework instead seeks to change Lebanon’s behavior by making Israeli withdrawal contingent on Hezbollah’s removal. Whether that formula succeeds remains to be seen, but it represents a fundamentally different framework.

Under the agreement, Israel will withdraw from territory it captured to establish a buffer zone only after Hezbollah has been verifiably removed from those areas. In accepting that formula, the Lebanese government has effectively acknowledged for the first time that Hezbollah’s weapons are the principal obstacle to a full Israeli withdrawal.

Even more significant were Aoun’s own remarks. Asked about criticism from Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, who termed the agreement “sedition,” Aoun dismissed suggestions that the agreement required parliamentary approval, saying it was a constitutional prerogative of the presidency and declaring simply, “We are committed to it.”

Another important innovation is that this time the United States – not the notoriously ineffective UNIFIL – is responsible for overseeing implementation and verification.

The agreement is significant for another reason. It shifted the Israeli-Lebanese conflict from the border and southern Lebanon into a question of who controls the Lebanese state.

Will Lebanon emerge as a normal, sovereign, Western-backed state exercising an exclusive monopoly over military force? Or will it remain subordinate to Hezbollah, whose independent arsenal and Iranian patronage have long eclipsed the authority of the state?

The agreement, in effect, forces Lebanon to decide what kind of country it wants to become. And here there have been several encouraging developments that Israel would be wise to encourage.

Unlike previous rounds of diplomacy, this initiative comes after Hezbollah has suffered major military, political, and financial setbacks. The organization has by no means disappeared, but it can no longer dictate Lebanon’s national agenda as it did in the past.

That weakening – as well as the weakening of Iran – helped create the political conditions that brought to power both a president and a prime minister who appear genuinely committed to restoring the state’s sovereignty at Hezbollah’s expense.

Desire, however, is one thing. Ability is another.

The central question now is not whether Beirut wants to disarm Hezbollah. It is whether it has the will, the ability – or both – to do so.

It is precisely Israel’s skepticism that Aoun can translate those intentions into reality that explains Jerusalem’s caution.

Aoun himself implicitly acknowledged the tremendous challenge during his White House meeting with Trump. He said he had asked the American president for only two things: continued political backing and support for the Lebanese Armed Forces, which he described as “the backbone of security and stability.”

Without a strong Lebanese army, he warned, “everything will collapse,” recalling that when the army disintegrated in 1975, militias filled the vacuum and southern Lebanon became a launching pad for Palestinian attacks against Israel.

Trump responded with an unusually strong public endorsement. “I fully trust the LAF. I fully trust the leadership of the LAF,” he said. He also praised the agreement with Israel as “a great step forward.”

That public vote of confidence matters. Unlike previous Lebanon initiatives, Washington has invested significant political capital in the current process and in trying to establish the LAF as the country’s sole legitimate military authority, replacing Hezbollah rather than coexisting alongside it.

But there is still a significant gap between Washington’s confidence and the realities on the ground. The LAF may, as Aoun said alongside Trump, be the country’s most respected national institution, but it is not currently equipped or financed to wage a sustained campaign against an organization as well entrenched and with as much firepower as Hezbollah.

LAF Commander Gen. Rodolphe Haykal has warned that the army lacks the resources needed to implement such a mission, while years of economic collapse have left its soldiers poorly paid and the institution heavily dependent on foreign support. He warned that attempting to forcibly dismantle Hezbollah, a Shi’a terror group, could place an enormous strain on the army itself – which is made up of Sunni, Christian and Shi’a soldiers – and risk reopening Lebanon’s internal sectarian fault lines.

For Jerusalem, however, the strategic value of this framework lies not just in its text, but in its architecture. Unlike previous diplomatic attempts that collapsed under the weight of weak international coalitions unwilling to confront Hezbollah, this agreement intentionally positions the US – not France or UN-led peacekeepers – in charge of the verification mechanism.

Israel has long viewed Paris with deep suspicion when it comes to Lebanon, seeing French policy as overly accommodating toward Hezbollah’s political wing. This is to say nothing of the distrust engendered by what Jerusalem views as France’s one-sided policies when it comes to the Palestinians.

By contrast, this framework is Washington-centric and will utilize US Central Command (CENTCOM) to actively verify that Hezbollah has been removed from an area before Israel moves out. In Israel’s eyes, American oversight means that a failure by the LAF to clear out a missile cache will actually carry diplomatic and financial consequences, rather than being buried in a routine UNIFIL complaint file.

Yet even the best American verification mechanism cannot compensate for a Lebanese army that lacks the resources to carry out the mission. And this is where the plan hits a wall.

While some envisioned Saudi Arabia stepping in to help bankroll the plan and fund the LAF, Riyadh’s actual contribution has been confined to low-cost diplomatic theater. A decade after choking off a landmark $3 billion defense grant to Lebanon due to Hezbollah’s dominance, the Saudis are now offering more diplomatic cover than hard cash.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) provided some economic help on June 11 by lifting a five-year trade ban, and even phoned Aoun on the eve of his White House trip to endorse the plan. But none of that substitutes for actually writing checks, and the Saudis have pointedly not opened up their wallets to pay LAF soldiers’ salaries or buy new military hardware.

That is why Israeli skepticism persists. The question is not whether Aoun wants to strengthen the Lebanese state. It is whether the army – the state’s principal instrument of power – is strong enough and has enough money to carry out the task.

There are, therefore, ample reasons to be skeptical. But there are also a few reasons to be cautiously optimistic: a substantially weakened Hezbollah and Iran, a Lebanese leadership publicly acknowledging that Hezbollah’s weapons are the problem, an American administration deeply invested in the agreement’s success, and an Israeli withdrawal explicitly conditioned on Hezbollah’s removal.

Whether those new realities will finally overcome Lebanon’s long history of frustrating even the best-laid plans remains to be seen. But by pulling out of Zawtar al-Gharbiyeh on Tuesday, Israel signaled that despite all the reasons for doubt, it believes this framework is worth putting to the test.