Negotiations between Lebanon and Israel have not yet begun. The first meeting at the US State Department led to a ceasefire through a memorandum of understanding that reflected the balance of power. It granted Israel once again an American, not legal, “right” to self-defense, and gave Lebanon only a vague exemption for “government targets” from Israeli offensive operations. This is the maximum that Washington was able to achieve, and it reflects the situation that had prevailed since the end of the 2024 war. Although the American wording of the memorandum in the sixth clause deliberately defined “security, stability, and peace” as the goal of negotiations between the two sides, it did not refer to the catastrophic consequences of the Israeli incursion, including forced displacement, systematic destruction, and the deliberate bombing of bridges and government buildings in the south, nor to the long term challenges these actions pose to security, stability, and peace.

What the “peace strategy” of its author Donald Trump ignores and obscures is the “strategy of sabotage” of his ally Benjamin Netanyahu. Although the two strategies appear to converge in a formula of “imposing peace by force” or “negotiating under fire,” the second one, the strategy of sabotage, remains dominant. For example, Israeli leaders agree that the war on Lebanon, or on the Lebanese “Iranian party,” has not yet ended, as is also the case regarding their war on Iran.

In pursuit of this objective, and in anticipation of negotiations, the enemy Israel has published maps of yellow and red lines, which include “buffer” and “security” zones that it occupies and from which it threatens a third area still under fire. Washington has not rejected this occupation; rather, it justifies and supports it. Worse still, both it and Israel do not support the Lebanese state but instead provide the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and its “party” with all the pretexts to sustain their roles, whether by raising the slogan of “resistance” or by claiming that the war “has not yet ended.”

More than in any previous phase, the Israeli violation of Lebanese territory this time appears to be the most dangerous ever, just as Iran’s determination to preserve the “Lebanese card” appears the most aggressive ever. And whatever is said in Lebanon about separating the Lebanese and Iranian tracks, those who claim to be most insistent on this separation, namely the United States and Israel, are in fact the ones most reinforcing the connection between them. The two tracks will remain mutually influential until the American Iranian negotiations are settled.

The question is whether this settlement is near, whether it will clarify the contours of bargaining over the “proxies,” and whether Lebanon can forget or ignore that it cannot trust either America or Iran. The real separation between the two tracks must begin from within Lebanon itself, or it will never happen.

So, to negotiation then, there is no other option, and it has been imposed on Lebanon by both warring sides. Either war or negotiation, as the president of the republic summarized the dilemma. No negotiation, only war, as the “Iranian party” summarized it when its supporters were unleashed to protest against the prime minister and accuse him of treason. And this is what the Israelis preferred as well, as ministers protested and settlers demonstrated demanding the continuation of the war. But negotiation is bound to test whether the Lebanese state proves itself to be a real state. It has already shown the opposite even in its new phase, when it hesitated to disarm the party.

During negotiations, it will discover that everything it rightly demands, especially the withdrawal of the enemy from Lebanese territory, and everything it commits to, especially regarding border security, will be met with questions about what it can actually do about a party still deeply embedded in the state’s institutions, or at least about rotten minds that threaten to kill state leaders simply because they adopted the option of negotiation.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar.