Politics

Defying Hezbollah, Israel and Lebanon start talking

While historic, talks are incomplete and structurally fragile. The central paradox is this: the Lebanese government is at the table. Hezbollah is not.

Oliver Contreras / AFP

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio (C), alongside US State Department Counselor Michael Needham (L) and US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa (R) at the State Department in Washington, DC, on 14 April 2026.

Defying Hezbollah, Israel and Lebanon start talking

Michael Horowitz

last update on 23 Apr 2026

For the first time in decades, Israeli and Lebanese civilian officials sat across a table in Washington and began talking. The discussions—convened in the shadow of a wider war with Iran, mediated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and given a 10-day ceasefire window by Donald Trump—are truly historic. The prospect of normalisation between the two states could help secure Israel’s northern front, which has once again flared up in recent weeks despite earlier Israeli claims of victory, while enabling Lebanon to finally extricate itself from the region’s recurring crises and conflicts.

These talks are also, as of today, incomplete and structurally fragile. The central paradox is this: the Lebanese government is at the table. Hezbollah is not. In Lebanon, that gap between the state and the most powerful armed actor within it has historically been the graveyard of previous agreements—and a recipe for violence.

The Lebanese government's willingness to enter direct talks is the more striking and significant development. President Joseph Aoun—elected in January 2026 after a two-year presidential vacuum— has been categorical in his framing. He has called Hezbollah an "armed faction" that has undermined Lebanon's interests and cost its citizens their lives. Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a former International Court of Justice president and longtime sovereignty advocate, has signalled openness to any negotiation format to end the war. This is not rhetorical posturing. It reflects a genuine, if fragile, reorientation of Lebanon's political centre of gravity.

The motivations are grim but clarifying. Lebanon cannot afford another lost decade. The country has been in economic freefall since 2019, has lived through the Beirut port explosion, a currency collapse, and now a war that has killed thousands and displaced a million. International reconstruction funding—from the Gulf, from Europe, from the IMF— is explicitly conditioned on progress toward Hezbollah disarmament and state sovereignty. Lebanon's new leadership understands that the price of continuing to shelter Hezbollah's military wing is continued exposure to conflict and economic ruin.

That said, Lebanon’s leadership is also acutely aware of the limits of its position. For all the rhetoric, and despite Israel’s relatively successful 2024 campaign, Hezbollah remains Lebanon’s most powerful actor, stronger than the state itself, including the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF—the country’s relatively small military).

Although the government has taken the unprecedented step of publicly condemning Hezbollah’s military activities and even declaring them illegal, it has little real capacity to curb the group. Hezbollah still fields more fighters and better equipment than the LAF, while Lebanon’s internal political and sectarian balance further constrains state action. President Joseph Aoun, a former LAF commander himself, understands this better than most. He knows that ordering a full-scale crackdown on Hezbollah could easily backfire: parts of the military might refuse to comply, turning any confrontation into a defeat before it had even begun.

Lebanese Presidency / AFP — Lebanon's President Joseph Aoun delivers a televised address to the Lebanese people from the Baabda Presidential Palace, east of the capital Beirut, on 17 April 2026.

In other words, Lebanon’s leadership enters these unprecedented talks fully aware of the constraints it faces. Even if it were to agree to normalise ties with Israel, it would have little ability, at least for now, to restrain Hezbollah’s activities, especially if the group chose to reject such an arrangement outright.

More than that, if the president and prime minister were to move in ways that directly threatened Hezbollah’s military capabilities or crossed one of its red lines, they could expose themselves to direct retaliation. The 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, for which Hezbollah operatives were later convicted in absentia by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, remains a stark reminder that the group is willing to eliminate even senior state officials when it sees them as obstacles.

Lebanon's leadership is acutely aware of the limits of its position. For all the rhetoric, Hezbollah remains Lebanon's most powerful actor.

The short and long-term calculus

Given those risks and the limited likelihood of success, the real question is why President Joseph Aoun is willing to make this bet. The answer is twofold—one short-term calculus, another long-term. In the short term, the normalisation talks are a way out of the crisis that emerged after the announcement of a two-week-long ceasefire between the US and Iran. Despite the agreement, Israel insisted (and Washington seemed to acquiesce) that Lebanon was out of the ceasefire, and continued its operations against Lebanon. For its part, Iran insisted that Lebanon was part of the deal. Although a secondary theatre of the US/Israel vs Iran confrontation, Lebanon ended up being a significant irritant in the talks, and Lebanon faced continued violence even as the region was offered a brief respite from it.

The direct talks, sponsored by the US, were thus a quick way to gain favour in Washington, pushing President Trump (who likes a good deal just as much as a good photo op) to pressure Israel to stop the fighting. The timing was right: Although Hezbollah opposed the talks and even threatened to demonstrate against them, Iran was willing to bite the bullet to advance its own talks with the US. The gap between Tehran and Washington is wide, but both sides also likely feel that a resumption of hostilities at this time would be a lose-lose scenario.

Oliver Contreras / AFP — US Ambassador to the UN Mike Waltz, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, US Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, and Israeli Ambassador to the US Yechiel Leiter at the State Department in Washington, DC, on 14 April 2026.

In Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu was evidently in favour of continued fighting in Lebanon, as a way to both continue to weaken Hezbollah, put pressure on Iran, and perhaps even torpedo the talks in Islamabad. Yet the Israeli leader faced an angry Trump, who understands that, if the talks collapse, he will have at some point to make good on his promise to escalate the war, which could mean putting boots on the ground—and would come with a heftier price in American blood and perhaps in US votes during the next elections.

Short of a ceasefire, the solution offered by Israeli officials was to potentially create a new buffer zone in Lebanon, locking Israel in a more permanent occupation of a narrow stretch of land in southern Lebanon. Israel has already tried that approach, which backfired spectacularly, boosting Hezbollah's position inside Lebanon, and eventually leading to a withdrawal in 2000.

In the meantime, the regional landscape offered a risky opportunity for the Lebanese government to please everyone (for a time) by agreeing to talks with Israel. The Lebanese leadership was smart enough to take it, acting, in that sense, in line with its role to protect the interests of the Lebanese, rather than those of Hezbollah or Iran.

But there is also a long-term component to these talks. If the talks are successful—not in normalising relations between Israel and Lebanon, but in restoring some amount of quiet—then the Lebanese government would have won a symbolic but altogether not insignificant victory.

AFP — Members of Lebanon's powerful Shiite movement Hezbollah parade with a mock missile launcher in this file photo.

Hezbollah's narrative has always been that its "weapons" are the key to deterring Israeli incursions in the country, and thus an essential part of Lebanon's sovereignty. Hezbollah positions itself as "a defender" of Lebanon. But over the past two years, this narrative has been battered in multiple ways, both due to the group's inability to push back against Israeli incursion and force a full Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, and more recently, because the group decided to involve itself in the war between the US and Iran, even though Lebanon was not directly involved.

By embarking on a risky but calculated process of normalisation, the Lebanese government has a chance to rewrite the narrative by putting forth the argument that Hezbollah dragged Lebanon into a wider regional war, largely in service of Iran's interests, and it was the state that ultimately brought the conflict to a close through diplomacy.

This argument may not succeed, and any gains will take time to materialise; for now, the balance still tilts toward renewed conflict rather than lasting peace. Yet by presenting itself as the true embodiment of restored Lebanese sovereignty, the government can hope to create the political and social conditions for a future confrontation with Hezbollah on more favourable terms. If that moment comes, it may be able to count on the Lebanese Armed Forces to obey orders and on much of Lebanese society to see disarmament not as a path to civil strife, but as the only way to prevent another war.

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