00:00Lebanon and Israel have held their first direct talks in decades in what was described as a positive step towards peace.
00:07The development comes as fears were growing that if Israel might renew a fully-fledged offensive against the militant group Hezbollah,
00:13and as a year-long ceasefire appears tenuous.
00:16But Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said his country was still far from normalisation or economic relations with Israel.
00:24Joining me now is Dr. H.A. Hellyer, Senior Fellow in Geopolitics, International Security and Middle East Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
00:33Good morning, Dr. Hellyer, and thank you for joining us.
00:36These exchanges are the first of their kind in decades. How significant are they in your opinion?
00:45Good morning. Thank you for having me on the programme.
00:47So they're significant in the sense that they're quite symbolic.
00:50As you say, they're the first ones that have happened in decades.
00:53But it's hard to separate this move from the pressure that's been building from the Trump administration on Lebanon to engage more directly with the Israelis.
01:03The Israelis and the Lebanese have had a ceasefire over the past year.
01:08But that ceasefire has been violated repeatedly by the Israelis who continue to occupy positions in southern Lebanon
01:14and continue to strike wherever they see fit within Lebanon more generally.
01:20So for the first time, there have been these direct talks.
01:23The Israelis are talking about them as opportunities for economic collaboration and things like that.
01:28Of course, the Lebanese are very far from that.
01:31The Lebanese see the Israelis quite accurately as occupying their territory in the south, bombing it regularly,
01:38as they've been engaging in countries in the surrounding neighbourhood, most significantly, of course, Palestine and Syria.
01:46So it's difficult to see this as a massive breakthrough and more of an opportunity for the Israelis to signal to Washington
01:54that they're trying to go down this route of building economic ties wherever they can see fit and engaging in that sort of economic transactionalism.
02:02But unless there are serious moves by the Israelis to commit to actually leaving Lebanon and ending these sorts of vigilancy strikes,
02:11I don't think we're going to be seeing very much progress at all.
02:14Now, who stands to gain more from these talks, be it the talks as they are currently happening,
02:22or ones that might actually develop further?
02:27So here's the issue.
02:29The talks are meant in any negotiation to come to a deal, a deal which both sides are meant to abide by.
02:37There's already a deal that's been on the table that the Israelis and the Lebanese have ostensibly agreed to,
02:45but it's been consistently violated by the Israelis, forgive me, most repeatedly over the past year.
02:53And you've seen this in other situations as well.
02:56We're talking about Lebanon today, but of course, there's a ceasefire deal being put into implementation on Gaza,
03:04which has been violated multiple times by the Israelis in terms of both ways traffic and the Rafah,
03:10constantly moving this yellow line.
03:13So there's a lot of distrust, I think, with actors in the region when it comes to engaging in these sorts of deals with the Israelis,
03:19unless there's a guarantor that will actually hold the Israelis to account when or if they violate the deal.
03:28And as yet, people expect that to be the United States because nobody else would be able to do it.
03:33But the United States hasn't shown that it's willing to actually apply that pressure and use that leverage.
03:39So talk of ceasefires and deals becomes rather premature in that regard.
03:44Now, in the distant future, Israel is demanding that Hezbollah be completely disarmed.
03:52Even if a Lebanese government had the will to do Israel's bidding in this,
03:59how capable would they be of disarming Hezbollah?
04:04So let's be clear, the disarming of Hezbollah, I don't think, is simply a matter of Israel's bidding.
04:10I think that there are large groups of Lebanese that would want to see all military force,
04:18all guns and arms be in the hands solely of the Lebanese state.
04:23It's simply not tenable for the medium to long term that that not be the case.
04:27You can't have a state within a state.
04:30And I think the Lebanese writ large have a lot of support for that particular idea to have a monopoly of power over arms and weaponry.
04:39But as you say, part of the issue here is about capacity and the ability of the state to reassert its power,
04:45particularly over Hezbollah, and particularly since Hezbollah has grown in terms of its own power over the course of the past decade.
04:55Of course, in the past couple of years, they've taken a massive setback because of Israeli strikes and attacks.
05:00But I think that there is a lot of political will within Lebanon to see that happen so that there is a monopoly of power that is centered within the state,
05:12and particularly so that foreign powers do not have this sort of engagement within Lebanese politics, particularly the Iranians,
05:21because the Iranians, of course, exert huge amounts of influence over Lebanese politics via Hezbollah.
05:25So I don't think it's purely about, you know, Israel having a demand.
05:30I think that this is something that goes much further beyond that.
05:34I think, again, within Lebanon, there are huge swathes of people that want to see all monopoly of force being centered in the state.
05:43The question is how to do it without pushing Lebanese society towards civil war,
05:50particularly considering that, again, the Israelis occupy parts of southern Lebanon.
05:55They still have positions within southern Lebanon that they refuse to leave, and they continue to strike Lebanon.
06:02And this, unfortunately, is a playbook that we've seen in other countries where the effort to, quote-unquote,
06:10engage in paramountcy, as the Israelis seem to be doing in different countries in the region,
06:14really disrupts and destabilizes any effort at de-escalation and coming to a sustainable solution within countries like Lebanon and like Syria and, of course, like Palestine.
06:26Now, Lebanese Prime Minister, Nawaf Salam, said yesterday that normalization with Israel is still a long way off.
06:34Does the fact that he didn't rule it out completely tell us anything?
06:40It only tells us that in Washington, D.C., they've been talking about normalization for so long that many politicians within the region
06:48simply don't want to have to tell the Americans, forget it, it's never happening.
06:52I think that you could envisage a scenario many years from now where the Lebanese would normalize.
07:00But frankly, the ball isn't in the Lebanese court in that regard.
07:03This is about Israel.
07:05Israel had the opportunity to normalize with the entirety of the Arab world and far beyond the Arab world
07:11since the Arab Peace Initiative was declared back, you know, more than 20 years ago.
07:17The Saudi-led initiative, which Lebanon, of course, signed up to, the Israelis have had the opportunity to normalize
07:25with a number of Arab states since then on a bilateral basis as well, including most significantly the Saudis.
07:32And the Saudis have made it very clear that they would normalize.
07:36But there are certain very basic, I have to say, very basic minimal conditions, and those include a Palestinian state.
07:43And when it comes to the Saudis in particular, their demands are really quite low.
07:51And yet the Israelis have balked at the idea of a Palestinian state.
07:55They've even balked at the idea of having the Palestinian Authority return to Gaza,
07:59let alone having any sort of linkage between Gaza and the West Bank.
08:03Of course, when it comes to the Arab world generally, and I have to say the international community more widely,
08:09with the exception of the United States, this is a very clear-cut issue.
08:14Israel is an illegal occupation of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem, of Gaza, and of the Golan Heights, and needs to withdraw.
08:23Thank you very much for that, Dr. Ehechehel, your senior fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
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