Reports that Beirut is again floating direct talks with Israel should be read not as progress but as a warning; the State of Israel has seen this illusion before.

In 1982, Jerusalem persuaded itself that President Bashir Gemayel and the Maronite camp could deliver not only a strategic realignment, but perhaps even peace. However, that expectation quickly collapsed: Gemayel was assassinated, Lebanon’s internal fractures sealed the opening, and Israel learned the hard way that a signal from one Lebanese faction is not the same as a sovereign national decision. In other words, the central error was clear: Israel mistook a fleeting political moment for a durable state decision. That was the ‘Gemayel error’, and it is precisely the mistake that must not be repeated.

Indisputably, Lebanon is not a normal state with a settled chain of command. Rather, it is a confessional bargain sustained by demographic fiction. The clearest proof is that the country has not held an official census since 1932, because that last count underwrote the order itself: the presidency for a Maronite, the premiership for a Sunni, the speakership for a Shiite, and, later, a 64–64 division in parliament between Christians and Muslims.

Today, that arrangement survives not because it still reflects reality, but because confirming it could shatter it. In fact, Christians are no longer the majority, and most serious estimates now place Muslims well above 60 percent of the population, with Shiites widely regarded as the largest single sect.

Thus, once that fact is faced, the system’s central fear comes into view: if the Shiites are now the largest community, why should they remain confined to the speakership rather than press for the presidency or the premiership as well? For precisely that reason, Lebanon’s order survives by refusing to count because its balance depends on numbers it dares not test.

Certainly, this refusal to confront reality does not stop at the domestic level; it also shapes the Israeli question from the outset. The Maronite-heavy Lebanon with which Israel once imagined a durable accord no longer exists. Instead, Lebanon is a hijacked nation with a fractured arena: a Hezbollah-Amal Shiite bloc tied to Iran; anti-Hezbollah Christian parties such as the Lebanese Forces and Kataeb; fragmented Sunni networks; Druze power brokers; remnants of the old patronage order; and reformists born of the 2019 collapse. In such a system, even apparent progress at the top reflects fragmentation more than cohesion.

Nevertheless, Joseph Aoun’s election with 99 of 128 votes and Nawaf Salam’s designation with the backing of 84 lawmakers showed that Hezbollah no longer fully monopolizes the system. Yet those same numbers also exposed the system’s deeper limit: they reflected temporary parliamentary arithmetic, not genuine national unity.

In my view, Lebanon can still produce elite bargains and create political openings, but it still cannot impose collective decisions on all armed actors or guarantee that any agreement will hold. Thereby, Hezbollah remains decisive because it represents the central obstacle to any credible peace in Lebanon.

Before the current war, serious estimates placed its arsenal at roughly 120,000 to 200,000 rockets and missiles, making it the largest non-state missile force in the world. Yet this was never merely a militia stockpile; it was the hard-power core of a rival order: rockets, drones, anti-tank systems, intelligence networks, hospitals, schools, charities, media, and patronage fused into a single Iranian-backed structure.

As a result, Hezbollah does not simply operate in parallel to the state; it stands above key parts of it, with the power to defy, constrain, or override it by force. Under those conditions, peace cannot rest on diplomatic language alone because a state that does not control war cannot credibly guarantee peace.

Undeniably, Hezbollah has been badly weakened since it joined Hamas’s butchering campaign on October 8, 2023. Hassan Nasrallah is dead. Hashem Safieddine is dead. Fuad Shukr is dead. Ibrahim Aqil is dead. Ali Karaki is dead. Nabil Kaouk is dead. Ahmad Wahbi is dead. Mohammed Nasser is dead. Taleb Abdallah is dead. In other words, Hezbollah’s core is gone.

At the same time, Israeli operations penetrated Hezbollah’s communications architecture, with one major wave of device explosions wounding around 1,500 people. In tandem, the IDF’s boots on the ground campaign killed thousands of fighters and severely damaged the group’s command, logistics, and infrastructure.

Ergo, precisely because Hezbollah is weaker, Israel has to be more careful. Irrefutably, a wounded terrorist group -as we have seen in Gaza with Hamas and its allies- can still spoil a settlement if it retains its veto. Accordingly, that is why it has spent months rearming, retaining an operating budget of about $50 million a month, rebuilding parts of its rocket and drone inventory, and preserving elements of its elite Radwan Force despite the whole logic of the postwar framework being to remove armed Hezbollah elements from the border zone.

Thence, the point is not that it emerged intact but that it still retains the one power that matters most: the ability to veto Lebanon’s direction by force. And if that remains true, then every diplomatic flourish built on the fiction of Lebanese sovereignty collapses on contact with reality.

On that basis, that is why the Litani River dilemma matters. According to the 2006 UN resolution 1701, Hezbollah was supposed to leave the area south of the river free of unauthorized armed personnel and weapons.

Nonetheless, twenty years later, that promise still lies in ruins.

Currently, Hezbollah still keeps weapons south of the Litani, UNIFIL still cannot move freely and the deployment of 10,000 Lebanese soldiers to prevent the Shia terrorists from proceeding with their terrorist activities in the area has failed.

Simultaneously, that same inconsistency appears in Lebanese public life. Indeed, the Arab Barometer recently found that only 30 percent of Lebanese overall said they trusted Hezbollah, while about 85 percent of Shiite respondents did; in contrast, the Lebanese Armed Forces enjoyed roughly 85 percent trust nationwide.

Plainly, the picture is unmistakable. Hezbollah still owns its base, but not the country. As a result, this yields a terrorist organization that is still strong enough to obstruct and too sectarian to anchor any real national peace. Whereby, we are in front of an Iranian terrorist group that can paralyze Lebanon but it cannot reconcile it.

Worse still, this dysfunction operates inside a state already broken by cumulative collapse. Lebanon’s anti-system uprising erupted in October 2019. Then, on August 4, 2020, the Beirut port exploded when about 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate belonging to Hezbollah ignited, killing more than 200 people, injuring more than 6,000, and displacing roughly 300,000. Due to all these events, the “new Beirut” recently moved to reimpose visa requirements on Iranians and called for a ban on IRGC activity.

Evidently, on paper, those steps matter because they suggest that at least some Lebanese officials finally grasp what should have been obvious long ago: sovereignty cannot coexist indefinitely with open Iranian penetration. In practice, however, this is not renewal, this is all belated embarrassment and is just “acting” because of international pressure. For that reason, Israel cannot move toward peace simply because Beirut has started acting slightly less like an Iranian corridor.

Beyond Lebanon itself, the broader strategic balance only strengthens Israel’s skepticism. Iran has roughly 90 million people and covers about 1.745 million square kilometers. Israel, by contrast, only has 10 million people and spans only about 22,000 square kilometers. In other words, Israel is about eighty times smaller.

Yet despite that disparity, if Israel, can demonstrate coercive reach against a country of Iran’s scale and even threaten seizing Kharg Island alongside the United States, then Beirut -but also Damascus, which these days is quiet but attentively taking notes of what is going on in the region- has even fewer excuses for tolerating Iranian forward bases on Israel’s frontier.

For that reason, the policy conclusion is brutally simple: Israel should not reject peace with Lebanon forever, but it should reject the peace theater now. Above all, it should make no more ‘Gemayel errors’.

Indubitably, Jerusalem should sign nothing with a state that cannot enforce what it signs and it has to stop mistaking diplomatic motion for strategic change.

Beyond dispute, real peace becomes possible only after Hezbollah is disarmed, after Beirut genuinely monopolizes force and forbids its army from collaborating with Hezbollah, after the Iranian corridor is broken, after southern Lebanon is truly cleared of unauthorized weapons, and after Lebanon finally resolves the contradictions it has frozen since 1932.

Until then, direct talks are not a breakthrough but a trap. States make peace. Lebanon, as it stands, still cannot.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)