Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Tuesday that Israel is seeking peace and normalisation with Lebanon and that Hezbollah is the only obstacle standing between the two countries — framing the Washington talks that began the same day as a historic opportunity that Lebanon’s government should seize by separating its interests from those of the armed group that has drawn it into a devastating war.
“We want to reach peace and normalization with the state of Lebanon. Israel and Lebanon don’t have any major disputes between them. The problem is Hezbollah,” Saar said at a press conference alongside visiting Czech Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Petr Macinka.
The Washington meeting — the first direct Israel-Lebanon talks since 1993 — is being mediated by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and includes the Israeli and Lebanese ambassadors to the United States. The talks come after more than two months of conflict that has killed more than 2,000 people in Lebanon and displaced over one million — a humanitarian catastrophe that frames every conversation in the negotiating room whether or not it is explicitly on the agenda.
The Israeli framing and what it demands
Saar’s framing is both an olive branch and a demand. By insisting that Israel and Lebanon have no major disputes — no territorial quarrel, no fundamental incompatibility of interests — he is implicitly telling the Lebanese government that the path to peace runs entirely through Hezbollah’s disarmament. The problem for Israel’s security is the problem for Lebanon’s sovereignty, Saar said, directly equating the two — a formulation that suggests Israel sees Lebanese sovereignty over its own territory as contingent on removing Hezbollah’s military infrastructure from the south.
Saar pointed out that Hezbollah attacked Israel on March 2 against the will of the Lebanese government — a characterisation that serves two purposes simultaneously. It absolves the Lebanese state of direct responsibility for the conflict’s initiation, creating diplomatic space for Lebanon to engage in talks without accepting blame for the war. And it underscores Israel’s core demand — that the Lebanese government must now exercise the sovereign authority it claims it had on March 2 to prevent Hezbollah from operating as a state within a state.
Israel has rejected Lebanon’s call for a ceasefire and continues to insist on the disarmament of Hezbollah as the prerequisite for any durable agreement. That position has not changed with the Washington talks — what has changed is the venue and the level of diplomatic engagement. For the first time in 33 years, Israeli and Lebanese officials are in the same room in the same city for direct negotiations.
The 1993 parallel
The last time Israeli and Lebanese officials held direct talks was 1993 — a year after the Oslo Accords created a brief window of regional diplomatic possibility that ultimately did not produce a Lebanon agreement. The 33-year gap since then reflects the depth of the structural barriers to Israeli-Lebanese normalisation, with Hezbollah’s growth from a militia to a state-within-a-state equipped with over 150,000 rockets representing the primary reason direct engagement has been impossible for over three decades.
The Washington talks are not a peace negotiation in the conventional sense — they are a preliminary diplomatic contact mediated by a powerful American third party in a situation where one side continues to conduct military operations against territory the other side nominally controls. Israel struck southern Lebanese towns with airstrikes, phosphorus shells, and artillery on Monday, killing five people, and claimed imminent full operational control of Bint Jbeil. Those strikes are the backdrop against which Tuesday’s Washington meeting takes place.
Hezbollah’s response
Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem — or whoever has assumed effective leadership following Israel’s claim to have killed him, which Hezbollah has not confirmed — urged Lebanon to cancel the Washington talks, reiterating the group’s categorical rejection of direct negotiations between Lebanon and Israel. The call to cancel reflects Hezbollah’s understanding that the Washington process, if successful, would produce exactly the outcome it most fears — a Lebanese government that has formally separated its diplomatic and security interests from Hezbollah’s and committed to a framework in which Hezbollah’s military wing is treated as the problem rather than the resistance.
For Lebanon’s government, attending the Washington talks despite Hezbollah’s objection is itself a statement — that the Lebanese state is willing to pursue its sovereign interests through diplomacy even when the most powerful armed actor within its territory disagrees. Whether the government has the political durability to maintain that position as the talks develop and Hezbollah’s domestic pressure intensifies is the central uncertainty of the Washington process.
The Iran connection
The Lebanon-Israel Washington talks are inseparable from the broader US-Iran ceasefire framework. Israel’s Lebanon campaign has been explicitly excluded from the ceasefire that covered direct US-Iran hostilities — Netanyahu confirmed to Vance that uranium enrichment is the fundamental red line, and Israel’s continued strikes on Hezbollah have been a primary Iranian justification for maintaining its Hormuz control posture. A Washington agreement on Lebanon that addresses Hezbollah’s military infrastructure would remove one of Iran’s most publicly stated reasons for its hardline stance — potentially creating diplomatic linkage between a Lebanon settlement and progress on the Hormuz and nuclear questions that both the US and Iran need to resolve before April 21.
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