Israel’s Ambassador to Washington Yechiel Leiter opened the fifth round of Israel-Lebanon talks in Washington last Tuesday with an impassioned warning.

“We are in a train wreck,” he declared in a Hebrew statement as the talks began, laying into US President Donald Trump’s administration over its willingness to include a ceasefire in Lebanon as part of a memorandum of understanding Washington inked with Tehran the week before.

By the time the talks ended three days later, with a fresh Israel-Lebanon framework signed by both sides, Leiter was newly optimistic. He said the agreement had put “the train back on the tracks,” with a “final destination” of peace between the neighboring countries.

The shift captured the agreement’s central purpose: keeping the Lebanon file from being absorbed into the US-Iran track.

The direct Israel-Lebanon talks had been set up by Washington in April partly to detach Lebanon from the broader Iran conflict, as Tehran sought understandings with Washington that would also protect Hezbollah. Israel was not a party to the MOU, pursued by Trump to end the war with Iran and open nuclear talks, yet the deal appeared to constrain Israeli operations against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where fighting had continued for months after the group opened fire on Israeli troops and civilians in support of its patron, Iran.

Concern in Jerusalem sharpened last Sunday, when US Vice President JD Vance — who seems eager to lead the Israel-skeptic wing of the Republican party — said the US and Iran had agreed in a first round of talks in Switzerland to create a “deconfliction mechanism” involving Lebanon, with Qatari and Pakistani mediators helping to maintain the fragile ceasefire. Israeli officials feared the mechanism would only strengthen Hezbollah and cement Iranian influence over Lebanon.

The direct Israel-Lebanon channel produced several ceasefires in recent months, none of which held for long: Beirut has been unable to rein in Hezbollah, and Israel’s efforts to disarm the group militarily have also failed. As Washington pushed to end the Iran war, it accepted Tehran’s demand that the US-Iran ceasefire extend to Lebanon — terms Israel insisted it was not bound by, though it had refrained from escalating in several incidents at Trump’s behest.

Against this backdrop, the new framework — signed as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a veteran Israel backer, looked on proudly — appeared to Israel as a course correction.

“Final destination: peace between our two countries… In this performance-based trilateral framework agreement, Iran is out, Hezbollah is out, and the road to peace between Israel and Lebanon is in,” Leiter said.

Things are never so simple. This isn’t the first major Beirut-Jerusalem agreement. A failed 1983 accord still looms over any such effort. The framework doesn’t remove the danger Hezbollah poses, doesn’t prove the Lebanese state can establish its authority in the south, and could still collapse in a country where civil war is an ever-present........

© The Times of Israel